Reviews for Tokio Blues (Norwegian Wood)

The average rating for Tokio Blues (Norwegian Wood) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-02-22 00:00:00 Craig Mitchell Twenty Revolutions The birthday I feared most was my 20th. For people older than me, the most significant birthday was their 21st. But when the age of legal adulthood was reduced to 18, turning 21 no longer had the same significance it once had. Before then, you could be conscripted into the armed forces at 18, but you could not drink alcohol until you turned 21. So, if you were old enough to die for your country, surely you were old enough to have a drink? Either way, turning 20 for me meant that I had ceased to be a teenager, a group of people linked only by the fact that their age ended in the suffix "-teen", but still it felt special not belonging to the grown up crowd. On the other side of 20, you emerge from university (if you've been lucky enough to go there) and dive straight into full-time employment, maturity, responsibility, expectations and adulthood. Suddenly, things are all a lot more serious, more permanent, less experimental, or this is how it seems. Japanese-Style Haruki Murakami writes about the Japanese experience in "Norwegian Wood". It's set in the years 1968 to 1970, so it mightn't be the same now. However, it seems that the transition into adulthood is more demanding, more stressful. It also seems that there are more casualties, more teenagers fail to make the transition and end up committing suicide. Murakami writes about the transition almost like it's a game of snakes and ladders. You can climb into the future, success and normality, or you can slide into darkness, failure and death. Well, Well Murakami's protagonist, Toru Watanabe, pictures the darkness as a well-like abyss early in the novel when he recounts the events of a day he spent with the girl he longs for, Naoko. "I can describe the well in minute detail. It lay precisely on the border where the meadow ended and the woods began - a dark opening in the earth a yard across, hidden by grass. Nothing marked its perimeter - no fence, no stone curb (at least not one that rose above ground level). It was nothing but a hole, a wide-open mouth…You could lean over the edge and peer down to see nothing. All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world's darknesses had been boiled down to their ultimate density." As a teenager, Toru's life had been fairly innocuous, he had been playing in a meadow compared with the thicket that awaited him in the future. But first he had to avoid the well in making the transition. As his friend Reiko says in another context: "She and I were bound together at the border between life and death." There is a sense in which we have to negotiate the boundaries as safely as we can, to cross the border and close the gap. If we are lucky, we can do it together. Unfortunately, not everybody is destined to make it into the forest and out the other side. Vanishing Act The overwhelming feel of reading "Norwegian Wood" is one of being in a blank, dream-like, ethereal world. Although Murakami describes people, surroundings and objects with precision, it all seems other worldly, as if everybody lives and breathes in a world beyond this world. There is a sense that at any moment, it could all disappear, that it might all just be part of some cosmic vanishing act. Even if we make it through, we might turn around and discover that some of our friends haven't been so lucky. Talking about My Generation Most of the action in the novel is dialogue, the characters talking about themselves and their relationships. They are preoccupied with themselves, introspective and self-centred. They converse, they play folk songs on the guitar, they write letters that are later burned. Nobody makes anything that will last, other than perhaps themselves and the relationships that are able to survive into adulthood. They struggle for permanence, when everything else around them is ephemeral. Even their memories fade. In the "frightful silence" of the forest, Naoko asks Toru: "I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?" Of course, he responds that he will, although 20 years later, he finds that his memory "has grown increasingly dim." "What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?...the thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow." To which he adds, "Because Naoko never loved me." "Norwegian Wood" The Beatles song features throughout the novel. It's a favourite of Naoko's and Reiko plays it frequently on her guitar. For much of the novel, the lyrics could describe Toru's relationship with Naoko and his other love interest, Midori: "I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me." There is a sense of sadness in the sexual subject matter of this novel, almost as if it's been written in a minor key. Reiko sums up the Beatles pretty accurately, "Those guys sure knew something