Norwegian Wood (novel) - Allusions

Allusions

• One of the favorite books of Toru and his older friend Nagasawa is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But before said book became Toru's favorite, he liked John Updike's The Centaur, which he read several times.
• In his initial meetings with Naoko and Reiko at Ami, Toru is reading Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain. He is also assessing Beneath the Wheel, the second book of Hermann Hesse.

• When Toru visits Naoko at Ami, they reminisce about a time when he and his friend Kizuki took a motorcycle trip to visit her in a hospital a few years earlier. This same story is told at more length in the title story of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.