Norwegian Wood

Toru Watanabe hears the Beatles on an airplane and is pulled back twenty years to Tokyo in the late 1960s — to student protests he did not join, to a dead friend he could not save, and to two women who offered him opposite versions of love. Naoko is beautiful and receding, disappearing into grief like someone walking into fog. Midori is alive the way a fire is alive — bright, warm, and slightly dangerous. Murakami's most autobiographical novel strips away the surrealism he is known for and leaves something rawer: a young man trying to figure out how to live in a city where loneliness is the weather and loss is the rent you pay for caring about anyone at all.