Hiromi Kawakami was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1958. She is a 1980 biology graduate from Ochanomizu Women’s University in Tokyo, where her degree thesis was on “reproduction in sea urchins”. In 1982, Kawakami worked for four years as a biology teacher at Denenchoolori High School. After her marriage in 1986 and her husband’s work involving living in another region of Japan, she stopped working and became a housewife and a mother. She divorced in 2009.

The Nakano Thrift Shop was published in Japanese in 2005 and English in 2016. It won the Junichiro Tanizaki Prize, one of Japan’s much sought after literary awards. It was a best-seller, translated into several languages and was adapted for television. Kawakami is known as an unconventional novelist, Haiku poet, literary critic and provocative essayist. She is one of the most acclaimed writers in Japan.

The story of The Nakano Thrift Shop revolves around four characters. Young Hitomi, the protagonist and narrator, works as a cashier in Mr Nakano’s thrift shop; the married, middle-aged Mr Nakano, the shop owner, is a mysterious person and a womanizer with various former wives. Takeo, his delivery driver, is an unemotional shy young man, disinterested in sex and to whom the passive Hitomi seems to be attracted. The fourth character is Nakano’s eldest sister, the fifty-year-old artist, Masayo, who is secretive about her regrets and heartaches. She is accommodating, has never married and volunteers to teach Hitomi a few rudiments about love and attraction.

In different ways, each character is peculiar, introverted, eccentric and with no motivation for adjustment. Hitomi has changing moods, and her thoughts evolve around Takeo and his disinterest in love and romance. Both of them seem awkward and insecure. Hitomi is uncertain about whether she loves Takeo or dislikes him. As for Takeo, his sentiments appear to be lukewarm towards her, an emotional uncertainty that is not uncommon in Kawakami’s novels.

Nothing much happens in the everyday life of the four characters – just a quiet, mundane perpetuum mobile, similar to Kawakami’s previous novel, The Briefcase, published in English in 2012, which we discussed in our Book Club in 2018. Both novels are slow-paced with no magical realism, plot, or twists, just an account of the quiet life of ordinary people. It is akin to Yasujiro Ozu’s films which have a certain charm. A line that is not uncommon with some Japanese authors and film-makers.

The novel is divided into 12 chapters. Each chapter is linked to the previous one and yet is self-contained, like an episode in a series. The chapters are titled according to items sold in the shop: Paper Weight, Letter Opener, Sewing Machine and other several bric-a-brac.

In The Nakano Thrift shop, the author concentrates more on describing the shop’s daily occurrences rather than developing her ambiguous characters, which are revealed to the reader in segments and without depth. The novel is left open-ended, giving the reader a choice for the denouement. The story provides salient insight into a Japanese shopkeeper’s daily life and the life of his workers and clients.

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Haruki Murakami, one of Japan’s most famous and acclaimed contemporary writers, was born in Kyoto in 1949 but grew up in the Osaka – Kobe area, an only child whose father was a Buddhist priest’s son and his mother, an Osaka’s merchant daughter. Both his parents taught Japanese literature.

Murakami spent his young years reading an array of European and American literary works, which later influenced his writing. He majored in theatre arts at Tokyo’s Waseda University in 1975.

He loved classical and jazz music to the extent that, while still at university, he worked at a record shop before opening his own coffee/jazz bar, “Peter Cat”, with his university girlfriend, Yoko, who later became his wife. He ran the bar from 1974 to 1981 and sold it when he started earning a living from writing.

Haruki Murakami translates books from English to Japanese. He is also a novelist, writing non-fiction, short stories and essays. Several of his novels have been made into films. Norwegian Wood, Murakami’s fifth novel, was published in Japanese in 1987 and English twice: by Birnbaum in 1989 and Rubin in 2000. Moreover, it was released as a film at the end of 2010.

While his fame was increasing, Murakami left Japan, discontented by Japanese social mentality in the late 1980s. He first moved to Europe, where he lived for a few years before going on to the USA in 1991. He taught at Princeton University from 1991 to 1993, followed by Tufts University from 1993 to 1995.

