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Review by Sue Arnold, The Guardian

‘It was this, his fifth novel, that introduced Murakami to a new, young audience and turned him from a reasonably successful novelist into an international bestseller. It's easy to see why. Nineteen year-old Toru Watanabe's complex relationship with two totally dissimilar female undergraduates will immediately appeal to readers probably in the same state of emotional turmoil themselves. Outwardly, the characters in this nostalgic, sensitive, low-key story are drop-dead cool, arguing about Euripides as they drink beer and listen to jazz. Inside, they are as lost and mixed up as Holden Caulfield. Significantly, when he is not writing his own novels, Murakami translates Salinger, Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver and his other favourite American novelists into Japanese. For me, the main attraction, apart from the honesty of the narrator, are the descriptions of late-night Tokyo bars and the wild mountain country around the Kyoto sanatorium to which one of his girlfriend’s retreats. Beatles buffs will recognise the title from a Rubber Sole number, which has the same effect on Watanabe twenty years on as madeleines did on Proust, prompting one critic to describe this as Proust-like. My only gripe is the American reader, justified, I suppose, because it's an American translation. A Japanese accent like the one in Memoirs of a Geisha would have been even worse. This is a classic example of a foreign book where a neutral English voice that doesn't interfere with the listener's personal perception of faraway places with strange-sounding names would have been the best solution.’

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Review by Rachel Redford, The Observer

Every now and then among the audio damp squibs there’s a Roman candle: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami is exactly that.

Toru Watanabe’s Proustian moment comes when he hears the Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood’. He’s taken back twenty years to his university days in late 1960s Tokyo and his complex relationships with three women: Naoko, Reiko and Midori. Naoko’s soulmate and Toru’s friend had killed himself aged seventeen, and the repercussions of his suicide ripple through all their lives.

Norwegian Wood is anchored firmly in Japan with its bullet trains, love hotels, slurpy miso soup – and its suicides – and yet each of the characters is strangely isolated and, like the world they inhabit, vibrantly real and trembling on the edge of disintegration at the same time.

The choice of narrator must have been a difficult one; a native Japanese speaker reading English would have run the risk of caricature. American John Chancer grew on me. His gentle voice harmonises with the mesmerising Proustian musings and the musical leitmotifs, while the subtle transatlantic accent highlights the immediacy of the characters and of this sharp new translation.

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