"In Haruki Murakami’s outstanding 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood,..." — Alain de Botton

In Haruki Murakami’s outstanding 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood, we are taken through every nuance in the emotions of unrequited or doomed love. What is ignored, as it almost always is in art, is the business of sharing a life with someone who isn’t married to someone else, distant, dying or out of reach. What we have come to think of as a “love story” tends — ultimately — frequently to comprise only the obstacles that lie in the way of a love story starting. But once a relationship properly begins, the film or novel ends.