This week: What’s a bildungsroman novel and why isn’t Norwegian Wood one? It all depends on your definition of “adult.” Then a quick request for a little conversation from y’all and the usual footnotes. Here we go.
Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel Norwegian Wood is one of those intensely moving, cathartically emotional, and mournfully haunting stories that follows you long after you close the book’s final chapters. It‘s been just about twenty years since I read it, and if the details and plot specifics have become blurry, the emotional scar tissue it left on my brain is as clearly defined as ever.
The story itself is mundane, almost pedestrian. A middle-aged man hears a Beatles song on the radio and it sends him into a reminiscence of his younger days as a university student. The events that transpired during that time, although rarely explicitly told, reveal the enormity of other people’s impacts on our psyches, especially during our formative years. It is a beautiful, sad, deeply moving novel, one that I am so glad I read and that I will never read again1.
Norwegian Wood served as something of a statement of theme for Murakami2. He had written stories and novels in the bildungsroman genre before, but after the success and impact of Norwegian Wood, it became a sort of home base to which he would return often enough that other, later novels can be viewed as a continuation of protagonist Watanabe’s journey to adulthood, even if the ostensible names have been changed3. And, in fact, Norwegian Wood is cited on Wikipedia’s list of bildungsroman novels and this…doesn’t sound quite right to me.
A bildungsroman novel is a story of a person’s formative years or their journey from the last pangs of adolescence to being a fully-formed adult. It’s similar, in its way, to the coming-of-age novel but without being exactly the same. Here’s a good definition from the staff blog on Masterclass.com4:
A coming-of-age story is a catch-all term for a novel about growing up that can fall into nearly any genre; a Bildungsroman is a specific genre of literature about the growth and education that a character undergoes from lost child to mature adult. Many novels about maturation can be considered coming-of-age stories, but not all of them can be considered a Bildungsroman.
Under this definition, Norwegian Wood, in which several of the characters, including the principal protagonist, are university students, literally in the midst of their education and the (arguably) final growth stage before adulthood, qualifies as a bildungsroman. But, under that same definition, a novel like Tom Sawyer would be more of a coming-of-age story as it tells of Tom's adventures during his childhood. But, because at the end of the novel, Tom is still a child, albeit a mature and clever one, it can't be called a bildungsroman5.
But, as I said above, I’m not sure I agree. And I’m going to insert a spoiler warning here — if you plan to read Norwegian Wood, skip this paragraph and go on to the next one. Right. So, to me, a bildungsroman is wrapped up neatly at the end. All the characters have achieved a level of emotional maturity and are able to more readily able with the next stage of their lives. Only, as the first chapter of Norwegian Wood shows, Toru has been so haunted by the events of the last chapter that he has spent the next decade and a half of his life in a state of arrested emotional development. He may physically be a mature adult at the end of the novel, but he’s not an emotionally mature adult. At least, not in my reading of it. End spoiler.
So, which definitions of maturity and adulthood are we to use? Looking at some of the other books on Wikipedia’s list, the definition of a mature adult becomes a little fuzzy around the edges. Are the women of Little Women adults by the end of the story? Is Ender from Ender’s game? How about Paul Atreides from Dune6? I’d argue that the answer to all of these is, “Yeah, kinda.” But maybe that’s the point of literary genres in the first place - to make us question the conventions found within the genre’s borders and limitations, to maybe force a conversation about a given genre and when and how it needs to change?
Conversationally Yours
So, I’m curious. As I said below, in the footnotes, I stalled on reading through Murakami’s catalog with the novel IQ84. I haven’t read any of his works newer than that one. Another example I could give would be Jonathan Lethem - I read everything from Gun, With Occasional Music to You Don’t Love Me Yet and just stopped. Or John Irving. I read everything up to The Fourth Hand and then…nothing. So, am I alone in this? Are their authors where you go through their entire catalog and then just stop one day? If so, who are they? What made you stop? Leave a comment or send me an email, I’d love to hear from you either way.
Stay curious,
J
Most of us have a list of books and movies like this, I think. I mean, it's a regular question on book and movie forums. My list has Norwegian Wood, the movie Dancer in the Dark, and a whole host of other stories. The number one and two spots, though, are reserved for Bridge to Terabithia and Where the Red Fern Grows. Nope. Never again.
I’ve read a lot of Murakami; I’ve read most of the ones available in English and a couple of the stories in the original Japanese. I find that, like a lot of authors I admire, their work falls off for me about mid-career and I end up stalling out on reading the back half of their catalog. In this case, it was 1Q84 that stalled out and I have never been quite able to figure out why. Also, for what it's worth, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an absolute masterpiece and one I would put alongside 100 Years of Solitude in a literature curriculum for their insights into how we collectively shape the world around us through our imaginations far more than through our actions.
Or, at least, that’s the thesis I’m going to write if I ever go back to school for a degree in Japanese literature. For the curious, I maintain that South of the Border, West of the Sun’s Hajime is just a slightly more grown-up version of Norwegian Wood’s Toru.
I have been seeing ads for Masterclass courses all over the place, mainly because the Algorithm knows I'm into online learning, I suppose, but this is the first time I've come across their blog. There are a lot of informative articles there. Who knew?
I mean, it can. It's just a question of how pedantic you really want to be and for this particular essay, I'm leaning all the way in.
I'll add a more recent novel to the list, one that Wikipedia's many editors may not yet be aware of. The Art of Fielding is a really good novel that manages to combine the unlikely elements of baseball, Moby Dick, and falling in love into an unlikely stew that is hard to put down. Here's an affiliate link if you're interested.