Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The eerie and ominous Murakamiesque atmosphere is disappointingly missing in this novel. The book is a twisted kind of love story where one sentence stands out: Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.

I had expected that the theme would be based on John Lennon’s song Norwegian Wood (This Bird has Flown) about an extramarital affair:

I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn't it good Norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay
And she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around
And I noticed there wasn't a chair
I sat on the rug biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said
"It's time for bed"
She told me she worked
In the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn't
And crawled off to sleep in the bath

The sitar was used for the first time by a rock band in this track from Rubber Soul. It is speculated Lennon's affair was with either his close friend and journalist Maureen Cleave or Sonny Freeman. Paul McCartney explained that the term “Norwegian Wood” was a sarcastic reference to the cheap pine wall panelling then in vogue in London. McCartney commented on the final verse of the song: “In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn't the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn't, it meant I burned the f**ing place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental.”

Mori in the Japanese title translates into English as "wood" in the sense of "forest", not the material "wood", even though the song lyrics refer to the latter.

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