Norwegian Wood follows Toru Watanabe during his early 20s after he has moved to Tokyo to study and to put some distance between himself and his home town Kobe.

The suicide of his school friend is still deeply affecting him and his relationship with other people. Murakami describes Watanabe’s character using the interactions he has with the people around him: his room mate, his drinking buddy and the two women that the story centers around. First he runs into Naoko, his dead friend’s girlfriend. He develops feelings for her but she is struggling to deal with the past and suffers from mental health issues. She is introspective, calm, and fragile.

Not much later he meets Midori, who while also struggling with personal challenges, deals with them in different forward-looking ways. She is funny, sexual, teasing, quirky and lively. In a way Toru has to navigate two possible paths, one representing the past and one the future.

I enjoyed reading this book during my recent holiday. Some of the characters and their interactions might be over exaggerated, but it didn’t diminish the enjoyment for me. It remains very readable even 50 years after publication. Moreover, there is something relaxing about people interacting in the analog world of the 1960s, e.g. setting up meeting dates and missing each other or calling the student dorm to communicate with a friend, or not running into each other for weeks.

This is a non-magical book of Murakami, one that he himself doesn’t consider his best work. Instead of the magical it is about grief, isolation, love, and mental health.