As a university student in 1968, Toru Watanabe’s life oscillates between adolescent angst about love and purpose, soothing retreats into books and cultural investigation, and nocturnal forays into the labyrinths of Tokyo’s tiny whiskey bars searching for compliant young women.

In short, Watanabe is a typical teen of the late Sixties. Except for one thing: his obsession with Naoko, once the lover of his best friend, Kitzui, and now a fragile woman whose identity is shattered under the weight of Kitzui’s suicide.

“Norwegian Wood” is Watanabe’s recollection twenty years later of that symbiotic triangle and the scars its collapse carved into him and Naoko. What keeps “Norwegian Wood” from ever bending toward maudlin – as many tales of love unrequited and hidden despair tend to do – is Watanabe’s impassionate, almost stoic observational abilities. Whether it is Naoko’s roommate at a sanitarium confessing an improper sexual interlude, or the glimpse of a cloud “clinging to the dome of heaven like a thin streak of test paint,” or the gradual acquisition of wisdom gained via costly emotional transactions, Watanabe watches, listens, experiences, and learns. As much as “Norwegian Wood” is a story of love, it is also one of maturity.

Young Watanabe comes to accept, and take solace in, the belief that “death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life.” Older Watanabe seems at peace with the repeated trauma that stained his adolescence. What doubt that persists with him is common among writers who reach for the past: “Writing from memory like this,” he says, “I often feel a pang of dread. What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?”

At one point, Naoko’s roommate, Reiko, tells Watanabe in the context of explaining why she, Naoko and Watanabe are drawn to one another, “What makes us most normal is knowing that we’re not normal.”

“Norwegian Wood” is much the same. It asks big questions about life, but it doesn’t proffer big answers. Murakami allows each of us to find our own version of normal.