Norwegian Wood
Play sample
  • Published: 10 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448103706
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416
Categories:

Norwegian Wood

Formats & editions
Paperback
21 Oct 2025
Paperback
1 Apr 2003
Hardback
15 Nov 2022
EBook
10 Oct 2011
Audiobook
29 Oct 2020
Paperback
1 Jun 2011
Buy from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

The haunting, enigmatic love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar in Japan, and is his bestselling title throughout the world

The haunting, enigmatic love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar in Japan, and is his bestselling title throughout the world

Autumn 1969, and soon I would be 20.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

‘Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami’s writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility’ Guardian

'Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates the heartbreak and loss of faith' Sunday Times

'A masterly novel' New York Times
  • Published: 10 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448103706
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416
Categories:

About the author

Haruki Murakami

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

portrait photo of Haruki Murakami

Also by Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Men Without Women
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
1Q84
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
See all

Praise for Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood is Japan's The Catcher in the Rye

Daily Telegraph

Everyone who reads Norwegian Wood runs out to buy copies for friends and lovers... Drawing on Fitzgerald, Capote, Chandler and the Japanese tradition, his books are at once disarmingly direct and slyly, charmingly evasive. They are playful and melancholy; full of wrong turns and red herrings, corridors that lead nowhere and - above all - girls who disappear

Guardian

A masterly novel. . . . Norwegian Wood bears the unmistakable marks of Murakami's hand

The New York Times Book Review

This book is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it's also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows

Independent on Sunday

Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed. Quietly compulsive and finally moving

Times Literary Supplement

A heart-stoppingly moving story... Murakami is, without a doubt, one of the world's finest novelists

Glasgow Herald

Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around

Time Out

Norwegian Wood . . . not only points to but manifests the author's genius

Chicago Tribune

An intimate and dark story... A beautifully introspective novel that made me feel all the emotions

Cosmopolitan

Murakami must already rank among the world's greatest living novelists

Guardian

Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility

Guardian

Vintage Murakami [and] easily the most erotic of [his] novels

Los Angeles Times Book Review

[A] treat...Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is done

Baltimore Sun

Murakami's most famous coming of age novel of love, loss and longing

Dazed and Confused

[A] treat . . . Murakami captures the heartbeat of his generation and draws the reader in so completely you mourn when the story is done.

The Baltimore Sun

Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love... It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed.

Times Literary Supplement

One of the most poignant and evocative novels I have ever read

Palantinate

Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates heartbreak and loss of faith

Sunday Times

Discover more

Article
QUIZ: Which Murakami book should you start with?

Never read Murakami and wondering where to begin? Take this fun quiz to figure out which book you should read first.

Article
Contemplating a life change? You need to read this cosy Japanese fiction

Reviewers agree – if you’re feeling in a rut, it’s time to read What You Are Looking For is in the Library. Learn more and see what readers are saying about it.

penguin pop image
penguin pop image