Exploring the Significance of Death in Murakami’s ‘Norwegian Wood’

 by Isaac Mead

‘In the midst of life, everything revolves around death’. Norwegian Wood centres around this duality, as Murakami provides an insight into how life and death are intertwined. 

‘Light Red Over Black’ Mark Rothko - 1957

Norwegian Wood is a Japanese novel published in 1987 that tells a coming-of-age tale set in the late 1960s in Tokyo; the novel begins with the protagonist, Toru Watanabe, hearing ‘Norwegian Wood’ by the Beatles as his plane lands in Hamburg. This particular song evokes a nostalgic recollection of formative events of his late adolescent years in the city, dominated by lust, death and isolation. Naoko, the central female character is Toru’s main love interest for much of the novel and exhibits prominent mental disorientations after the suffering the pain of losing her sister, boyfriend Kizuki and eventually herself to suicide. Murakami paints the way in which these events have shaped Toru all the way to the book’s conclusion and seemingly continues without the reader and one is forced to engage with the text with their own meaning (so much of my analysis will be ‘educated speculation’ and not definite). 

Death is a recurrent event through much of the novel, specifically suicide, yet Murakami sensitively portrays these characters in a manner in which their struggle is treated with respect and compassion. Throughout the book Toru appears to only be able to define himself by those around him and emphatically repeats that he is simply an ‘ordinary man’. He is a character who ‘third wheels’ relationships, entertains others by telling stories about his roommate and defines himself by his responsibility for the emotional stability of Naoko. When Naoko commits suicide Toru loses his purpose. What he has been living for dies and now his life has to move forward, not as Kizuki’s friend, not as Naoko’s lover but for himself. 

Hidden symbolic passages are scattered throughout many of the chapters and provide the ambiguous ending with some form of clarity. One example of this is when the single thing that Naoko offers to her friend at the mental health sanctuary, Reiko, is clothes. Traditional Japanese culture signifies that in wearing the clothes of Naoko, Reiko becomes some form of a shell for the spirit of her (and the typically separate entities of life and death are merged). This idea continues through the fact that Reiko’s name translated in Japanese stands for ghost or spirit, and similarly the place she travels to at the end of the book is located in a town called Asahikawa. In Japan Asahikawa has ties to the afterlife as it is commonly viewed as the entrance to the spiritual world, which somewhat clarifies that the final sexual act between Reiko and Toru actually depicts Toru bidding farewell to Naoko’s spirit. The hopeful conclusion the book reaches comes as Toru transitions to the living world where Midori is (on the other side of the phone). Toru is disoriented and placeless in the final sentence as he finds himself in the land of the living, which is something that he hasn’t been a part of for much of his life.  

Ultimately, the balance between the forces of life and death found in this book are summarised by this quote. ‘Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.’