Norwegian wood murakami review

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Haruki Murakami presents an astounding novel as he explores the ways in which our past influences us and how much we let them control us. In fact, all the characters within Norwegian Wood let the past haunt them to some degree. With the tragic suicide haunting both him and his love interest, Naoko, Toru lives in a continuous cycle of perceiving his current life with the influence of his past. Not in some time-traveling plot or even from the way he writes from a point-of-view reflecting on his past, but rather the fact that his troubled past controls his present life. Toru Watanabe lives in both the present as the past. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.Ī magnificent blending of the music, the mood, and the ethos that was the sixties with the story of one college student’s romantic coming of age, Norwegian Wood brilliantly recaptures a young man’s first, hopeless, and heroic love. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before.

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