Norwegian Wood

A young man mourning the unexpected death of his best friend falls in love with the girlfriend he left behind.

Tokyo, the late 1960s.

Students around the world are uniting to overthrow the establishment and Toru Watanabe’s (Ken'ichi Matsuyama) personal life is similarly in tumult. At heart, he is deeply devoted to his first love, Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), a beautiful and introspective young woman. But their complex bond has been forged by the tragic death of their best friend years before.

Watanabe lives with the influence of death everywhere. That is, until Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), a girl who is everything that Naoko is not – outgoing, vivacious, supremely self-confident – marches into his life and Watanabe must choose between his past and his future.

Curator's Note

Norwegian Wood is a film adaptation of the melancholic novel of the same name that truly propelled writer Haruki Murakami to reluctant super-stardom which reportedly caused him to leave Japan.

Obviously at the heart of this film is Murakami's much-loved story, but ingrained throughout that is director Trần Anh Hùng's unique visual style that audiences will be most aware of through his earlier films The Scene of Green Papaya (1993), The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000) and his recently released film starring Juliette Binoche, The Taste of Things (2023).

– Reece Goodwin, Curator (Film & TV)