Deep Readings: Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood «

Deep Readings: Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood

July 1, 2025 Deep Readings No Comments

The Fragment

“I was thirty‑seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to Hamburg airport. Cold November rains drenched the earth and lent everything the gloomy air of a Flemish landscape. The Beatles’ song Norwegian Wood began to play.”
(Short quote due to copyright)

[Read more → widely available online excerpts and reviews]

Contextual Glimpse
Published in 1987, Norwegian Wood was the novel that brought Haruki Murakami international fame. A nostalgic tale of youth, love, loss, and memory, it is set mainly in 1960s Tokyo. The opening scene places us in 1970s Europe, where the narrator hears the Beatles’ song that gives the book its title. This triggers the cascade of memories that shape the entire novel. Murakami weaves together Western cultural references and Japanese sensibility, creating a bridge between worlds, time, and identity.

Resonance
The fragment intertwines three layers: the turbulence of the airplane, the bleak November landscape, and the sudden intimacy of a remembered song. Memory, landscape, and music merge into a single threshold moment. This is how nostalgia works: a sensory trigger opens a floodgate, pulling us out of the present and back into formative moments of love and loss. Murakami captures the fragility of time — how a single melody can undo decades, collapsing then and now.

Why this may also be about you
Each of us has songs, scents, or images that carry us instantly back into the deepest folds of memory.

Lisa’s inspired, original idea about this fragment
Perhaps the airplane itself is the perfect symbol. Suspended between sky and ground, past and future, it becomes a vessel of memory. Inside, the passengers are bound by turbulence and routine — yet a single song cracks open the walls, turning a metal cabin into a portal of the soul.

Inner Invitation
Close your eyes. Recall a song that is bound up with your own past. Let it play in your imagination. Notice what memories surface — images, feelings, faces. Don’t judge or analyze; simply let them arrive. Ask yourself: what part of me still lives in that music? Let the fragment live inside you for a while, as if the melody itself is a doorway.

Closing Note
Murakami’s opening shows us how memory can strike without warning, like turbulence in the air. A single note, and the hidden corridors of our lives swing wide open.

Keywords
memory, nostalgia, music, song, identity, love, loss, time, turbulence, landscape, Murakami, Beatles