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Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
Norwegian Wood is set in Tokyo in the late 1960s. The novel starts in 1968, when Toru is a freshman at Waseda University. Toru stays in the campus dorms, where he is living alone for the first time. His dorm is part of a large complex that includes a dining hall, an auditorium, and athletic fields. His only complaint is the dorm’s "political smell." In Chapter 2, he explains:
The complex was run by some kind of fishy foundation that centered on some kind of extreme right-wing guy, and there was something strangely twisted—as far as I was concerned—about the way they ran the place.
The dorm hosts patriotic flag-raising ceremonies every morning, and while Toru doesn’t endorse the political theater, “it made no practical difference” to him. Toru lives in an impeccably neat room with a roommate he dubs “the Storm Trooper,” poking fun at his insistence on cleanliness. Many of the scenes in the novel that take place at the University occur in this dormitory or near classrooms—where Toru meets Midori.
While Toru attends Waseda University, many of the left-wing students are protesting the way the school is run. This was typical in the late 1960s, a time of political unrest on campuses across the world. Throughout Norwegian Wood, references to pop culture—including the Beatles and Bob Dylan—flesh out this 1960s setting. Toru is indifferent to the political protests. In Chapter 4, when revolutionaries take over one of his classes, he comments:
I had no problem with what they were saying, but the writing was lame. It had nothing to inspire confidence or arouse the passions. And the round guy’s speech was just as bad—the same old tune with different words. The true enemy of this bunch was not State Power but Lack of Imagination.
Again, Toru’s personal grief seems to inure him from becoming invested in politics. Instead, Toru frequently walks around the city of Tokyo with Naoko and Midori. These walks introduce to the novel's setting an entire world beyond the university. Additionally, crucial parts of Norwegian Wood take place outside of Tokyo at the Ami Hostel, where Naoko and Reiko stay to convalesce. This sanatorium is deep in the woods and cut off from the rest of civilization. The Ami Hostel is an eerily idyllic place, where life is so comfortable that patients rarely want to leave.
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