about the sadness of life," she says, before adding, "and gentleness", almost as an afterthought. She Never Loved Me I love all of this talk of love and longing and loss and loneliness and labyrinths (all the "L" words). Not everybody feels the same, though. You should have heard my wife, F.M. Sushi, when she noticed my tears and stole a look at what I was reading. "Why don't these people just stop moaning and get a life. Can't they just grow up, for chrissake. Everybody's responsible for their own orgasm." Then she flicked the book back at me across the room, adding defiantly (and defeating my prospects that night in one fell swoop), "Especially you." I pick up the book, find my place and resume reading where I left off (page 10), equally defiantly, and aloud..."Because Naoko never loved me." My wife turns her back on me as I snicker at her lack of understanding of my gentle side. Growing Up (How Strange the Change from Minor to Major) Still, a few hundred pages later, I am stunned by her prescience. Toru grows up in Murakami's delicate hands. He has to stop dreaming, he has to live in the present, he has to embrace the now that is in front of him, he has to love the one he's with. He has to distance himself from the past, so that it becomes just a lingering memory. Reiko tells him: "You're all grown up now, so you have to take responsibility for your choices. Otherwise, you ruin everything." Midori (who he has ummed and ahhed about) tells him: "...you, well, you're special to me. When I'm with you I feel something is just right. I believe in you. I like you. I don't want to let you go." In the pouring rain, she reveals to Toru she has broken up with the boyfriend that has prevented her from committing to him. "Why?" he asks. "Are you crazy?" she screams. "You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Then in a scene that could come straight out of "Casablanca", she says: "Drop the damn umbrella and wrap both your arms around me - hard!" How did F.M. Sushi know this would happen? That Toru would grow up and get a girl, not just any girl? That they would fall in love and not into a deep, dark well. Still I prefer Murakami's way of telling the story. It always comes as a surprise the way he tells it, the change from minor to major. What would my wife know of these things? What I find mysterious, she finds obvious. When I find the harbour hard to fathom, she appears to walk on water. If you put her in a labyrinth, she would always find her way out. Whereas sometimes I prefer to hang around and enjoy the experience of being down in the rabbit hole. Mystified. Confused. Excited. At least for a little wile. Original Review: October 3, 2011 Audio Recording of My Review Bird Brian once initiated a Big Audio Project, where Good Readers record and publish their reviews. Unfortunately, BB deleted his page after the amazon acquisition of GR. My recording of this review was my first contribution. You can find it on SoundCloud here:

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-10 00:00:00 Sandra Henslin Before I begin may it be known that this was not my first Murakami. I read Kafka on the Shore and loved it. I read Wind-up Bird Chronicle and loved that too. So I got to thinking that maybe I should read the book that made him famous, the book that everyone in Japan is said to have read, that compelled Murakami to flee the country to escape the media attention. How disappointed I was when I finished. Also, I wrote this on iPad so the punctuation and capitalisation is off. I tried to fix all the auto correct but I may have missed a few. The characters in this book are all loathsome. Toru Watanabe, the main character, is a self-pitying man looking back on his days at university in Tokyo during the student riots in 1969-1970 when he supposedly "fell in love". He attempts to paint himself as a "nice guy", deluded into believing himself to be honest and who has "never lied in his life" (an idea which is refuted several times in the novel. E.g. When midori asks him whether he slept  with Naoko since and he replies "we didn't do anything" - yeah, 'cause people generally rub up naked against each other and give blow jobs to anyone and everyone. You know, that's nothing. Also, bottom of page 350. Yeah) which often came off as whiny whenever he "felt bad" over the fact that he was not self-entitled to screwing people over and actually felt guilt (although this guilt only tended to manifest itself awhile later when he actually got around to thinking about people other than himself). One of many puzzling traits was his insistence at naming every single book and song that he was reading/listening to despite most of them being easily interchangeable, replaceable and irrelevant seeing as they had no correlation whatsoever to the plot or character development (a few exceptions being the song 'Norwegian Wood' [obviously], Das Kapital in relation with the setting of the student riots and the