Born in Kyoto in 1949, Haruki Murakami is one of Japan’s best-known contemporary writers. His dreamy, surrealist style intrigued readers worldwide with novels like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995). Norwegian Wood departs from that style, and its more straightforward approach makes it an outlier in Murakami’s body of work. Based on the short story “Firefly,” which appears in his collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006), Norwegian Wood is missing much of Murakami’s signature supernatural feel, focusing instead on love, loss, and the struggles of growing up and finding one’s identity. It is, in the author’s words, a “straight, simple story” (295). Nevertheless, the novel is one of Murakami’s most popular. It catapulted him into literary stardom, expanding his readership so much that Murakami moved out of Japan to avoid being recognized.

Although Murakami resists referring to Norwegian Wood as autobiographical, he admits to having “borrowed” details from his own life, and there are many parallels between the novel and the author’s biography. Like Toru Watanabe, Murakami grew up in Kobe and moved to Tokyo, where he was a freshman drama major in 1968. His university was closed due to student protests, which he, like Watanabe, didn’t participate in.