Norwegian Wood

The realist novel in Murakami’s shelf — no vanishing cats, no parallel worlds. Toru Watanabe narrates backwards from middle age through his student years in late-1960s Tokyo and the two women who pulled him in opposite directions: Naoko, grieving and fragile, and Midori, alive and impatient. It is the book that made Murakami famous at home, and the one most often handed to people who have never read him.

Context: the a16z list puts Murakami in its Fantasy section as an author entry rather than a title, describing him as the master of “weird, surreal, and very relatable coming-of-age stories” — wells that open onto other dimensions, women who may not exist, jazz records at two in the morning. This is the entry-point volume of the four they name, and the least fantastical of them.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from; Fantasy section, Murakami author entry.
• Haruki Murakami — the author.
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — the next of the four selected works, and where the surrealism takes over.
• Kafka on the Shore — third of the four.
• 1Q84 — fourth of the four.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates the list.