Norwegian Wood is Japan’s The Catcher in the Rye

Everyone who reads Norwegian Wood runs out to buy copies for friends and lovers… Drawing on Fitzgerald, Capote, Chandler and the Japanese tradition, his books are at once disarmingly direct and slyly, charmingly evasive. They are playful and melancholy; full of wrong turns and red herrings, corridors that lead nowhere and – above all – girls who disappear

A masterly novel. . . . Norwegian Wood bears the unmistakable marks of Murakami’s hand

This book is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it’s also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows

Catches the absorption and giddy rush of adolescent love… It is also, for all the tragic momentum and the apparently kamikaze consciousness of many of its characters, often funny and quirkily observed. Quietly compulsive and finally moving

A heart-stoppingly moving story… Murakami is, without a doubt, one of the world’s finest novelists

Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around

Norwegian Wood . . . not only points to but manifests the author’s genius

An intimate and dark story… A beautifully introspective novel that made me feel all the emotions

Murakami must already rank among the world’s greatest living novelists