"Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum--a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes and I'm watching over it for no one but myself."

I'm not the first and won't be the last to compare 'Norwegian Wood' to 'The Catcher in the Rye.' But it bears repeating because while I loathe 'The Catcher in the Rye', I really enjoyed 'Norwegian Wood'. And this despite my issues with both novels being strikingly similar.

So what's the deal?

These are both (anti) coming of age novels that revolve around relatively privileged, 'not like the other boys' protagonists who never really seem to gain any insight into themselves even as they point their little magnifying glasses at the world around them. And just as many consider liking 'The Catcher in the Rye' to be a red flag, I wouldn't be surprised if many people felt the same way about this novel. But what I think 'Norwegian Wood' has that 'The Catcher in the Rye' just missed out on is self-awareness. Unlike 'The Catcher in the Rye' which defiantly tells the reader: 'take from me what you will', we get a little bit of a nudge from Murakami in 'Norwegian Wood.'

In his fantastic review of the novel, Booktuber 'TheBookChemist' discusses how about two-thirds of the way through the story, protagonist Toru Watanabe briefly has to endure being put under the microscope himself by an unambiguously 'bad guy', and his close friend, Nagasawa.

Nagasawa is this too-clever, too-handsome, destined for success, girls falling all over themselves for a chance to bask in his presence kind of guy. He admits this openly, admits that nothing means much to him other than climbing the traditional social ladder to be able to have a comfortable, hedonistic life doing whatever he wants. He treats his girlfriend, who by all accounts is a perfectly lovely person who has never done him any wrong, incredibly badly, neglects to think of her really as a human being rather than just another box to tick ('Perfect girlfriend/wife --tick!), and is utterly unapologetic about it.

In a pivotal scene where Nagasawa invites Watanabe to join him and his girlfriend for dinner, Nagasawa casually mentions that he and Watanabe are the same kind of person. "Neither of us is interested, essentially, in anything but ourselves [...] That's why we can think about things in a way that's totally divorced from anybody else. That's what I like about him. The only difference is that he hasn't realized this about himself, and so he hesitates and feels hurt." (p.208)

All of this is spot-on and completely representative of the Watanabe we've come to know over the course of the novel. When Nagasawa says this, a sort of spell over the reader is broken. The distance Watanabe has kept us at from his own story suddenly makes sense, his dreamy, hyper-sexualized, fantastical recollections of his interactions with the three main women in his life suddenly make sense, his lack of introspection makes sense if we see Watanabe as being just like his friend.

It's not an especially subtle reveal, and it comes at kind of a strange place in the narrative, making the ninety remaining pages that come after it feel like a deflated balloon. It would have been so much stronger, thematically, to close the novel with this scene, I think, and with a little restructuring it could have found its way there. And having that scene at the end also would have been a nice bookend to middle-aged Watanabe's opening remarks about memory in chapter one, and how it's "a funny thing" (p.4) that warps and changes as we get farther away from it in time.

It would have been this nice one-two punch: not only is memory flawed, but our self-perception even as things are happening is flawed.

That, more than the manic pixie dream girls and questionably constructed sex scenes was what bugged me about 'Norwegian Wood' as a love story -- it could have been so great, all the pieces were there, but for some reason, one of them was out of order. And to be fair, despite this issue, it is a brilliant take on the traditional love story. Watanabe is not a nice guy, who thinks he's a nice guy, and gets those feelings validated often enough (at least in his own recollections) that he never realizes he was as much of a jerk as his overtly jerky friend all along.

And I think that describes a lot of guys, frankly. Or at least, a certain type of guy. And what's interesting yet problematic about this novel is that the exact Watanabe type: bookish, 'sensitive', 'hopelessly romantic', 'nice guys' would read this and get to the part where Nagasawa compares himself to Watanabe and agree with Watanabe's (incorrect) evaluation that they aren't in fact the same at all. And then go on their merry way, innocently wondering why it is that so many women think it's a red flag that they like this book.

And that's such a shame, because there's no one better to learn a lesson from this book than those exact guys, who this novel is so clearly aimed at.

But that's not really this book's fault, so I can't fault it or Murakami for simply being another in a long line of books and movies to be misunderstood by its intended audience and warped (in their ignorance) into something much uglier than it was meant to be: a validation of bad behavior.

However, outside of that, and in terms of its value as a piece of art, it's gorgeous. I came away from this completely understanding why so many people love Murakami's writing, and agreeing wholeheartedly with them.

Much like 'Catcher in the Rye' before it, this is an attempt (I think more successful) to capture the ennui of being a young adult and coming to terms with not only that impermanence, but the impermanence of the people that come into our lives, and how incredibly hard that is to reconcile, and indeed how some people don't or can't, and get stuck.

There's a lot of grief in this novel, and that grief over lost youth and the ghosts of the people of our past lingers. Murakami ties that exploration of loss to literal death quite often, but we see it in other, more subtle moments as well: a roommate that suddenly isn't there anymore, a friend you see for the last time, the high school sweetheart you ghosted after graduation. And Murakami allows us to feel the weight of those losses too.

One of the most poignant episodes involves Watanabe's roommate in the dorms, Storm Trooper, a guy who is the source of much ridicule by Watanabe himself; Watanabe openly makes fun of Storm Trooper's quirks to other students living in the dorm, and to each of the other people he meets, and is fairly cold to the guy in person as well, even though he admits that it's because of his roommate that he becomes more organized and cleanly.

In a rare moment of introspection, middle-aged Watanabe looks back on his roommate with a degree of empathy his twenty-year-old self was incapable of: "My stories of Storm Trooper made Naoko laugh [...] though I was not exactly proud of myself for using him this way. [...] Making maps was the one small dream of his one small life. Who had the right to make fun of him for that?" (p.28)

Storm Trooper shows up many times, long after his unexplained exit from the story, and Watanabe's obvious soft spot for him despite how awful he was to him, was one of the throughlines that made Watanabe feel like a real person. That type of loss: no longer having the ability to apologize for something and grant that other person and yourself closure is, unfortunately, one of the painful realizations that so often comes with maturity.

It serves as a subtle but powerful lesson to any young reader: don't take for granted that you'll always have the chance for your thoughtlessness or cruelty or neglect to be forgiven.

And in that spirit of closure, I feel that with 'Norwegian Wood' under my belt I can finally let go of how much I dislike 'The Catcher in the Rye'. Finally, I have a worthy counter-offer to anyone, but especially young men, who are still trying to figure out what it means to be good, and who feel detached and lonely in a way no other person has ever felt detached and lonely before. However, though 'Norwegian Wood' definitely has the capacity to incite that rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass, it doesn't offer an alternative road map, and I fear that if such a young man read this, saw himself in it, and was ashamed, he would be left standing on nothing.

There are arguably not enough books written for men by men that explore toxic masculinity of this type, however, such explorations on their own are not enough -- there needs to be somewhere to go from there that isn't the 'black-pilled' so-called 'manosphere' or the intellectual in-aesthetic-only wasteland of Jordan Peterson.

Popular books exploring a healthier form of masculinity like 'The Song of Achilles' are great places to start, but, and it feels a bit funny to even type it out, the world might actually need more nuanced representations of actually 'good guys' written by men, for men. Because we've gotten really good in leftist spaces at noticing and, rightly, pointing out bad behavior and toxic traits, but there's a real vacuum when it comes to producing representations of solutions, especially in literary fiction not written by and for queer BIPOC folks or white women.

So, go forth, lads: the final frontier awaits!