50 Books That Stayed With Me: 7 of 50
7 of 50
Fiction and I have an odd relationship. I don’t reach for it often, and when I do, it’s usually by accident. Maybe that means my bar is low. Or maybe it means the ones that do land, land hard. Either way, here is 7 out of 50, in a series about fifty books that stayed with me.
Haruki Murakami is… divisive. To put it mildly. His writing can feel slippery, dreamlike, sometimes frustratingly opaque. His female characters are often criticized, and not without reason. I want to acknowledge all of that upfront, because it’s important context. And yet, Norwegian Wood remains one of the most affecting, quietly devastating books I’ve ever read.
On the surface, it’s a coming of age story: Toru Watanabe, a university student in Tokyo, navigating love, grief, memory, and the strange loneliness of early adulthood. But beneath that, it’s an exploration of loss in all its forms. The kind that doesn’t explode your life so much as seep into it, quietly, relentlessly, until everything feels tinted by it.
What struck me most was how Murakami captures the ache of being young and not having the emotional language for the things happening inside you. The way friendships blur into love, how love blurs into dependency, and how some people walk into your life and quietly rearrange the furniture and you’re never quite the same after.
Some novels demand effort; others are breezy and forgettable. For me, Norwegian Wood sits in that rare, delicate middle space. It’s accessible, heartbreaking without being manipulative, and written with a tenderness that sneaks up on you.
It’s a sad book. Not melodramatic. Just sad in the way life can be. Beautifully so. Of the little fiction I’ve read, this remains one of the best.
And lines worth starring? Many. But I’ll leave you with this one:
“What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.”
Oh, also
“Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “Only arseholes do that.”