Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami (Author, Introducer)
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.

In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

A beautifully packaged hardback edition of Haruki Murakami's breakout hit, now with a new introduction by the author

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

'Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around' Time Out

Norwegian Wood is Japan's The Catcher in the RyeEveryone who reads Norwegian Wood runs out to buy copies for friends and lovers... Drawing on Fitzgerald, Capote, Chandler and the Japanese tradition, his books are at once disarmingly direct and slyly, charmingly evasive. They are playful and melancholy; full of wrong turns and red herrings, corridors that lead nowhere and - above all - girls who disappearA masterly novel. . . . Norwegian Wood bears the unmistakable marks of Murakami's handThis book is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it's also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lowsCatches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed. Quietly compulsive and finally movingA heart-stoppingly moving story... Murakami is, without a doubt, one of the world's finest novelistsEvocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers aroundNorwegian Wood . . . not only points to but manifests the author's geniusAn intimate and dark story... A beautifully introspective novel that made me feel all the emotionsMurakami must already rank among the world's greatest living novelistsSuch is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibilityVintage Murakami [and] easily the most erotic of [his] novels[A] treat...Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is doneMurakami's most famous coming of age novel of love, loss and longing