At the beginning of Norwegian Wood, 37-year-old Toru Watanabe is flung backward into memory and nostalgia when he hears a version of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” playing on an airplane loudspeaker. His immersive retreat into memories of the Tokyo of his youth and all that happened to him there is somewhat reluctant, and yet the sharpness of his memories from this time is astounding—soon, it becomes clear that these memories are the most important of his entire life. Ultimately, Murakami uses the mixture of painful and pleasurable memories Toru recollects to show that feelings of nostalgia and regret can often be intermixed and muddied within one’s memories—sometimes, even, to the point of these two different emotions becoming indistinguishable from each other.
The world of Norwegian Wood is one based on memory. Toru’s recollection of his formative years is precise and near-perfect, yet also tinged, at various times, with the hazy wash of nostalgia and the sharp, uncomfortable pain of regret. As Toru’s memories rush back and mix together, the delineation between these two modes of memory often becomes blurry, rendering difficult moments more beautiful and pleasant ones more tense than they may have been in reality. “Eighteen years have gone by, and still I can bring back every detail of that day in the meadow […] It almost hurt to look at that far-off sky.” So begins Toru’s journey his past, spurred by hearing a rendition of “Norwegian Wood” as his flight touches down in Hamburg, Germany. From the very first lines of the story-within-the-story of Norwegian Wood, Murakami illustrates the simultaneous pain and ecstasy of memory. Toru admits that while he was living in the moment back then, the scenery of the day he’s recalling was just scenery—now, though, it is “the first thing that comes back.” He remembers minute details brilliantly and reverently, but when it comes time to populate the scenes of his memory with the people who inhabited them, he’s full of guilt and regret over not being able to summon faces, feelings, and other details so easily. This early scene sets the stage for the way memory is handled throughout the rest of the novel. Toru recalls a beautiful, brilliant meadow and a sky so beautiful it “almost hurt to look at”—in the physical realm of this memory, beauty and pain are practically indistinguishable. Yet as Toru begins filling in the blanks of this memory in the meadow, the bleak details press up even more closely against the inexplicable feelings of happiness and hope. The meadow is a place where Toru used to walk with his friend and romantic interest Naoko while she was housed in a sanatorium in the forested mountains beyond Kyoto, cut off from the rest of society as she attempted to heal from the depression that would eventually claim her life. The conversations Toru and Naoko had in the meadow on the day Toru is remembering were dark and full of fear—jokes about falling into a deep well at the edge of the clearing, shared distress about the impossibility of truly watching over and caring for another person—and yet Toru’s physical memory of the meadow is bright and pleasant. In this way, Murakami entangles nostalgia with regret, creating a surreal, idyllic soundstage upon which the unpleasant, hard facts of memory are then played out.
Murakami also shows how, in addition to sharpening memory in odd ways, nostalgia and regret also have the potential to dull or corrupt memory. Well past the midway point of the novel—over the course of which Toru Watanabe has described, in detail, the people, places, and conversations that defined the tail end of his teenage years—he writes, rather offhandedly, that remembering the year 1969 feels like getting stuck in a “deep, sticky bog” filled with “endless swampy darkness.” Though the memories he’s relayed thus far are seemingly accurate, detailed, and full of both sensory and emotional detail, Toru admits that wading into these memories often feels difficult, dangerous, or taxing. Toru is able to summon incredibly specific details—but admits that doing so requires a lot of mental and emotional work and a lot of time. It makes sense, then, that he would compare wading through the memories of his most formative years to struggling through a dense swamp or a profound darkness. He is essentially rebuilding his youth from the ground up, retreading painful memories and attempting to sift through the complicated feelings of regret and pain he feels at some memories while indulging the happiness and hope he feels at others. Murakami uses Toru’s journey through the “swamp” of his past to show that while details, conversations, and descriptions may be easy to summon, the feelings behind those acute memories are not so easily retrieved. Toru finds even his happy memories with Naoko tinged by the pain of her death that has echoed through the years, while some of the saddest memories in Toru’s life—caring for Midori’s dying father, bonding with the troubled Reiko, and battling his own loneliness at home and at work in Tokyo—feel more hopeful and bright than objectively happy instances from his past do. Murakami thus demonstrates the strange but profound admixture of such feelings from one’s memories, using Toru’s confusion at his own feelings to illustrate just what a confounding, mysterious realm memory often is.
