Reading notes: 'Norwegian Wood'

By Haruki Murakami. This book was supposed to be good, and it is in fact good. It's both morally serious and entertaining. Notes: Once I've decided to read a book, I'm now avoiding not only spoiler-y reviews but even dust jackets and blurbs. When I go back and read them after the fact, they often seem irrelevant and/or inaccurate, and (if I can help it) I don't want them to prejudice me. In seventh grade we had a 1/3-year course on the culture of the '60s that I remember vividly and that I suspect has influenced my thinking a whole lot. (It was my first taste, against the backdrop of a very serious traditional middle school, of taking a historical-sociological view of things like "Mellow Yellow" and The Graduate.) Anyway, I had no sense of how late-'60s culture would have played out in Tokyo, and that was part of my interest in this book. Sometimes economic details are striking to later readers in ways the author probably didn't anticipate. Broke college kids, who are obviously frugal…