Norwegian Wood 

by Haruki Murakami 

translated by Charles Flores

published by Horizons

In tandem with poet-writer Charles Flores, the publishing house Horizons has published a Maltese translation of Haruki Mukarami’s Norwegian Wood.

In a curious yet informative footnote at the end of the novel, Jay Rubin, its English translator, explains the Japanese public’s phenomenal reaction when the book first hit the bookshelves in 1987. 

“Every Japanese person seemed to have read it,” he states, adding that the author, far from being pleased, panicked at the thought of becoming an overnight superstar, and immediately self-exiled to the United States.

After four long years, Murakami was eventually persuaded to return to his homeland. However, his fiat was conditional upon the press and the media jointly promising to allow the writer the complete courtesy to live in total privacy.

Norwegian Wood ultimately belongs to the romance literary genre and recounts the growing pains of a village boy named Toru Watanabe in 1960s Tokyo. 

In the earlier chapters, Watanebe’s childhood friend Kizuki, who was highly disturbed, commits suicide. This prompts Watanebe to abandon his rural surroundings and move to Tokyo, where he gets admitted to college life. While there, he befriends his dead friend’s former girlfriend, Naoko.

Kudos must go to Flores’s mastery and use of Maltese

Sadly, this promising friendship takes a severe jolt when the emotionally troubled Naoko also starts to exhibit indicative signs of a disturbed behaviour, necessitating her being admitted to a mental hospital. How this development affects their once promising friendship, and the manner in which they choose to tackle this unhappy predicament, provides the essence which formulates the rest of the novel.

Haruki Murakami

What in my opinion makes Norwegian Wood such a fine reading experience lies in the author’s incredible power of observation.

Mukarami’s masterful depiction of the details is so realistic that, when these seep into the narration, it becomes very easy for the reader to immerse himself completely in the lives of the book’s beautifully designed characters.

Thus, the reader is almost forced to ooze sympathy for the protagonists in this heart-breaking story; and ends up feeling nostalgic for the era, even though the Maltese experience of the 1960s must be myriads of light years away from that of Tokyo’s!

Kudos here, however, must also go to Flores’s mastery and use of the Maltese language.

He has adopted a passionate approach in portraying the psyche of these troubled characters, as if he personally cares for their painful and difficult situations, while managing to pinpoint the precise phrase in the vernacular, to paint a visual image which helps such a tragic situation to become more alive.