Norwegian Wood

Toru Watanabe hears a Beatles song on a plane decades later and is pulled back to his student years in late-1960s Tokyo. His best friend killed himself at seventeen, and Toru drifts toward that friend's girlfriend, Naoko, who is fragile and slowly receding from the world, while also meeting Midori, who is alive and direct and wants him here, now. The book is plainer than most Murakami, no talking cats or parallel worlds, just grief and sex and the ordinary trouble of being twenty and unsure who to choose. Read Jay Rubin's translation, the one most widely available in English. It is gentle and very sad without ever announcing it.