The song is melancholy and is noted for its references to Eastern spirituality. The song also heavily features the sitar, an Indian instrument. The song describes an extramarital affair that co-songwriter John Lennon engaged in. The title of the novel comes from the Beatles’ song Toru hears in the airport at the novel’s opening. As such, Norwegian Wood is a novel steeped in pain, with characters that are deeply wounded, but it is also a novel of healing through the power of love.

She serves as a connection to living and to life that quite-probably saves Toru from the same fate as his friends. Midori brings Toru back into his life, especially after the death of Naoko. This process is rarely easy, and the characters fight through depression and confusion, seemingly always tempted to choose suicide over fighting through their mental and emotional challenges. This forces the surviving characters to examine their lives and the decisions they make. Two characters choose death, suddenly, which shakes the other characters to their cores. The central theme of Norwegian Wood is the balance of life and death. In the meantime, Toru meets Midori, student in his drama class who likes him. Afterwards, Naoko leaves him a note saying that she needs some time to herself, and she admits herself into a sanitarium. They spend more and more time together, and on Naoko’s 20th birthday, they have sex.

Toru and Naoko both decide to go to university in Tokyo. The two remaining friends are profoundly affected by Kizuki’s death: Toru feels the pressure of death everywhere he looks, and Naoko feels as though she has lost her soulmate. They are all happy, but their peacefulness is shattered by Kizuki’s unexpected suicide on his seventeenth birthday. Toru grows up in Kobe, Japan, in a tight-knit circle of friends with his best friend, Kizuki, and Kizuki’s girlfriend, Naoko. Thirty-seven-year-old Toru Watanabe hears an instrumental cover of the Beatles’ song “Norwegian Wood.” He begins to reflect on his life in the 60s. In Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami introduces the main character as he walks through an airport in Hamburg, Germany.

Norwegian wood book