Because of the Kobe earthquake and the Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo underground by a Japanese religious sect, Murakami felt the need to return to his native country in 1995. He now lives in Oiso, in the Kanagawa prefecture, and has an office in Tokyo.

Murakami’s books have been translated into several languages and are bestsellers worldwide. He has received many awards for his work in addition to The World Fantasy Award, The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, The Franz Kafka Prize, Hans Christian Andersen Literary Award, Yomiuri Prize and The Jerusalem Prize.

The story of Norwegian Wood is narrated in the first person by the thirty-seven-year-old Toru Watanabe. Watanabe’s plane had just landed at Hamburg airport, Germany, when “Soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood”, Naoko, Toru’s first love, liked this song, which is often mentioned in the story. The melody triggered old buried memories of eighteen years earlier when Toru was a nineteen-year-old student in Tokyo and loved Naoko.

Toru, now an adult, is reminiscing on his college years in the sixties and his relationship with his high school friend, Kizuki, and his attractive and emotionally unstable girlfriend, Naoko. However, the seventeen-year-old Kizuki unexpectedly commits suicide and Naoko, who feels helpless, lost and depressed after her premature boyfriend’s death, turns to Toru for help.

Naoko likes Toru, who, in return, loves her. Nevertheless, due to the enduring impact of Kizuki’s suicide, things do not go the right way between them. Naoko shows signs of schizophrenia, abandons her studies and is admitted to a sanatorium. Her stay there becomes long and her leaving unforeseeable.

While Naoko is in the sanatorium, Toru meets his extroverted, lively classmate, Midori Kobayashi. She is the complete opposite character from the introverted, dispirited Naoko. Furthermore, Toru falls in love with Midori but suppresses it because of his commitment to Naoko. Naoko ends up taking her own life to end her sufferings, like her boyfriend, Kizuki and her older sister, who both committed suicide at seventeen. Toru is devastated after hearing the news.

Murakami’s Norwegian Wood was inspired by the eponymous Beatles song released in 1965:
“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
And when I awoke, I was alone
This bird had flown…”
(The Beatles, 1965)

Another song, also released in 1965 by the Who, could have influenced Murakami, who was a teenager at the time:
“People try to put us d-down (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we get around (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old”.
(The Who, 1965)

These songs convey the pain of living, the feeling of loss, angst, and painful existential feeling, struggle for recognition and yearning for independence from established adults’ rules and regulations perceived by adolescents coming of age.

The author also writes about the Japanese students’ street demonstrations in revolt against long-established traditions in Japan in the late sixties. The demonstrations were likely inspired by the enormous French student protests of May 1968, which reverberated among students worldwide.

The subject of the novel is a worthy issue on its own. Combining it with the need to experiment with sexual desires when coming of age is not uncommon to broaden the subject perspective. However, adding multiple recurrent sexual scenes lessens the main subject’s importance and weakens it.

Norwegian Wood is an absorbing, dark story. Fortunately, the end brings a glimpse of hope, a ray of sunshine as an incitement for a promising new start leaving the past behind. The characters are touching in their sufferings. Their “mal de vivre” convey an overwhelmingly depressing atmosphere of isolation leading to oppressive loneliness. They are undoubtedly intended by the author, whose books are often fatalistic, melancholy or even surreal and nightmarish, as illustrated in “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”, which we discussed in our Book Club in 2011.

In one of his interviews, Murakami says that he likes to write weird stories despite being a very realistic person. Maybe it is a sort of escapism from reality, being a “loner” as he typifies himself. Referring to his young readers, he says he hopes that his books “can offer them a sense of freedom – freedom from the real world.”

Murakami mentions that even though Norwegian Wood’s story takes place in the late sixties when he was a university student, it is not an autobiography. He says: “I borrowed the details of the protagonist’s university environment and daily life from those of my own student days. As a result, many people think it is an autobiographical novel, but in fact it is not autobiographical at all”.