The appearance of this book is very good news. Haruki Murakami's best-selling novel in Japan, Norwegian Wood was originally published in Japanese in 1987. It has been translated into English once before, but for complex copyright reasons that edition has never been widely available. The arrival of this new translation effectively launches Murakami's most popular work onto the English-speaking world's mass market for the first time.
Many modern Japanese novels share a distinctive quality that makes them both refreshing and satisfying. Whether you're reading Murakami or Banana Yoshimoto, there is the same openness and honesty in the characters, the same delicate introspection, the same pastel-colored, sweet-sour charm.
None of the characters is truly driven by irrational forces. Instead, almost all of them have an ability to take life between finger and thumb, turn it this way and that, and make sane, rational, but not unfeeling assessments of it. The contrast with novelists of the preceding generation such as Yukio Mishimo, all of whose books are in one way or another the product of an obsession, couldn't be more marked.
These benign characteristics taken together make this school of novelists particularly consoling, fresh, and nourishing. In Murakami's case you can add a marked sexual openness, and a clear consciousness of his predecessors in the craft of writing serious fiction.
Norwegian Wood tells the story of a student in late 1960s Japan called Watanabe. He's a serious and thoughtful young man who takes courses in subjects like German and History of Drama, and for relaxation reads novels by classic authors such as Thomas Mann and William Faulkner. After one of his friends, Kizuki, inexplicably kills himself, Watanabe begins to develop a relationship with the friend's former girlfriend, Naoko.
But when she, also without apparent reason, drops out of his life, he slowly becomes involved with another female classmate, the individualistic and sexually adventurous Midori.
Watanabe's relationship with these two girls forms a kind of map of his inner existence. They stand for two different approaches to the world and to life itself, music in the major and the minor key. Midori, with her short skirts, impulsive behavior and general effervescence, represents the life-affirming bright side. Naoko, with her absorption in her former boyfriend's suicide, plus her own psychological problems, is the dark side, even the imminent presence of death itself, forever waiting in the wings.
This sounds like the common Asian awareness of life as balances between the opposites yin and yang. But the use of two women to symbolize different mental states in their male lover is a common device in classic Western fiction -- Thomas Hardy used it in Jude the Obscure, D.H. Lawrence in Sons and Lovers and John Cooper Powys in Wolf Solent. This doesn't make it hackneyed, however -- instead, it shows how versatile the trick is, and how useful it can prove to an author wanting to explore a narrator's conflicting feelings. It also provides a ready-made story that is likely to have a familiar ring for many readers.
There's also a sub-plot that centers around the rich and versatile Nagasawa, a classmate who habitually sleeps around with girls he meets in bars as a form of escape from his relationship with his regular girlfriend. Watanabe sometimes accompanies Nagasawa on these nights on the town. But one evening the three of them have dinner together, and then, following some heavy drinking on Nagasawa's part, home truths begin to be exchanged.
Back in the main plot, Naoko contacts Watanabe again. The pressure of student life and the death of her boyfriend have proved too much, she reveals, and she is now in a sanitarium. Watanabe goes to visit her, and there he meets her friend and roommate, a formerly married older woman called Reiko. The story Reiko tells him of lesbian approaches made to her by a 13-year-old child, her talented piano student, forms one of the most intriguing sections of the novel.
At one point, Reiko gives Watanabe a piece of advice that could be said to put Murakami's attitude to his characters, and to life itself, in a nutshell. All of us are imperfect beings living in an imperfect world. Let yourself go with life's natural flow, she urges. Things will go the way they're supposed to go it you just let them take their natural course.
One of the assumptions regularly made about Norwegian Wood is that it tells the story of Murakami's own student days, when he first came to Tokyo from Kobe, and there met Yoko, his future wife. Murakami has made the following comment on this hypothesis. "I borrowed the details of the protagonist's college environment and daily life from my own college days. As a result many people think it is an autobiographical novel, but in fact it is not autobiographical at all. My own youth was far less dramatic, far more boring than his. If I had simply written the literal truth of my own life, the novel would have been no more than 15 pages long."
The book's suspense element, of course, lies in which of the girls Watanabe will finally choose, and this isn't resolved until the very last page, if then. But the real interest of the book lies deeper than this. The moods and mental worlds the girls close to Watanabe represent are all elements of existence. Which he finally chooses doesn't really matter -- like the seasons, or the movements in the Mozart piano concertos one of the minor characters in the book is particularly attracted to -- they are all necessary parts of life.
Jay Rubin's translation is fluent and very readable. In a note at the end he states that the novel's earlier translation, by Alfred Birnbaum, was produced only for distribution in Japan, complete with notes for students learning English. Copies of this earlier version have occasionally turned up in Taipei bookstores, but this new one is the first to be easily available, in paperback and reasonably priced.
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
Under pressure, President William Lai (賴清德) has enacted his first cabinet reshuffle. Whether it will be enough to staunch the bleeding remains to be seen. Cabinet members in the Executive Yuan almost always end up as sacrificial lambs, especially those appointed early in a president’s term. When presidents are under pressure, the cabinet is reshuffled. This is not unique to any party or president; this is the custom. This is the case in many democracies, especially parliamentary ones. In Taiwan, constitutionally the president presides over the heads of the five branches of government, each of which is confusingly translated as “president”
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 In 1899, Kozaburo Hirai became the first documented Japanese to wed a Taiwanese under colonial rule. The soldier was partly motivated by the government’s policy of assimilating the Taiwanese population through intermarriage. While his friends and family disapproved and even mocked him, the marriage endured. By 1930, when his story appeared in Tales of Virtuous Deeds in Taiwan, Hirai had settled in his wife’s rural Changhua hometown, farming the land and integrating into local society. Similarly, Aiko Fujii, who married into the prominent Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家) in 1927, quickly learned Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and
RSS