The novel opens not in the past, but in the middle of an ordinary journey. A 37-year-old man named Toru Watanabe is sitting aboard a plane as it descends through thick clouds toward Hamburg, Germany. The aircraft shudders and tilts, rainwater streaking the oval windows, and the cabin fills with the kind of grey, pressurized stillness that makes strangers feel very alone. Then, through the speakers overhead, an orchestra begins to play an arrangement of the Beatles song "Norwegian Wood" — gentle, unhurried, the melody drifting through the recycled air like something half-remembered from a dream.

For most passengers, it is simply background music, the kind of thing you tune out. But for Toru, it is a detonation. Something in his chest clenches. His vision blurs. He is not crying, not exactly, but his body is responding to the song before his mind has even caught up, the way a hand pulls back from a flame before the brain registers heat. He grips the armrest. He stares at the clouds outside the window. The stewardesses move through the aisle, professional and unhurried, and none of them can see that the man in his seat is quietly coming apart.

This is the hinge on which the entire novel turns — a single piece of music, a few bars of melody, and suddenly twenty years collapse. Toru is 37, but the song drags him backward to when he was 18, 19, 20 years old, living in Tokyo, navigating a world that kept asking things of him he didn't know how to give. Murakami establishes from the very first pages that this is a story being told from a great distance of time, through the medium of grief that has never fully resolved, like a wound that closes over but aches when the weather changes.