First American Publication This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally
acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over 4 million copies in Japan and is now available
to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event. Toru a quiet and
preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo is devoted to Naoko a beautiful and
introspective young woman but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best
friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he
faces there but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she
retreats further into her own world Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a
fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman. A poignant story of one college
student's romantic coming-of-age Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young
man's first hopeless and heroic love.
