When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

• The Vintage edition of Norwegian Wood has sold over 365,000 copies since 2001. (Other special editions e.g. Waterstones hbk and Vintage East promo have sold a combined 23,000) - Norwegian Wood is Murakami's bestselling novel
• Norwegian Wood was adapted into a film by Tran Anh Hung, with a soundtrack by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, released in the UK in March 2011. The film tie-in edition has sold 83,000 copies (home and export) to date.
• Murakami's magnum opus, the trilogy 1Q84, was published by Harvill Secker in 2011 to rapturous reviews and his best-ever hardback sales: both volumes were Sunday Times bestsellers and combined hardback sales are nearly at 180,000 copies
• Over two million copies sold in Japan, 1 million within the first year of publication. Norwegian Wood made Murakami into a celebrity, and he fled Japan with his wife to live in the US
• Murakami's entire backlist will be rejacketed in a new iconic, witty and collectable series style to coincide with the publication of 1Q84 in Vintage