time, and there was a part where Toru was comparing himself to "Jay Gatsby watch(ing) that tiny light on the opposite shore night after night" [although I cringed at the feeble struggle to relate this tacky soap-operatic tale of Toru's wuv for Naoko's body to a symbol signifying Gatsby's obsession to repossess and re-enact what has evolved into a doomed and glittering illusion and the idea that the dream has surpassed the real and is better experienced from a distance]). Seriously, the number of smug name dropping probably extended the book a few dozen pages and you would think that someone who read so much would have at least developed even the smallest amount of empathy but, for all I know, Toru Watanabe spent all his time reading with his eyes glazed over thinking and feeling sorry for himself that he has to feel guilt over using girls as rebound. What was even more depressing about this book was that every single female character was weak and dependent. From I'm-pretending-to-do-the-tough-girl-act-but-in-a-cute-subservient-way Midori who is needy and whiny (she has reasons for being moody and throwing tantrums but there are absolutely no excuses for being cruel and manipulative which is what she does to win Toru's heart) to I-don't-love-you-but-you-want-sex-and-blowjobs-and-I-can't-say-no-to-men Naoko to I'm-so-independent-and-empowering-and-independent-but-I-have-a-"small stomach"-and-can't-eat-much-*coughi'minsecureaboutmyselfcough* Reiko. Midori, however, is the character who ticks the generic box of 'being different', a thin veil attempting to hide the fact that she is actually the fantasy girlfriend of lot of insecure men. She is cute, she is kinky, desperate to sexually please men, is interested in "fuck(ing) like crazy", she is friendly and social with a lot of people, she cooks good food, cleans and is a hard worker and shows that she can slavishly take care of men ie domestic goddess. "I'm looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I  tell you I want to eat strawberry shortbread. And you stop everything you're doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortbread out to me. And I say I don't want it any more and throw it out the window. That's what I'm looking for." Are we supposed to find this endearing? Are we supposed to read this in wonder and awe and repeat to ourselves what Toru says afterward: "I've never met a girl like you"? The thing is, it is in Murakami's style to present a lot of truisms and while in his other works, they are intertwined with the surreal in such a way that it doesn't matter whether they are huge generalisations or just really cheesy because they come from dreamlike layers echoing the absurd and the interior monologue of the character and so it isn't preachy, just something to think about. In Norwegian Wood, they are brash and blunt. The characters make sweeping and often blindly hypocritical and prejudiced assumptions disguised in the appearance of truth mostly about how they are so 'different' and everyone else are such boring sheep (in predictable hipster style: "liek omigod, i'm, liek, sooo unique and different?!?! Liek omigod, my tiny brain never thought of that!!!!") such as "never again would she have that self-centred beauty that seems to take its own independent course in adolescent girls and no one else". So ALL adolescent girls are all self-centred (sorry, self-centred beauty - like totally a compliment!!! *eyeroll*), huh, and Toru here wants US to think that HE is so exceptional when he manages to group half the population into (at one point) possessing a particular trait? There are a lot of "I don't know, I'm just a girl" moments but I reaaaaally don't want to have to open the book again and go look for them. I could go on and on about how odious Naoko and Reiko were but this review is getting really long and all I've been talking about are the characters. The plot, in all its boring and barely existing glory: Toru Watanabe runs into Naoko, the girlfriend of Kizuki, his high school best friend (who had suicided a couple of years previous), and realises she has a hawt body. On her birthday he rapes (sorry, "makes love" to) her while she's distraught over Kizuki and she runs away to a mental asylum to get better. Toru whinges about loneliness. He meets Midori. Everything gets dragged out about how they are both sad and lonely. Toru visits Naoko at the asylum and meets her roommate, Reiko. Toru chooses Midori over naoko because she is a "real, live girl". Naoko commits suicide. Toru and Reiko fuck in her memory. Half the book is whinge and whine, the other half objectifies women.      Positives: 1. Murakami writes beautifully. It's as simple as that. Norwegian Wood is what you would get if you stamped a picture of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel onto a pair of crocs. 2. My mum likes the Beatles song and I've also had the song stuck in my head since reading this book. 3. It's over.