Noruwei no Mori

Norwegian Wood is a story about love, sex, relationships, and the complexities which define and effect the interactions of the human species. A novel centered around loss and pain, Haruki Murakami paints a picture of late 1960's Tokyo fraught with confusion, emotion, and the breaking down of the human mind. Norwegian Wood is in many ways a beautiful tale of tragedy and confusion. The style and cadence of Murakami's writing, and specifically his dialogue hold a distinctive, snappy honesty rarely found. The chracters are flawed, real, and therefore that much easier for the reader to invest in as we follow them along these winding roads of instability and small victories. The bluntness with which chracters unfold topics and events of their lives is refreshing, though occasionally jarring.

Written originally in 1987, and dealing with the 60's there was a sense of era about the novel that really seemed to capture the spirit of the times - which though enjoyable for the atmosphere of it, occasionally left me feeling I was a bit young to fully appreciate all the underlying currents of the time period in which the novel was set. [myself having been born in 1988] Never-the-less the feel of the novel was an authentic and wonderfully mystical one, permiated by a love of music, free spirits and soft revolutions which coloured the novel and its tragedies with all the more clarity.

A complex novel which attempts to unravel the logistics of the soul, sanity and love and death, Murakami questions convention and loyalties as the main character, Toru Watanabe stumbles his way from adolescents into full-blown accountable adulthood.

Toru is a resolutely optomistic character that finds himself hopelessly in love with his deceased best friend's girlfriend Naoko. Despite her sweetness and beauty, Naoko remains emotionally unavailable as she constantly attempts to unravel the sickness within her own mind - a reoccuring theme that is never directly explained nor defined, as mental strangeness and 'brokeness' becomes a concept of relativity which continually infiltrates chracters and relationships as the story unfolds.

In stark contrast to the quaint Naoko is Midori - the spunky, outspoken, short-skirt wearing character from Watanabe's classes. Midori adds a sense of uncertainty, adventure and bluntness to Watanabe's life previously missing, and he and Midori become odd but close friends. As Watanabe manueveres his way through university, he continually finds himself re-evaluating and analyzing not only his relationships, but the way in which he interacts with those closest to him.

Because of this constant evaluation of relationships, the novel is completely interwoven with explicit interactions of sex and erotic encounters. Though this certainly adds merit to Watanabe's inner dilemas - namely, the fine lines between love, sex, romantic relationships and friendships - the explicit nature was certanly more than my person taste appreciated, and is something to keep in mind and be advised of for readers.

Despite these less than appealing scenes, the novel is a well written stylistic tale of the downfalls in human nature, and the inexplicable connections humans form with one another.

Never Let Me Go

The acclaimed novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a wonderful balance of ignorance and knowledge: "The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way." Kathy, the novel's main character and narrator recalls being told this in her childhood years at Hailsham boarding school - this qoute sums up the way in which Kathy interacts with the reader for the majority of the novel: from the on set, the narator [kathy] makes it clear that she is a 'carer' but it is left to the reader to piece together bits of information - just as the students did at Hailsham - in order to get a grasp on what a 'carer' in the novel's context, even is.

The novel outlines the coming of age, and subsequent years of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy within the greater context of a rare boarding school in east Sussex. Though the reader is not told a great deal about the school or the students outright, as the novel progresses through the first few chapters, it is clear that these are not ordinary students, and the Guardians do not treat them in the way you might expect. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when you realize that the youths are not so much students as they are walking donations to be used commodity-style. Once this concept is grasped, it is a quick jump to full realization that the students are in fact copies of 'original' citizens used as 'donors' for their vital organs. The reader is eventually told this outright, but it is with a sense that you already expected what was coming - somehow, you knew it was coming. "All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma." This is the same way the students interact in Hailsham, piecing together concepts and understandings without fully knowing the full picture. The effect of such subtle revelation is one of intimacy with the characters and leans towards a greater connectivity with the would-be unrelatable environment of the novel.

Though the clone/donor concept is certainly not an original one, Never Let Me Go certainly does not seem overdone, nor repetative. The style and manner in which it is written - and more specifically the careful subtle ways the three main characters maneuver through a world frought with inevitability, truly draws the reader in and puts a touching spin on an idea that might otherwise be considered "sci-fi'. Instead the novel is expressly drama, coming of age, and sentimental, exploring the complexities of knowledge and innocence, through revelation and careful curiousity. In this manner Ishiguro explores what it means to serve a societal purpose, what it is to really live, and the human soul (and what evidences might be used to prove such a thing exists).

"We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time."