Norwegian Wood - Murakami

I will not be able to do this book justice in a short review on Amazon.  I will study this book for the rest of my life and place it among the greatest novels I have read.   Norwegian Wood is simply magnificent.  Strip away the awkward young love and the experimental erotica and what’s left is a deep examination of the human heart.   Haruki Murakami, although not an educated psychologist, is an extremely talented novelist.  We are all amateur observers of the human condition and have experienced the love and pain created in our own relationships, Murakami merely writes it down for us to examine more closely.  Not all of us have experienced the darker side of emotional behavior when loss, leads to depression, which can lead to suicidal gestures, and which might ultimately lead to a terminal act.  Here is a spoiler.  There are four suicides in this book--one by carbon monoxide asphyxiation, one through wrist laceration, and two by hanging.  There are other deaths described as well.  But this is not a morbid book.  On the contrary Murakami goes to great measure to capture the beauty of life both in natural and physical state and in its more mystical shape of brotherly love and of course erotic love.  He captures the beauty of human friendship and what happens when selfishness overrules better judgment, but ultimately that selflessness can prevail, in some cases it can save.  Murakami ‘s philosophy, that death is the inevitable outcome of life, permeates this book, but also that lives and experiences, even those that have been lost can continue to live.  “Norwegian Wood”, the Beatle’s song not the novel, evokes the memories of lives and loves worth remembering for the characters in this novel.  We all have similar songs that remind us of those other experiences we have long since forgotten.  Murakami is simply reminding us that not only is it OK to remember, it is a fundamental requirement of the well lived and considered life.