My wife gave me this book after I'd recommended Crime and Punishment on her, and reading it, I kept circling back to that comparison. Both are really about a man stuck inside a moral dilemma he can't talk his way out of — Raskolnikov with guilt, Toru with a debt he owes to people who are disappearing around him.

What pulled me in beyond that was the backdrop. Murakami writes late-1960s Japan with its weather, the dorm rooms, the record shops — that made the setting feel as present as any of the characters.

The characters themselves are the real achievement. Nothing about them feels engineered to serve the plot; each one carries a small, specific curiosity that makes you want more of them even in scenes where they're barely present. There's a recurring image of a well in the book — deep, dark, impossible to see the bottom of — that Toru keeps returning to as a stand-in for the people he loses. It's not subtle, but it's the right kind of unsubtle.

I finished it thinking less about the romance everyone talks about and more about Toru simply learning how to keep standing after the people around him didn't.

References:

Murakami, H. (2000). Norwegian wood (J. Rubin, Trans.). Vintage International. (Original work published 1987)