53 pages • 1 hour read
Haruki MurakamiA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
In this first chapter of the novel, which serves as a prologue thereto, the narrator, a 29-year-old advertising copywriter living in Tokyo, learns of the death of a woman with whom he had an affair in college. The woman was killed at age 26, hit as a pedestrian by a passing truck. The narrator learns of her death through a newspaper clipping, read out loud to him by a friend; although he can no longer remember the woman’s name, he attends her funeral and briefly acknowledges her father: “On leaving, I lowered my head in silence, and he lowered his head in return, without a word” (4).
The narrator spends the remainder of the chapter recalling what he can of the woman. She left home at 16, was an avid reader, and was sexually promiscuous; her relationship with the narrator was impersonal, casual, and drug and alcohol-fueled, in a way that the narrator describes as typical of the time: “You know, the stuff of everyday. Meanwhile, the curtain was creaking down on the shambles of the sixties” (5).
The “Wednesday afternoon picnic” of the chapter title refers to a weekly ritual that the narrator had with this woman, where they would lie down together on the campus green during sunny days.
By Haruki Murakami
1Q84
1Q84
Haruki Murakami
After Dark
After Dark
Haruki Murakami
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Haruki Murakami
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Haruki Murakami
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Haruki Murakami
Kafka on the Shore
Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
Killing Commendatore
Killing Commendatore
Haruki Murakami
Norwegian Wood
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami
South of the Border, West of the Sun
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Haruki Murakami
Sputnik Sweetheart
Sputnik Sweetheart
Haruki Murakami
The Elephant Vanishes
The Elephant Vanishes: Stories
Haruki Murakami
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami, Transl. Jay Rubin
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Haruki Murakami