Isn’t it good, Norwegian Wood
I’ve finally started reading Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami’s novel. I bought a copy about five years ago, just before I crammed all my belongings into my car and drove out West. It was one of the books I left packed in a box in my dad’s shed. The box later migrated to my brother’s house, where it resides to this day, for all I know. After hearing somewhere that the protagonist spends a portion of the book reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, I decided to cash in some of my Amazon gift certificate on it. Whenever I read a mention of Magic Mountain, I get a little chill. Norwegian Wood is the second book I’ve read in past month that explicitly references it; the other was Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table.
I spent about a year reading Magic Mountain. It’s an enormous, dense tome and after nearly every page I’d find it resting on my lap as I stared out the window at the pigeons and reflect on whatever had struck me that day. The story revolves around Hans Castorp, a young man visiting his cousin at an exclusive sanatorium in the Alps for patients with tuberculosis and other lung ailments. He is soon diagnosed with suspicious-looking spots on his lungs, and his two-week visit expands to fill seven years. During his stay he dabbles in botany, painting, and charity. He falls in love with another patient, and receives a philosophical education from the discussions between Settembrini, the humanist man-of-letters who spends his time preparing his contribution to a project called The Encyclopedia of Human Suffering, and the semitic Jesuit theologan, Herr Naptha. Thomas Mann knows how to write character: all of the forty-plus patients and doctors at the Bergdorf Sanatorium are quirky yet plausible, vivid and distinct without overwhelming the story.
Towards the end of the summer, the events on Magic Mountain began to sharply mirror particular events in my own life. It was kind of freaking me out, actually. When I came down with a strep infection, then so did Hans Castorp. When I went hiking in the mountains to try and shake myself out of a lethargic, bitter funk, also then did Hans. It was spooky.
I’m glad I didn’t get around to reading Norwegian Wood before Magic Mountain, because a major portion of the former directly draws on the theme and setting of the latter. I’ve just got to the part where Toru goes to visit the girl he’s in love with, the tragic, inscrutable Naoko, at a sanatarium in the moutains near Kyoto. The parallels between the Bergdorf and the Ami Hostel are quite apparent already. It definitely adds a lot to the experience to have that frame of reference.
Now that I think about it, I’ve had really good really good luck with the books Murakami refers to; I think I picked up Stendhal’s The Red And The Black because a character in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World read it.