The Beatles

The Beatles recur in Norwegian Wood not as a biographical subject but as a musical presence woven into the novel’s memories, intimacies, and acts of mourning. Their songs are associated with Naoko’s preferences and, later, with Reiko’s guitar during a private memorial for her. In that movement from remembered affection to a shared ritual, the music offers companionship and gentleness, but not an escape from loss.

Identity and Place in the Novel

The Beatles appear through songs rather than through the band members as active characters in the story. Their repertoire belongs to the everyday musical world shared by the novel’s characters, and it becomes especially significant when a song recalls Naoko or when Reiko plays for Watanabe. The band therefore has a recurring presence without a plot of its own: its importance lies in the relationships and occasions to which its music attaches.

That attachment brings together two different scales of meaning. The songs are specific and familiar, with titles and remembered preferences; at the same time, Reiko connects the musicians’ work to sadness and gentleness more broadly. Music does not explain grief or resolve it. It gives the characters a way to remain together while they acknowledge it.

Songs Associated with Naoko

During Naoko’s final evening with Reiko at the sanatorium, the two share supper, bathe, drink wine, and listen as Reiko plays guitar. The Beatles are part of the music Reiko plays, including “Norwegian Wood” and “Michelle,” which she identifies as Naoko’s favourites. The songs make Naoko’s tastes present in a moment that otherwise looks toward a new beginning: earlier that day, Naoko had said she was getting rid of things from the past so she could be reborn in the future.

The contrast matters. The music does not simply mark Naoko as a figure confined to the past; it is part of an evening she shares with Reiko, amid conversation and the hope that she will become healthy and happy. But the songs also acquire a retrospective weight because Reiko recounts this evening to Watanabe after Naoko’s death. What had been a shared, living occasion becomes part of the account through which the surviving characters remember her.

Reiko’s Guitar at the Memorial

Later, at the private memorial Reiko and Watanabe hold for Naoko, Reiko again turns to the Beatles. She plays “Norwegian Wood,” “Yesterday,” “Michelle,” and “Something,” then sings and plays “Here Comes the Sun” before continuing with “The Fool on the Hill.” Watanabe lays seven matches in a row as Reiko drinks wine and smokes. The counting gives the music a visible measure: the songs accumulate one by one, while the two participants share the task of marking the memorial’s progress.

Reiko remarks that the Beatles understood the sadness of life and its gentleness. Her observation makes explicit what the scene’s pairing of music and remembrance has already suggested: the songs offer neither denial nor a cure for bereavement. They are gentle company within it. Reiko then resumes playing, moving through “Penny Lane,” “Blackbird,” “Julia,” “When I'm 64,” “Nowhere Man,” “And I Love Her,” and “Hey Jude.” When Watanabe tells her the count has reached fourteen, the number records both the length of the musical sequence and the care with which the memorial is being carried out.

A Wider Repertoire and the Limits of Consolation

The Beatles form one part of a much broader evening of music. As the wine gives way to whisky, Reiko continues with bossa novas and songs associated with Rogers and Hart, Gershwin, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Carole King, The Beach Boys, and Stevie Wonder, as well as “Sukiyaki Song,” “Blue Velvet,” and “Green Fields.” She sometimes closes her eyes, nods, or hums along. The sequence shows that the memorial is not defined by a single band or a single emotion: the Beatles’ songs sit within a changing repertoire sustained by Reiko’s performance and Watanabe’s counting.

Across the novel, the music’s function also stands against Watanabe’s harder knowledge about death and grief. He has come to understand that death is part of life, but after Naoko’s death he recognizes that no truth, sincerity, strength, or kindness can cure the sorrow of losing someone loved. His memories of Naoko return with the force of a tide, and after his travels he shuts himself away in his room, still fixed on the dead rather than the living. Against that unresolved grief, the Beatles’ songs provide a shared form and a temporary human connection. Their significance is not that they heal the bereaved, but that Reiko and Watanabe can use music to remember Naoko together while grief remains.