59 pages • 1 hour read
Haruki MurakamiNorwegian Wood
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Rain
Rain is employed throughout Norwegian Wood to create an emotionally charged atmosphere. It often represents the distance between characters and the distance created by memory. The novel starts in the rain, as Watanabe descends through the clouds in Hamburg, and rain appears again at key moments, such as Naoko’s fateful 20th birthday, the night Naoko, Reiko, and Watanabe spend together at Ami Hostel, and the afternoon when Midori and Watanabe confess their love for one another on the department store roof. Rain often works to erase the outside world and bring focus to the connection between characters, making them feel “as if [they’re] the only ones in the world” (161). It unites the pivotal emotional moments of the novel, creating a through line from the rainy landing in Germany to the final scene as Watanabe waits for Midori to break a silence like “the silence of all the misty rain in the world falling on all the new-mown lawns of the world” (293).
Music
Beginning with the name of the novel, music is a motif that plays a vital role in Norwegian Wood. The title comes from the 1965 Beatles song “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” which appears multiple times throughout the novel. It is Naoko’s favorite song and often makes Watanabe think of her. The novel also references many classic folk songs, helping to ground the narrative in the 1960s, as well as classical music and jazz. Primarily, music serves to bring characters together. Both Reiko and Midori play the guitar, and the characters’ evening activities often consist of listening to music, whether it be records or someone playing. One night while working at the record store, Watanabe reflects on how playing different types of music draws different kinds of people: “Whenever I put on hard rock, hippies and runaway kids would gather outside to dance […] and when I put on Tony Bennett, they would disappear” (165). Watanabe understands the power of music to set a mood and connect individuals.
Forests
Although the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood” refers to wood in the sense of a material, the Japanese title of the novel uses the Japanese word that carries the sense of “forest,” creating a shift in meaning that illustrates the importance of woods and forests in the text. Throughout the novel, forests and woods appear as a symbolic in-between place, a kind of borderland that separates physical places but also the metaphysical space between life and death. Significantly, Watanabe says the woods where Naoko hangs herself are “as dark as the depths of her own heart” (276). Therefore, the forests in the novel, which are often described as “chilling,” “dark,” and “silent,” can also represent Naoko’s mental state. Naoko lives in a metaphorical forest, drawn toward the world of the dead by Kizuki and toward the world of the living by Watanabe.
Watanabe, who experiences bouts of depression, is also familiar with the symbolic forest, but he always manages to escape it. When he tells Midori that her new haircut looks “great enough to knock down all the trees in all the forests of the world” (259), he suggests he can see a way forward with her. She looks beautiful enough to banish his depression once and for all.
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By Haruki Murakami
