Quick note on literary allusions in Norwegian Wood

There are various literary allusions in this novel. Murakami makes several direct and indirect references to F. Scott Fiztgerald's The Great Gatsby. As we also went over this week, Murakami uses Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain as a meditation on winter, snow, death. In a very general way, it is a novel about the young Hans Castorp who stays in a sanitorium for 7 years while seemingly suffering from tuberculosis. There, he interacts with various patients that stand in for the philosophical cornerstones of a "diseased" modern European civilization while lusting over a French-Russian fellow patient.

In the final set of reading, you'll see that Murakami sketches springtime through a reference to Kajii Motojiro's famous short story "Under the Cherry Tree." Kajii was a writer during the early 20th century who died very young after suffering from tuberculosis. Some scholars argue that his short stories seem to be saturated in his own meditations on illness and death. I do not think this story was ever professionally translated, but I wanted to provide a link to the story at Aozora (in Japanese only):
http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000074/files/427_19793.html