Hello, this video is about Norwegian wood by Hurricane Merakami. This came out in 1987 in Japan and was published in English in the year 2000 and was phenomenally popular. He was already a pretty popular author in Japan at the time, but this really like put him on the international stage. And yeah, I've been seeing this around bookshops for years and I always thought like, oh, Norwegian wood, it's just some trees in a shadow and it took me until I started reading it to realize that these are feet and it's like two people facing that way and someone facing that way in the shadow. It's a very good cover. This is the story of Toru Watanabe and it takes place mostly as a kind of flashback from him when he's in his late 30s to him being 19 in the 60s. So he had a really strong childhood friend, like the only person that he ever, you know, really felt like he understood and he understood him called Kazuki who killed himself on his 17th birthday with no explanation. And this really starts when Toru is going to university in Tokyo when he's 19 and still really bearing that grief. He gets to know the girlfriend of his best friend, Nauko, who is also really struggling both of the grief and with other mental issues. And then there's another girl called Midori that he meets who's really like fun, who has her own set of issues too, but they meet at university and it's really about all of them shouldering grief, but it's kind of a love story with like a, you know, good old three way. We don't want to say three way then. What's it called? love triangle. It's a love triangle. No three ways involved. This is I think the fifth Murakami book I bred. And I've forgotten how damn pervy they are. This was so pervy that were just really long unnecessary descriptions of women's bodies through the eyes of this male protagonist and lots of unnecessary sex. And it was all just very icky. He made another friend at university called Nagasawa who was like this really popular guy. You had a really great girlfriend but just went cruising all the time. So that June, I went out with Nagasawa twice again to sleep with girls. It was easy both times. The first girl put up a terrific struggle when I tried to get her undressed into the hotel bed. But when I began reading alone because it just wasn't worth it, she came over and started nuzzling me. It's like, oh, how like icky. There's a lot of perpetuating stereotypes by just enforcing gender division in a way that I also find quite uncomfortable. This bit was a letter from Naoko to Watanabe. I probably should have been a better fairer person when it came to the way I treated you. This may not be the most normal way to look at things though. Girls my age never use the word fair. Audrey girls as young as I am are basically different to whether things are fair or not. The central question for them is not whether something is fair, but whether or not it's beautiful or we'll make them happy. Fair is a man's word finally, but I can't help feeling this is exactly the word for me right now. It's like why? Why is that why is there a man's word? Both of the female characters are mightpicsy dream girls. Madori is almost very empowered and independent, but she's also weirdly promiscuous and sex focused in a way that's quite unrealistic and everything she does and says is just to serve Watanabe. I think the main problem with this book for me besides the way gender stuff was that I didn't like Watanabe or respect him in any way. He has enough problems to engender sympathy, but not enough to be endearing and yet he doesn't have any positive qualities. He doesn't really have any qualities. He just exists. There's one really good thing about him which is he's amazing at compliments. He's really good at complimenting women, but besides that he's really mundane and just like doesn't draw me in as a character or like the central person in this part at all. The central themes of this book are grief and brokenness and whether you can when you're broken you can ever come back to that and whether that's something that you have to try to do or whether it's luck of the draw and it does all that without it ever overtly talking about grief or what it does talk about being broken quite overtly. But I found all that quite interesting thematically, but I think he kind of ends up on the side. The book is kind of saying that there are some people that are completely irredeemable and I find that a tough peltus wallow because I just disagree with that fundamentally and I just didn't buy a lot of the ways that things turned out in this. It was like quite deterministic in a way that doesn't align with my worldview. Norwegian Word is a notable out of Murakami's books for having zero elements of magical realism so it's just like a very normal straightforward book and I think those are the things that I like about Murakami. I like the way he writes but I think there's just like a lot of negatives that he has in his books and a lot of the magical realism things have the ability to be really big pluses and this just doesn't touch any of that so didn't enjoy it very much. You may so many people absolutely love this book and you're going to say like I'll see the gender thing in a historical context. No, don't want to but you know if you can maybe you'll love it as well. I thought it was quite Monday and that's where I'm going to leave it today. Let me know if you enjoyed it but don't if you disagree with my opinions they're just my opinions they're not going to change based on your opinion we just have different opinions and that's fine. I feel like that's the disdain where I have to make every single video where I am critical of things. I didn't like it. This video isn't saying that you won't like it. It's saying that I didn't like it. We'll actually end it there. Goodbye. No three ways involved. No, no three ways.