{"id":189,"date":"2012-01-08T14:27:51","date_gmt":"2012-01-08T22:27:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/?p=189"},"modified":"2012-01-08T14:27:51","modified_gmt":"2012-01-08T22:27:51","slug":"norwegian-wood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/archives\/189","title":{"rendered":"Norwegian Wood"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my journey to become more literate, I just finished reading my fourth book since college, Norwegian Wood<\/em><\/a>. Shamefully, this was the first Murakami novel I read. What kind of Japanese person am I? A terrible one, apparently.<\/p>\n

Having never read any of his other works, I really didn’t know what to expect. I had heard that some of his work was “postmodern” in some way, but this story didn’t seem to have much of that. It’s about a man’s memories of his college days, and his romances with two very different women. There’s quite a bit of graphic sex descriptions in this book. I loved them. I seem to get off on textual descriptions of carnal acts. Well, I’d much rather see them, of course, but the descriptions were sufficiently hot.<\/p>\n

Despite the rampant sex that made me jealous that I didn’t partake in nearly as much of it during college, the book is heartbreakingly sad. I won’t spoil anything, but the body count in this love story is surprisingly high. Perhaps that’s why there’s so much sex, as a contrast to the depressing deaths that occur throughout the book. In general, the story moves along at a good pace, and I kept wanting to know what happens to Toru, the narrator, and his evolving relationships with the women in his life. I definitely enjoyed this book, although it was very sad in some parts.<\/p>\n

One thing that I found surprising, though, was that the book was removed from a high school reading list<\/a>, not because of the explicit sex the narrator has with multiple women, but because of the one lesbian sex scene in the whole book. I find it shocking that these parents chose to focus on that one scene, but they said nothing of the male character’s liaisons with over half a dozen women. It just goes to show you, homophobia is still rampant in this country, and it’s denying high school kids the experience of reading quality literature. What a shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my journey to become more literate, I just finished reading my fourth book since college, Norwegian Wood. Shamefully, this was the first Murakami novel I read. What kind of Japanese person am I? A terrible one, apparently. Having never … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[273],"tags":[285,286],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-haruki-murakami","tag-norwegian-wood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ryotakahashi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}