Toru Watanabe hears a Beatles song on a plane and is thrown back to 1969, to a Tokyo university, and to two women. Naoko was his dead best friend’s girlfriend, fragile and receding into a sanatorium in the hills. Midori is alive and blunt and impossible to look away from. It’s the straight realist novel in Murakami’s body of work — no talking cats, no parallel worlds — and it’s the one that made him famous enough in Japan that he left the country. Sad in a very specific way about being twenty and carrying somebody else’s death.
Norwegian Wood