Some characters you read, others you just meet. They walk right off the page, sit down across from you, and change the way you see things. For me, that’s always been Midori Kobayashi from Norwegian Wood. She’s less a character I read about and more a memory I have, a flash of impossible green in a world I thought was only grey.

Murakami’s world, Toru’s world, is a quiet, lonely place. It’s a landscape haunted by ghosts, waterlogged with memory and the sad, sacred grief for Kizuki and Naoko. It’s all muted tones and unspoken sorrows. And then Midori happens. She doesn’t fade in; she bursts. A sunbeam through a dusty window, loud and warm and completely unapologetic.

What I love is just how fiercely, recklessly alive she is. In a story where everyone else seems to be wrestling with shadows, Midori runs out to meet the light, even when her own world is falling apart. With her father’s illness and all the messiness of her life, she doesn’t just face the darkness—she looks it dead in the eye, tells it a dark joke, and moves on.

Her voice… it was the first thing that really got me. It’s so raw, so real, so wonderfully out of place. She cuts through all the heavy silence with chatter about sex and death and desire, and you’re shocked, but you’re also so relieved. Someone is finally saying something. When she pleads with Toru, “I’m a real, live girl, with real, live blood gushing through my veins… You can’t feel anything?”—that’s her. She’s not a ghost. She’s not a memory. She’s the here and now, demanding to be felt.

While Toru is lost in the beautiful, tragic dream of his love for Naoko, Midori offers him something else entirely. Not a grand romance, but something smaller, messier, and infinitely more real. She just wants to be loved in a normal way, for someone to hold her hand when she’s scared. It’s such a simple wish, but in the context of the novel, it’s everything. She’s not asking for poetry; she’s asking for presence.

And her strength is just… captivating. She has every excuse to be broken, but she insists on finding and creating her own joy. That famous line, “I don’t want to be a ‘nice girl.’ I want to be a ‘girl,’ period,” feels like a revolution. It’s a promise that it’s okay to be flawed and complicated and to want things for yourself, to ask for them loudly.

In the end, Midori is a choice. She’s the possibility of a different path for Toru, a path that leads not back into the quiet corridors of memory, but out into the noisy, brilliant, chaotic streets of Tokyo. She’s the choice to engage with life, not just endure it.

So yeah, I love Midori. For her weird stories and her sharp wit, for her short skirts and her unwavering honesty. I love her because in a book so heavy with the weight of what’s lost, she is a loud, beautiful, and undeniable heartbeat. She’s the wild, hopeful soul of Norwegian Wood, and my world is so much richer because I got to meet her.