Thoughts on the movie (Norwegian Wood) -Yelin

The first thing that struck me watching the movie adaptation of Norwegian Wood was how young the main characters looked. We previously discussed whether this story is a bildungsroman. I believe it is. But, it's also true that coming to age can refer to different things: physical signs of age (like Reiko's wrinkles, or the actors' appearances in the movie), a specific significant number that carries legal weight (18 in the USA, and 20 in Japan), or to taking on a certain new social role and responsibilities. Speaking to the main character about Kizuki, Naoko refers to a "pain" of growing up that every person has to pay in order to reach adulthood successfully. The book’s focus on this pain is what makes me believe it is a bildungsroman. However, there are interesting things in the story that I don’t know what to make of.

Reiko’s wrinkles are not as bad in the movie as you might expect. For how much they’re focused on in the book, her actress looked young and pretty. The characters in Norwegian Wood are a bit older than, for example, Holden Caulfield who was 17 in Catcher in the Rye. Toru and Naoko are college and not high school students for most of the novel (though Kizuki dies at 17).

Does the novel describe their assimilation into a specific social script? The story offers a few different scripts. Nagasawa finishes college, positions himself to get a prestigious job, and mistreats his girlfriend unapologetically. “Storm trooper” has a certain niche he likes and pursues it single mindedly, largely ignoring the social scene around him. Hitomi wants to marry a man she loves and have babies.

There’s something this plotline of maturation doesn’t account for, and it’s the connection between childhood friends that lingers and frays in adulthood. The characters move on from each other without really moving on. They move to new cities, they go years without speaking, they change jobs, and they still think about each other. It’s like they’re going through the motions of a mature adult life before it really happens. 

Yelin Yao