Blog Post 5: How Hamid and Mitchell Borrowed Relationships from Norwegian Wood

 

In Norwegian Wood, Watanabe deals with life as a nondescript college student, and his first experience of love with his childhood best-friend’s girlfriend, Naoko. Watanabe’s character is explored primarily through his interactions with 3 characters, Naoko (who he has fallen in love with), Midori (a girl he is falling in love with), and Nagasawa (his only friend). These relationships explore the difficulty of loss (Naoko), living with loss (Nagasawa), and moving on from loss (Midori), and the result is an immersive understanding of a young person’s difficulties navigating his troubled relationships. As a reader of Norwegian Wood, I was entranced by Watanabe’s issues; I am of a similar demographic and find myself dealing with issues that are less pronounced but of a similar grain. The story left me ruminating about my own experiences for days, and I am not surprised to find that other writers' intertextuality borrowed elements from Murakami’s story.

In The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Changez is a Pakistani immigrant who deals with many issues foreign to Norwegian Wood. Transnationalism, immigration, terrorist attacks, and commentary on American life are all evident in just the chapters we read for class and are all nonexistent in Norwegian Wood. However, it seems that Hamid borrows the relationship dynamic between Changez and Erica heavily from that between Naoko and Watanabe. Erica grew up with the original love of her life, Chris, who died from lung cancer before the age of 22. She is haunted by his loss and deals with mental health issues stemming from his death. Like Watanabe, Changez is the first man (and person) she opens up to about her issues, but the result of their opening up (and sex) leaves both Naoko and Erica in such an unstable mental state that they end up in mental institutions. The three-way love triangle between a dead childhood lover, a mentally unstable girl, and a compassionate and confused young man is remarkably similar. Hamid successfully brings to light many of the feelings Watanabe demonstrates in Norwegian Wood through his character, Changez. The reader of both texts feels a sense of familiarity that is hard to shake.

In Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell, Eiji Miyake is a 20-year-old bastard in search of his wealthy father, and there are many similarities between this book and Norwegian Wood that extend past the setting in Tokyo. The primary thing I noticed when reading the excerpt for class was the relationship similarities between Eiji and Damion with that of Watanabe and Nagasawa. Both Damion and Nagasawa are highly intelligent, wealthy, persuasive individuals that see the pursuit of women as a game. Inexplicably to both the reader and Eiji/Watanabe, they take a liking to them, and bring them along to bars in pursuit of women for casual sexual encounters. When at the bars, the parallels between Nagasawa/Damion’s abilities to entertain the girls, and Eiji/Watanabe’s hesitation in engaging the women, are obvious to the reader. The power dynamic between wealthy benefactor and poor tagalong are obvious, and the way Damion/Nagasawa seem to transcend human emotion except for certain triggers is eerily similar. Just like in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a reader of both texts gets a feeling of Deja Vu from reading these literary foils.

Just as Murakami intertextually propelled elements of previous works, so too it is a new generation of writers deciphering and adopting the themes and characters of Murakami for their own works.   

Andrew