Is The Book Review Norwegian Wood Positive About The Ending?

Honestly, that ending still guts me every time I think about it. After everything Toru goes through with Naoko, Midori, and that whole long, drifting year, the final lines hit like a physical blow. He's calling Midori from a phone booth, completely lost, and the narrative just leaves him there. Is it hopeful because he's reaching out? Or is it a portrait of someone so shattered by loss they can't even locate themselves on a map? I lean toward the latter. The book spends so much time in the fog of grief, dissecting how it warps memory and connection, that a neat, happy resolution would feel dishonest. The ambiguity is the point—it’s not about closure, it’s about capturing the exact, unresolved ache of that period in his life. Some readers hate that, they want a clearer sign he’ll be okay with Midori. But for me, the sheer emotional honesty of that final, lonely scene is what makes the whole novel resonate so deeply long after you close it.

I remember finishing it and just sitting in silence for a long time. It wasn’t a feeling of satisfaction, more like I’d been shown something painfully true. So whether a review is ‘positive’ depends entirely on what the reviewer values. If they want catharsis and clear forward motion, they’ll probably pan it. If they appreciate Murakami’s ability to sit with profound melancholy without cheapening it, they’ll see the ending as its brutal, necessary heart.

Most reviews I've seen actually acknowledge the ending is a sticking point. It’s divisive, which in itself is a sign it’s doing something interesting, right? People get really heated about it. The ones that are positive tend to frame it as emotionally consistent—the entire book is a meditation on loss and memory, so an ending that offers clean happiness would betray the story’s core. They argue the uncertainty, that faint glimmer of Midori’s voice amid Toru’s disorientation, is the only kind of hope that could possibly exist in that world. The negative reviews call it frustrating, abrupt, or even nihilistic. They wanted Toru to have grown more, to have made a definitive choice. I think both sides have merit, but the positive reviews often dig deeper into the novel’s themes of isolation versus connection, suggesting the ending isn’t about an answer, but about the question itself finally being asked out loud.

It depends on the reviewer. Some find the open-ended, melancholic finish perfectly fitting for a novel so steeped in nostalgia and grief. They see it as honest, not giving a cheap happy ending to a story about profound loss. Others find it unbearably bleak or frustratingly inconclusive, wishing for more closure for Toru. I’m in the first camp. That last scene, with the telephone and the unknown landscape, captures a very specific kind of loneliness that feels truer than any forced resolution would.

I have a bit of a contrarian take here. I think a lot of the debate misses how the ending reflects the book’s title. 'Norwegian Wood' is a Beatles song about a room where a girl once lived, a memory both beautiful and sad. The novel is Toru’s 'Norwegian Wood'—his memory of that era, of Naoko, of his youth. Memories don’t have tidy endings; they just are, and they fade into your present. The ending feels like Toru stepping out of the memory-narrative and into an uncertain present, the melody of his past still playing. Reviews that get hung up on plot resolution sometimes overlook this thematic resonance. Is it a ‘positive’ ending? Not in a conventional sense. But as a structural and thematic completion of the book’s core idea, it’s kind of brilliant. It leaves you with the same haunting, bittersweet feeling as the song does, which I believe was entirely intentional.