Existential questions raised in Haruko Murakami’s novel “Norwegian wood”

The article is dedicated to the philosophical analysis of artistic features of Haruko Murakami’s novel “Norwegian Wood”. Philosophical tendencies first appeared in contemporary European literature because of several factors including the terrors of the two World Wars, and emerging of atomic bombs and their explosion in Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The main philosophical movement that appeared in the post-war period was Existentialism that challenged the theory of Essentialism invented by Greek philosophers. The founder of Existentialism is claimed to be French philosopher and writer, Jean Paul Sartre. A lot of modern writers were influenced by Existentialism, and started to imply this philosophy into their works of fiction. The aim of this article is to analyze the novel “Norwegian Wood” from the Existentialism point of view. In our research we used philosophical approach, historical-cultural, empirical and comparative methods. Also, we implied the theories established by famous thinkers and writers including, Jean Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Iris Murdoch.
Haruko Murakami (1949) is a Japanese well known writer, the author of fifteen novels, whose works became bestsellers around the world. One of his books that brought him fame was “Norwegian Wood” published in 1987. In this novel the author mostly considers the motives of death and life, and the theme of suicide taken as a priority, and the main problem raised in the novel portraying the young generation of the late XX century in Japan. We tried to investigate existential problems outlined in the novel. As the research results, we detected some existential notions like absurdity, alienation, isolation and free choice, presented by the author with the help of artistic narrating and language. Haruko Murakami in his novel “Norwegian Wood” highlights the meaningless of the life, and challenges his main characters face going through harsh free choices.
The conclusion of the research includes several findings. Firstly, the novel clearly contains some philosophical views about life and death. Murakami points out Existential problems which are the main theme in our research object. Also, the author with artistic interpretation gives a proper solution to existential crisis. In his views given in the novel, we found many similarities with European writers’ philosophically coated works.