Norwegian Wood
1987
Literary fiction
Murakami's breakout 1987 novel and his deliberate attempt to set aside magical realism for a "straight" realist book. Toru Watanabe, a 37-year-old businessman, hears the Beatles song "Norwegian Wood" on a plane landing in Hamburg and is pulled back into a flashback of his late-1960s Tokyo college days — his fragile, depressive first love Naoko, the suicide of their mutual friend Kizuki, the older sanatorium roommate Reiko, and the manic, vivid Midori. A meditation on memory, depression, and grief, told in spare prose. Its enormous success in Japan turned Murakami into a reluctant celebrity and drove him out of the country for years.