or should I say, I read a book called Norwegian Wood. Extremely erotic and more than a little brilliant, Norwegian Wood is the tale of a man looking back at his college years in the late Sixties (thus the Beatles song title). And while the subject matter sounds rather ordinary the story is anything but. I picked up this book after being impressed by several of the author, Haruki Murakami’s short stories (the compilation is titled The Elephant Vanishes, good stuff, although I haven’t read all of the stories yet.) Norwegian Wood contains very little of the bizarre, almost Kafka-like twists and turns in Murakami’s short stories so if you were assigned The Elephant Vanishes as I was and didn’t care for the strange absurdities therein, I still think you should give Norwegian Wood a shot so long as your sensibilities wouldn’t be offended by a large bit of graphic sex that never seems gratuitous.