Hearing a Beatles song on a plane in his late thirties, Toru Watanabe is carried back to his student years in Tokyo at the end of the 1960s. His closest friend Kizuki killed himself at seventeen, and Toru later drifts into an intense, tender relationship with Kizuki's former girlfriend Naoko, who is deeply troubled by the loss.
When Naoko withdraws to a sanatorium in the mountains near Kyoto, Toru visits her there and meets her roommate Reiko, an older music teacher with her own history. Back in Tokyo he befriends Midori, an outspoken, funny classmate whose family is dealing with illness. Against a backdrop of student protests he barely engages with, Toru must decide where his loyalty and love lie.
Unlike most of Murakami's work, the book has no talking cats or parallel worlds; it is a straightforward story of grief, sexuality and growing up. Its success in Japan was enormous and turned Murakami into a celebrity. Jay Rubin's translation is the standard English version, and readers often return to it for its melancholy atmosphere.
Book details
| Author | Haruki Murakami |
|---|---|
| First published | 1987 |
| Original language | Japanese |
| Translated by | Jay Rubin |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Type | Fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 296 |
| Setting | Tokyo and a sanatorium near Kyoto, late 1960s |
Themes
- Grief
- First love
- Mental illness
- Nostalgia
- Coming of age
Who should read it
Readers who want Murakami without the surrealism, or anyone drawn to quiet novels about love and loss.