Written by: Katherine Jimenez
College burnout, two scholarship projects, and a whole lot of expectations put me in a reading slump I thought I would never survive. But in December 2023 one of my favorite professors gifted me a copy of a book I had been dying to read for years: Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood.” And just like that, my reading slump came to an end.
I cannot say I fell in love with Norwegian Wood’s ending. It was confusing, heartbreaking, bittersweet, and everything else you’d expect from a Murakami novel—including a whole lot of depressing. The novel itself is a masterpiece. The characters were beautifully diverse, raw, and real. I loved Midori, hated Naoko, resented Watanabe. Their flaws were so incredibly woven into the story that, at times, it was difficult to know if the novel was autobiographical or not. But Murakami, despite being a master of the craft, still comes with his own flaws.
My problem with the book? The sex.
What occasionally helps to depict the emotional and physical closeness between two characters—Naoko and Watanabe in particular—becomes cliched and cheap in what seemed to be the author’s personal sexual dream. Women become objects of desire, unable to exist outside their bodies. Watanabe cannot exist without sex while Naoko and Midori, the two female leads, cannot exist without being sexualized or sexualizing themselves. They serve to both comfort and torment Watanabe in his journey of self-discovery. Though I understood that some of the intimate moments in the novel were meant to represent the ways the body can be used to escape or let go of trauma, I could not help but feel annoyed at how overly sexualized Naoko became in the most unnecessary moments (i.e. Naoko and Watanabe’s sexual act in the woods).
I loved Norwegian Wood for its accurate depiction of loneliness, sadness, and loss. It makes us question our place in a world where death is always certain, for ourselves and the people we love. But I wish the female characters could exist more for themselves than the main man.