TRANSLATOR'S NOTE



Haruki Murakami was shocked and depressed to find his normal six-
figure readership exploding into the millions when he published
Norwegian Wood in 1987. Fame was one thing, superstardom another,
and the craziness of it sent him back to the anonymity of Europe (he
had written the book in Greece and Italy). In 1991 he moved to the
United States. Not until 1995 was he prepared to resume living in
Japan, but strictly on his own terms, without the television
appearances and professional pontificating expected of a bestselling
Japanese author.
Norwegian Wood is still the one Murakami book that "everyone" in
Japan has read, but Murakami's young audience has grown up with
him as he has begun wrestling with Japan's dark past (in The Wind-up
Bird Chronicle) and the 1995 double punch of the Kobe earthquake
and, in Underground, the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.
Accustomed to his cool, fragmented, American-flavoured narratives
on mysterious sheep and disappearing elephants, some of Murakami's
early readers were dismayed to find that Norwegian Wood seemed to
be "just" a love story - and one that bore a suspicious resemblance to
the kind of Japanese main stream autobiographical fiction that
Murakami had rejected since his exciting debut in 1979. As Murakami
himself tells it, "Many of my readers thought that Norwegian Wood
was a retreat for me, a betrayal of what my works had stood for until
then. For me personally, however, it was just the opposite: it was an
adventure, a challenge. I had never written that kind of straight, simple
story, and I wanted to test myself. I set Norwegian Wood in the late
1960s. 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. My own youth was far less dramatic, far
more boring than his. If I had simply written the literal truth of my
own life, the novel would have been no more than 15 pages long."
The author may joke away its autobiographicality, but the book feels
like an autobiography; it favours lived experience over mind games
and shots at the supernatural, and it does indeed tell us much more
straightforwardly than any of his other novels what life was like for
the young Haruki Murakami when he first came to Tokyo from Kobe.
Back then, in the years 1968-70 that occupy the bulk of the novel,
Murakami's experience centred on meeting the love of his life, his
wife, Yoko, amid the turbulence of the student movement. The author
is right, though: there is a lot of fiction here, and a lot of caricature
and humour, and a lot of symbolism that Murakami's regular readers
will recognise instantly. It is by no means "just" a love story.
Determined Murakami readers abroad may have succeeded in
obtaining copies of Alfred Birnbaum's earlier translation of
Norwegian Wood, which was produced for distribution in Japan, with
grammar notes at the back, to enable students to enjoy their favourite
author as they struggled with the mysteries of English. Although the
novel has appeared in
French, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Norwegian and Hebrew, the present
edition is the first English translation that Murakami has authorized
for publication outside Japan.

JAY RUBIN