Thought Train to Pusan

A story of a young man’s unrequited love, tangled in a web of death, mental illness, and the impact of sexual experience upon a person’s life. I was unaware that that last point would play such an important role in the story of Norwegian Wood , which made reading on the bus next to an older women conspicuously reading over my shoulder a bit of an interesting experience. In general, however, this novel focuses on the confusing time that is a person’s late teens, and how certain moments have the power to stay with us all through our lives. Norwegian Wood begins with a 37-year-old Toru Watanabe, suddenly being hit with a wave of nostalgia, and memories from the 1960s when he was around 17-20 years old. And the trigger of these memories? An orchestral version of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood”. The rest of the novel is where Toru recounts all that occurred during this early and altering time in his life. It all begins when Toru’s best friend, Kizuki, commits suicide when he is 17