{"product_id":"norwegian-wood","title":"Norwegian Wood","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Murakami, Haruki\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eEdition:\u003c\/b\u003e Limited ed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNumber Of Pages:\u003c\/b\u003e 600\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eRelease Date:\u003c\/b\u003e 18-05-2000\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eDetails:\u003c\/b\u003e Product Description\n\n\nWhen he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.\n\n\nAmazon Review\n\n\n\"I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me\" \"Norwegian Wood\" (Lennon\/McCartney).\nWith Norwegian Wood Murakami, best known as the author of off-kilter classics such as the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard Boiled Wonderland, finally achieved widespread acclaim in his native Japan. The novel sold upwards of 4 million copies and forced the author to retreat to Europe, fearful of the expectations accompanying his new-found cult status.\nThe novel is atypical for Murakami: seemingly autobiographical, in the tradition of many Japanese \"I\" novels, Norwegian Wood is a simple coming of age tale set, primarily, in 1969\/70, the time of Murakami's own university years. The political upheavals and student strikes of the period form the backdrop of the novel but the focus here is the young Watanabe's love affairs and the pain (and pleasure) of growing up with all its attendant losses, (self-)obsessions and crises. \nThe novel is split into two volumes and beautifully presented here in a \"gold\" box containing both the green book and the red book. Young Japanese fans became so obsessed with the work that they would dress entirely in one or other colour denoting which volume they most identified with. And the novel is hugely affecting, reading like a cross between Plath's Bell Jar and Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women, if less complex and ultimately less satisfying than Murakami's other, more allegorical, work. He captures the huge expectation of youth, and of this particular time in history, for the future and for the place of love in it. He also saturates the work with sadness, an emotion that can cripple a novel but which here underscores the poignancy of the work's rather thin subject matter. --Mark Thwaite\n\n\nReview\n\n\n\"A deeply troubling yet poetically beautiful story\" (\nMarie Claire)\n\n\nBook Description\n\n\nOne of the nine titles in the Vintage East promotion\n\n\nFrom the Inside Flap\n\n\nan Publication\n\nThis stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed\nWind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time.  It is sure to be a literary event.\n\nToru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before.  Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable.  As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.\n\nA poignant story of one college student's romantic coming-of-age,\nNorwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a youn\n\n\nAbout the Author\n\n\nHaruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949. His works include A\nWild Sheep Chase; The Elephant Vanishes; Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; Norwegian Wood; Dance Dance Dance; South of the Border, West of the Sun; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; Sputnik Sweetheart;\n Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche; after the quake and\nBirthday Stories.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eEAN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781860468001\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguages:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eItem Note:\u003c\/b\u003e The very desirable and collectable two-volume paperback boxset, opened but never read.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eItem Condition:\u003c\/b\u003e UsedLikeNew\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Pigeonhouse Books, Dublin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40296208400536,"sku":"Q1-2GHS-7TYW","price":29.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0293\/7474\/2572\/products\/71QRPTJ6H2L.gif?v=1624192995","url":"https:\/\/www.pigeonhousebooks.com\/products\/norwegian-wood","provider":"Pigeonhouse Books, Dublin","version":"1.0","type":"link"}