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Haruki Murakami. Norwegian Wood Jay Rubin, tr. New York. Vintage International. 2000. 296 pages. $13 ISBN 0-375-70402-7
Japan
A CHARACTER IN Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood teases Toru Watanabe, its first-person narrator and hero, with the following remark: "You've got this funny way of talking. Don't tell me you're trying to imitate that boy in Catcher in the Rye?" Moreover, an endorsement on the book's back cover compares it to This Side of Paradise. All three works, to be sure, narrate coming-of-age stories focusing on the turmoils of youth; and Murakami's novel amply displays the author's penchant for American culture. Still, differences would seem to outweigh similarities, for Toru possesses neither the furious rebelliousness of Holden Caulfield nor the passionate romanticism of Amory Blaine. Indeed, Toru's defining qualities, as I argued in my review of the work when it originally appeared in Japan in 1987 (see WLT 62:2, p. 335), are his passivity, gentleness, and infinite capacity to empathize with the female companions in his life, which would place him in the lineage of the iro-otoko (lover) in classical Japanese literature.
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