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Giuseppe Pantano, Université de Lorraine, FranceAbstract
This contribution presents a multidisciplinary and cross-boundary analysis of the transmedial connections between Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (1987) and its homonymous Beatles classic. Grounded in intermedial analysis, it examines the articulation between lyrics and music in The Beatles’ song and explores how its verbal and musical elements resonate throughout Murakami’s novel. Norwegian Wood establishes its intermedial dialogue with The Beatles’ song from its very opening scene, in which the protagonist hears an orchestral arrangement of the piece—a narrative device that activates a process of self-exploration and inner turmoil. The Beatles’ lyrics are reflected in the dynamic, sexual, and emotional transitions experienced by Toru as he reaches adulthood, in stark contrast with his best friend Kizuki, who inexplicably committed suicide without undergoing such transformation (Cruz, 2019), unfolding a narrative of the self—a process instrumental in the construction of selfhood. Murakami’s fiction transliterates musical genres—jazz, pop-rock, classical—into prose, enacting a form of translation that, alongside linguistic mediation, renders his work globally resonant. His narrative style, described as magical realism, bridges East and West, the conscious and the unconscious (Strecher, 2002), capturing the spirit of the 1960s–70s generation while underpinning our globalised and transcultural age (Juen, 2017). Framed by the idea of everyday cosmopolitanism (Wakatsuki, 2018), this contribution guides the reader into a labyrinth of references that constitute obligatory and optional intertextualities (Fitzsimmons, 2013), explored through musical and literary modes of analysis.
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Conference: MediAsia2025Stream: Critical and Cultural Studies, Gender and Communication
This paper is part of the MediAsia2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Pantano G. (2026) From Song to Novel: Intermedial and Transmedial Analysis of Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and The Beatles ISSN: 2186-5906 – The Asian Conference on Media, Communication & Film 2025: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 15-23) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5906.2025.2
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5906.2025.2
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