ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Murakami’s bestselling novel Norwegian Wood. The novel is often understood as a story about a triangular relationship of the protagonist and his two girlfriends. However, I argue that the novel describes the current narrator who attempts to deal with his past failure to save his girlfriend Naoko and fails because of his lack of understanding of the power of narrative, and this affects his current relationship with the new girlfriend Midori. In this way, the novel demonstrates the power of narrative through the protagonist’s ignorance and failure.
I also draw attention to Murakami’s three-yearjourney in Europe, where he wrote Norwegian Wood and discuss how his confrontation with the cultural Other had an impact on his writing and how it appears in Norwegian Wood.
