LITERATURE AND CULTURE OF ASIA: Identity in three modern Japanese novels and their films

Norwegian Wood

materials for this page in progress

Links

The wiki article on Norwegian Wood is good quality. It provides a character list and plot summary, among other things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Wood_(novel)

(I have made my own summary, see below.)

The wiki article on the Beatles' song "Norwegian Wood" has interesting comments from Beatles members about the origin of the lyrics. However, when these details were revealed is not clear to me and whether Murakami, music aficionado that he may be, knew these details or not is very speculative territory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Wood_(This_Bird_Has_Flown)

Two articles on the director Anh Hung TRAN

An extensive musing on his various films by someone I have no background on but seems fairly well informed (saw a couple of errors here and there): "Ahn Hung Tran" by Gary W. Hooze (DVDBeaver.com), no date

A better-than-usual interview published in The Guardian "Tran Anh Hung enters Norwegian Wood – and emerges to tell the tale" by Nosheen Iqbal
Thursday 3 March 2011 17.00 EST

Lyrics for The Beatles song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"

initially released in 1965 in the Rubber Soul album

I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me...
She showed me her room, isn't it good, norwegian wood?

She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere,
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn't a chair.

I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said, "It's time for bed"

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.
I told her I didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath

And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown
So I lit a fire, isn't it good, norwegian wood.

Director Tran includes a non-1960s song, why?

After Watanabe and Midori spend the long rainy afternoon in her place, where she has made lunch for him, the scene cuts to a dialogue-free, short sequence she Watanabe is in his record store and Midori is looking for records in the store. It is in the "patina" range of colors that Tran uses for his comfortable, romantic scenes. The song playing is:

She Brings the Rain

"She Brings The Rain" Can (this version can be heard on iTunes, on the "Soundtracks" albumn of Can)

Yes I care if she brings me spring
But don't care about nothing
She brings the rain
Oh yeah she brings the rain

In the dawn of the silvery day
Clouds seem to melt away
She brings the rain
Oh yeah she brings the rain

She brings the rain, it feels like spring
Magic mushrooms out of dreams
She brings the rain
Oh yeah she brings the rain

So mellow yellow grey disappears
Flying on the raven's wing
She brings the rain
Oh yeah she brings the rain

Yes I care, she brings me spring
But don't care about nothing
She brings the rain
Oh yeah she brings the rain

She brings the rain, it feels like spring
Magic mushrooms out of things
She brings the rain, it feels like spring
She brings the rain, it feels like spring
She brings the rain, it feels like spring
She brings the rain

In the dawn of the silvery day
Clouds seem to melt away
She brings the rain
Oh yeah she brings the rain
Oh yeah she brings the rain
Oh yeah she brings the rain
Oh yeah she brings the rain

Full summary of novel

I have created a detailed summary of the novel. See Norwegian Wood summary

Books

Japan Foundation, A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World. 2008.

This book translates various essays discussing how Murakami is viewed internationally. From an essay on South Korea, where Murakami enjoys enormous popularity: "As the literary critic Chang Sukjuhas remarked, Murakami's works are an icon and code of a new literature that has emerged in the advanced capitalist world of today as it hurtles away from the group to the individual, from ideology to desire, amid the demise of absolute values such as history, divinity, and iideology. Murakami's sensitivity, furthermore, is shared by today's young South Koreans. Employing universal cultural commodities, his works depict not a reality specific to Japan but the urban life of a late capitalist society. As such, the more the world grows into a late capitalist society, his novels can be expected to spread wwith increasing force as transnational cultural commodities." (71)

"Inuhiko Yomota's keyword of scentlessness—the absence of impressions of a specific country—may be insufficient in explaining the acceptance of Murakami beyond generational differences. While Murakami's works are founded on an attitude of criticism toward a consumerist culture, the criticism is exprssed not in the form of painful screams but in an ever-cool manner. Coupled with the efect of the sense of loss that imbues his works, I believe that his literature, which seeks ways to live in the capitalist society of the here and now rather than turning its back on reality, has offered a revelation to young South Koreans." (70)

Strecher, Matthew Carl. Dances With Sheep: The quest for identity in the fiction of Haruki Murakami. Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese
Studies, no. 37. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of
Michigan, 2002.