Death is not life’s opposite or endpoint, necessarily, but a fabric woven through the very structure of daily life-something that must be contended with and pushed back against time and time again.Īs the novel progresses, Toru encounters more and more experiences with death that only remind him of the fact that there is a constant struggle between the world of the dead and the world of the living-a struggle compounded by the grief, confusion, and hopelessness of coping with death. He has been rattled by the pull that death exerts upon the living-but is, at a relatively young age, able to understand a profound and frightening concept. “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life,” Toru finds himself thinking early on in his college career.

As Toru heads off to college, he finds himself ruminating almost endlessly about the thin veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Toru is shaken by the loss of Kizuki, the first major death he’s experienced. Toru Watanabe is shocked when his best friend, Kizuki, commits suicide without warning at the age of 17. Influenced-or haunted-by the deaths they’ve witnessed, the three main characters struggle to understand the point of living, and dive deeper and deeper into existentialism as the novel unfolds. The two realms tug unceasingly at Toru, Midori, and Naoko, forcing them to choose between the pain of living and the escape of death. The world of the dead and the world of the living are in constant competition with one another throughout Norwegian Wood. As Toru watches his friends Naoko, Hatsumi, and Midori struggle with (and, in some cases, succumb to) their grief, Murakami suggests that everyone, at some point, must face down the deeply existential dilemma of whether to continue living and participating in a cruel, chaotic world, or to escape into death. Beginning with the unexpected, gruesome suicide of his high school friend Kizuki, Toru finds himself practically surrounded by death. Though only 19 years old throughout most of the events of the novel, Toru Watanabe encounters a staggering number of individuals-many of whom are his age or younger-who are either grieving a loved one, dying themselves, or seriously contemplating taking their own lives.

Norwegian wood novel