In Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami portrays love as inseparable from suffering and trauma. For Toru, closeness and intimacy always emerge through pain and loss. His relationships with Naoko and Midori reveal not only his confusion about love but also the two women served as an analogy between Japan’s cultural and traditional restraint, and Western openness, which reflected his cultural tendency and conflicts.
Toru’s love for Naoko is undeniable as he constantly thinks of her, visits her at the sanatorium, and clings to the promise of never forgetting their time together. He loves Naoko as a memory, idealizing her fragility while describing her body as “beautiful” and “flawless.” This gaze description scene in the sanatorium made me a little uncomfortable since I've always believed that his love for her is sincere and pure, until then, he was objectifying her. Toru never really empathizes with Naoko in a way that he offers a solution or tries to bring her out of misery, he was always just giving a quiet presence and listening. I believe Naoko symbolizes a Japan trapped in melancholy, purity, and silence.
Midori, on the other hand, reflects a Westernized sense of modernity and freedom. She is outspoken, sexually confident, and vibrant. Toru is always hesitant toward Midori, torn between the comfort of memory from Naoko and the vitality from Midori, which ties back to the country analogy, reminding me of his forever aspiration toward Western culture. In the ending of the story he picked Midori to be in his future, which aligns with Murakami’s own trajectory in life as he moved abroad shortly after the publication of Norwegian Wood.
For Toru, love becomes not a connection but accompany, a way to survive loneliness. In Murakami’s world, love is both a reflection of loss and a search for identity in a rapidly changing cultural landscape, reflecting on his own identity.
Sarah
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