Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood (1987) is a novel by Haruki Murakami. The first-person narrator, Toru Watanabe, takes a long and very detailed look back on his college years when he was between the ages of 18 and 20 or so. At first I thought the novel was boring, but then the characters started to grow on me, and Murakami's prose becomes hypnotic in a sense, and I often felt like a fly on the wall for the pages of seemingly endless but incredibly natural dialogue. Parts of the story take place in Yotsuya, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Myogadani, Kichijoji, Otsuka and Ebisu, all places I've lived or worked or both, and reading fiction set in real places that I'm familiar with always makes things more interesting.

There is lots of banal dialogue with sudden erotic turns as well. Sex, or talk of sex, just kind of pops up now and then, like in the following exchange between Watanabe and his friend Midori:

“I wonder what ants do on rainy days?” Midori asked.

“No idea,” I said. “They’re hard workers, so they probably spend the day cleaning house or taking inventory.”

“If they work so hard, how come they don’t evolve? They’ve been the same forever.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe their body structure isn’t suited to evolving—compared with monkeys, say.”

“Hey, Watanabe, there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know. I thought you knew everything.”

“It’s a big world out there,” I said.

“High mountains, deep oceans,” Midori said. She put her hand inside my bathrobe and took hold of my...

Suicide, or giving up on this world, is a big theme too, and three characters off themselves, changing the lives of those (three) who remain to push forward. We're also given the philosophy: “Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life.” And, “By living our lives, we nurture death.” The book also reflects the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, and for all these elements it's a little sad in places.

What's also interesting is we're given a sense that Watanabe is recounting his college years perhaps a decade or two later. We don't know what his life is like in the present, but at least we know he made it, through the cynicism, depression, meaninglessness, and mental problems of friends, and by the end of the novel, his making it is in some ways good enough.

A Pale View of Hills

A Pale View of Hills (1982) is Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel. Its narrator, Etsuko, lives in England, and her second daughter, Niki, is visiting from London. We learn early on that Etsuko's first daughter, Keiko, was so unhappy in life she committed suicide. During Niki's visit, Etsuko remembers a time not long after the war, when she was a young woman, pregnant with Keiko and living in Nagasaki. There she met Sachiko, whose daughter, Mariko, was also very unhappy as a little girl.

There's something eerily evocative about this story. I wanted somebody to rescue Mariko, but from whom or what she could've been rescued, I wasn't sure. Through ostensibly banal conversations and accounts of everyday experiences, the tension swells slowly and moderately before gradually receding, again and again and again, which made me expect the absolute worst. Ishiguro is a master of subtlety, and it shows in this early work as it does in The Remains of the Day (1989), and likely in his other novels which I have yet to read. A Pale View of Hills has been described as macabre and mysterious. A review in The New York Review of Books calls it a ghost story, adding the narrator doesn't realize that it is. For me, the book itself feels haunted, and the writing is pure, with each word carefully chosen. It's a novel I'll remember and recommend.

The Sea and Poison

I sort of read this book by accident. I’ve heard about Shusaku Endo for years but never read his work, and I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film, Silence, based on Endo’s 1966 novel of the same name. Then after reading a review in a friend’s blog about Endo’s 1986 novel, Scandal, I headed over to the Kinokuniya near Shinjuku Station’s east exit to see if they carried this title or any of his others. Half a dozen or so Endo novels were on the shelf but not Scandal, so at random I picked The Sea and Poison (1958).

Much of this story takes place at a hospital in Fukuoka at the end of the war. It’s told from the perspectives of ordinary people, all but one of whom become involved in an atrocity. The central character is Suguro, a medical intern whose colleagues are coercing him to participate in the vivisections of two captured American pilots. For a short novel, Endo covers a lot of ground, with a focus on guilt and culpability, ethics and morality. Reading it, I knew and dreaded that I'd eventually come to the vivisections. And although they weren’t so graphic, they were described in enough detail to be disturbing, as was the impassiveness of some characters in the lead-up to those grisly experiments. Endo’s prose in this book are smooth and easy to read, while the subject matter is rough terrain that’s hard to get through in places. I do look forward to reading more of his work but hope not all of it is so dark. I'm also interested in seeing how the story is told in the 1986 film The Sea and Poison, which was directed by Kei Kumai, with Eiji Okuda as Suguro and Ken Watanabe as Toda.