When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

About The Author

HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949. He met his wife, Yoko, at university and they opened a jazz club in Tokyo called ‘Peter Cat’. The massive success of his novel NORWEGIAN WOOD (1987) made him a national celebrity. He fled Japan and did not return until 1995 when he came to regard the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attack as twin manifestations of a violence just beneath the surface of Japanese life.