As Murakami muddles the ideas of nostalgia and regret, softening the hard lines between them or blending them into one emotion altogether, he ultimately suggests that nostalgia and regret can (and often do) exist side-by-side in one’s memory of a single moment—making memory a realm both familiar and inhospitable, captivating and repellent. These extremes and opposites, Murakami argues, are what make the world of one’s memory such a compelling place, and what bring one back to one’s past again and again.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Memory, Nostalgia, and Regret ThemeTracker
Memory, Nostalgia, and Regret Quotes in Norwegian Wood
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn’t give a damn about the scenery that day. […] Now, though, that meadow scene is the first thing that comes back to me. […] And yet, as clear as the scene may be, no one is in it. […] Naoko is not there, and neither am I. Where could we have disappeared to?
The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took the seventeen-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.
I can’t seem to recall what we talked about then. Nothing special, I would guess. We continued to avoid any mention of the past and rarely mentioned Kizuki. We could face each other over coffee cups in total silence.
I felt as if the only thing that made sense, whether for Naoko or for me, was to keep going back and forth between eighteen and nineteen. After eighteen would come nineteen, and after nineteen, eighteen. Of course. But she turned twenty. And in the fall, I would do the same. Only the dead stay seventeen forever.
Hey, Kizuki, I thought, you’re not missing a damn thing. This world is a piece of shit. The assholes are earning their college credits and helping to create a society in their own disgusting image.
By the time the number of curves began to decrease to the point where I felt some relief, the bus plunged into a chilling cedar forest. The trees might have been old growth the way they towered over the road, blocking out the sun and covering everything in gloomy shadows. The breeze flowing into the bus’s open windows turned suddenly cold, its dampness sharp against the skin.
“That song can make me feel so sad,” said Naoko. “I don’t know, I guess I imagine myself wandering in a deep wood. I’m all alone and it’s cold and dark, and nobody comes to save me. That’s why Reiko never plays it unless I request it.”
“The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.”
She exposed her nakedness to me this way for perhaps five minutes until, at last, she wrapped herself in her gown once more and buttoned it from top to bottom. As soon as the last button was in place, she rose and glided toward the bedroom, opened the door silently, and disappeared within.
A week went by, though, without a word from Midori. No calls, no sign of her in the classroom. I kept hoping for a message from her whenever I went back to the dorm, but there were never any. One night, I tried to keep my promise by thinking of her when I masturbated, but it didn’t work. I tried switching over to Naoko, but not even Naoko’s image was any help that time. […] I wrote a letter to Naoko on Sunday morning.
I felt guilty that I hadn’t thought of Kizuki right away, as if I had somehow abandoned him. […] The things that his death gave rise to are still there, bright and clear, inside me, some of them even clearer than when they were new. […] I’m going to turn twenty soon. Part of what Kizuki and I shared when we were sixteen and seventeen has already vanished, and no amount of crying is going to bring that back. I can’t explain it any better than this, but I think that you can probably understand what I felt and what I am trying to say.
Thinking back on the year 1969, all that comes to mind for me is a swamp—a deep, sticky bog that feels as if it’s going to suck my shoe off each time I take a step. I walk through the mud, exhausted. In front of me, behind me, I can see nothing but an endless swampy darkness.
The memories would slam against me like the waves of an incoming tide, sweeping my body along to some strange new place—a place where I lived with the dead. […] There Naoko lived with death inside her. And to me she said, “Don’t worry, it’s only death. Don’t let it bother you. […] Death is nothing much. It’s just death. Things are so easy for me here.”
Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.
