Norwegian Wood – The Movie

I love atmospheric Art movies with breath taking cinematography and a complementary soundtrack. I also love Japanese movies and Norwegian Wood has all these wonderful elements.

I can’t wait for the movie based on novelist Haruki Murakami’s book Norwegian Wood. It seems they got the rights for the Beatles song to be used in the movie too. The song has a lovely haunting sitar instrumental, played by George Harrison who studied the instrument with Ravi Shankar in 1966, making him world famous. There’s a strong spiritual element when playing the sitar and the player is often lost in a trance. Ravi Shankar says it is almost like prayer.

Norwegian Wood – Beatles

I once had a girl
Or should I say, she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?

She asked my to stay and told me sit anywhere
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair

I sat on a rug, biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two, and then she said:
“It’s time for bed,”

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn’t, and crawled off to sleep in the bath

And when I awoke, I was alone
This bird has flown
So I lit a fire
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

“But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)