I’m trying to avoid characterizing my reaction to the novel as just “meh.” But it was genuinely almost completely meh. Except I’m starting to understand that it isn’t Murakami without at least one totally bizarre sex scene.
Norwegian Wood was so much more tolerable than 1Q84 by the same author, but I still wasn’t wowed, so I think this will be my last Murakami. Two is enough. Maybe I’ll pick up Kafka on the Shore sometime in the distant future since I think that is the most popular besides Norwegian Wood, but even the idea seems exhausting to me right now.
Conceptually, this should be a book to which I would gravitate and relate. It’s about a young man learning how to heal from his friend’s suicide while navigating college and relationships with two very different but broken women. But I felt too distant from the narrative for any of it to pack an emotional punch.
I can’t decide if the protagonist was well drawn or not, but I’m leaning towards not. He felt very generic, and it seemed as though his personality or reflections were rarely on display. But he was technically supposed to be feeling a pervasive emptiness, so it makes me wonder if it was on purpose? I also only truly felt like he was struggling with his mental health during two scenes out of the whole novel, despite his constant poor decisions, so whatever was intentional or not obviously didn’t translate with me. I don’t understand what Midori was talking about when she kept telling him that his style of talking was so odd and interesting. But I simply didn’t understand Midori at all. Perhaps she was supposed to be so quirky that normal seemed unique to her. But in my perspective, it was just generic conversation on his part to pair with his generic existence.
Overall, it felt like the protagonist was a reader along with me, learning things about himself from the author at the same time we were, instead of the author lending us perspective into a protagonist that felt real and already existed separately from the author.
The character that I thought could have been interesting to learn more about was Naoko, if she was written by a different author and through a different narrator. I felt like absolutely no one in the novel understood her, including the author himself. She was someone who could not heal from the losses she experienced or separate that from her own mental health problems.
But overall she existed in the novel to be someone our protagonist could obsess over and feel responsible for, so the only aspects of her personality the narrative cared to explore are the ones that directly influenced the protagonist. I did read a Goodreads review that blamed Naoko for the suicide of their friend and directly linked her struggles with physical intimacy with an inability to love, and the irritation I felt over that review was ample more emotion than the actual novel ever produced.
