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Based on the 1987 cult novel by enigmatic Japanese scribe Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood is something of a Catcher in the Rice for all harajuku hipsters and literate westerners alike. It’s the tail of the turbulent power of love and loss as seen through the eyes of Toru Watanabe, a young student in Tokyo on the verge of manhood, and falling in love with two damaged women. By far the most widely read of all of Murakami’s works, Norwegian Wood was often put among the classic list of unfilmable books, a sprawling story of the lust and sex of the swingin’ free love 60s, with stirring sequences of richly romanticised landscape, lunatic asylums, suicides and The Beatles.
To be blunt and wrap up at the beginning (well, Japan is ahead in terms of time zones, I suppose), Norwegian Wood is a solid film, but by no means a brilliant one. While most Murakami purists will bemoan the slash and burn forensics necessary to bring a 400-page narrative to an already generous 133-minute movie, certain passages and choice conversations had to be lost in the miasma of moviegoer attention spans and bladder sizes. That said, this is decidedly not a popcorn flick, instead falling victim of the archetypal foreign film stereotypes – slow, subtitled, sparsely dialogued, and reliant on sex to give it some life.
