Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Norwegian Wood, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, Nostalgia, and Regret
Sex and Love
Death, Suicide, Grief, and Existentialism
Truth, Lies, and Communication
Education
Summary
Analysis
Toru thinks back to his freshman year of college in Tokyo 20 years ago. Because Toru is new to living alone, his parents arrange for him to live in a private dorm with a roommate. Toru describes his dormitory complex in painstaking detail, remembering the towering tree out front of the building and the sounds of his fellow students’ radios playing through their open windows. The complex is bustling and busy and has “everything you could want”—the only problem is that it is run by a “fishy foundation” with right-wing politics.
Just as Toru was able to remember the meadow in sharp, painstaking detail, so too is he able to recall seemingly banal or small details about his early days in his first dormitory. He describes it with a sense of nostalgia—even as he recalls the sense of unease and suspicion he felt about living there.
Themes
Toru’s all-male dorm is filthy and stinking, and many students keep pornographic posters on their walls. Toru’s room, however, is “sanitary as a morgue” due to his cleanliness-obsessed roommate, nicknamed “Storm Trooper” for his regimented preoccupation with keeping things clean, neat, and orderly. Storm Trooper is a nervous geography major with an occasional stutter who dreams of making maps one day. Toru, on the other hand, is majoring in drama, but tells Storm Trooper that he has no real attachment to it—he picked drama, he says, because he might as well have picked anything.
Storm Trooper is the first person Toru meets who serves to highlight and underscore his own aloofness and ambivalence. While Toru picks a major at random, with barely a second thought about his future or a practical career, Storm Trooper is obsessed with organizing and planning every single aspect of his life. Toru is barely a participant in his own life, while those around him are determined to take advantage of every opportunity to the fullest.
Themes
One Sunday morning, on the train, Toru is surprised to run into Naoko, an acquaintance from back home in Kobe. They have not seen each other in a year, and Naoko has become very thin. After running into each other, they decide to spend the afternoon together walking through the city. Toru regales Naoko with tales of Storm Trooper and his ridiculous early-morning exercise routines but is unsure of what to say to her during breaks in the conversation—though they often spent time together in high school, they have little to say to each other now.
There is clearly tension between Toru and Naoko—something unresolved from their shared past sits heavy between them. Toru’s comment about Naoko’s severe drop in weight also shows that she may be going through something, trying to transform or shrink herself in her new life in Tokyo.
Themes
At the end of the walk, as the two part ways, Naoko asks Toru if they can see each other again—even though she says she has no “right” to ask Toru for such a thing. Toru is confused by her statement, and Naoko admits that she’s had trouble expressing her feelings lately. Toru says he knows what she means and tells her he’s always free for a walk on Sundays.
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As he heads home, Toru thinks about his past with Naoko. The two met in high school: Naoko was the girlfriend of Kizuki, Toru’s only friend. Naoko and Kizuki were next-door neighbors growing up and had been close since childhood—there was never a time, Toru says, when the two weren’t a couple. Toru believes Naoko resents him because he was the last one to see Kizuki alive. On the last day of Kizuki’s life, he and Toru cut classes to go shoot pool at a local billiards hall. Kizuki was oddly quiet that afternoon and lost the game, but Toru had no clue that Kizuki would, after their match, go home, tape a rubber hose to the exhaust pipe of his car, and commit suicide without leaving a note behind.
This passage reveals the truth of Naoko and Toru’s connection. They are bound together by their grief over the loss of Kizuki, but at the same time, completely isolated in that grief because of their very different relationships to him. Toru feels a sense of guilt that he and not Naoko was the last to see Kizuki, and knows that Naoko, too, must feel guilt and confusion about Kizuki’s sudden and completely unexplained choice to take his own life.
Themes
Toru found himself “unable to find a place for [him]self in the world” in the wake of Kizuki’s death. Toru got a girlfriend and slept with her for a few months, but soon lost interest. He applied to and was accepted by a good university in Tokyo, but barely felt any excitement about the prospect of attending. All he wanted to do in Tokyo, Toru says, was create “distance between [him]self and everything else” and make a new life where he knew no one. Toru says that after Kizuki died, he began to see death “not as the opposite [of] but as a part of life”—something that was already within every being at the time of their birth and would stay with them always. Death could take Toru at any moment, he realized, and by the time he got to Tokyo, “everything revolved around death.”
This passage further reveals the ways in which Kizuki’s death has affected Toru’s life. Toru’s entire personality and many of his choices have been influenced by Kizuki’s death. He wants to wall himself off from others to dull the potential pain of losing another friend—and, at the same time, feels haunted by the idea that death is at the center of all life. Toru doesn’t know how to cope with his burgeoning existentialism and confusing emotions—but at least now that he’s reconnected with Naoko, he has someone who knows who he is, where he’s coming from, and perhaps a bit of what he’s feeling.
Themes
