Haruki Murakami is best known in this country for his distinctive and surreal novels like "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and "A Wild Sheep Chase." So it comes as no small surprise that the book that first earned him fame in his native Japan turns out to be a tender, straightforward coming of age story.

Published abroad in 1987 but only now translated and published here, "Norwegian Wood" introduces us to Toru Watanabe, a successful businessman who finds himself overwhelmed with emotion when he hears a muzak version of the Beatles classic on an airplane. As he swoons over the musical madeleine, he's transported back to his days as a university student in Tokyo in the late '60s and his anguished love for two women -- fragile, enigmatic Naoko and wealthy, elusive Midori.

Watanabe vividly recounts his conflicts and complications, including the pain of watching Naoko slip out of his grasp and into madness. Along the way, he only occasionally veers into the maudlin, preferring instead to pepper his recollections with unexpected, welcome flashes of humor. While skillfully chronicling his helpless regard for the women who change his life, he broadens the picture. Here are dead-on observations of the frivolities of youth -- the erotic escapades, the eccentric roommates, the pretentious multiple readings of "The Great Gatsby," the endless nights of drinking and flirting and playing guitar.

Watanabe's wry digressions only serve to make the impending disasters more believable -- when, until we are very old, are we more susceptible to suffering than when we are very young and very sure of ourselves? Watanabe is hip deep in tragedies -- his best friend commits suicide, Midori's father wastes away and dies -- but he boldly declares, "I've chosen to live." Like all true survivors, though, he carries his past like a scar -- it marks him, it's part of him, but it only hurts when he reopens the wound.

The awkward fumblings and lonely regrets of a romantic college student may not be unique, but Murakami has such a warm, unaffected style it's impossible not to be drawn in, and the setting -- the Far East during the Free Love era -- gives the novel an exotic shimmer. Like the song that haunts its hero, Murakami's tale is a melancholy memory of what was and what could have been, a deft combination of adult wisdom and youthful heart.

--Mary Elizabeth Williams

Lying Awake
By Mark Salzman
Knopf, 181 pages

It's rare these days to find Roman Catholic spirituality treated with the same straightforward, respectful sense of wonder as, say, Tibetan Buddhism, but "Lying Awake" does just that. The fifth novel by Mark Salzman, author of the acclaimed "Iron & Silk," this slim, spare, beautifully written book tells the story of a Carmelite nun facing an agonizing personal decision. Sister John of the Cross has a rich, mystical spiritual life that includes frequent visions and ecstasies, many of which inspire the poetry that has won her a small following and financed much-needed repairs to her tiny, cloistered order's monastery. But her visions are often preceded by blinding migraine headaches that leave her incapacitated, unable to participate fully in the rigorous life of her order. Should she follow her doctor's recommendation that she undergo surgery to treat an epileptic disorder that is causing the migraines? The surgery threatens to confirm her deepest fear: that her visions have been false -- not a sign of God's proximity but merely a symptom of illness.

With a matter-of-fact ease that doesn't exoticize Sister John's intense religiosity, Salzman conveys her thought processes: When her prioress orders to her to stop reading in her cell at night -- the others have noticed the light coming from under her door, and her wooziness during the day detracts from her presence in the community -- he writes: "Sister John's heart sank. Writing had become as important as prayer to her -- it was prayer -- but she also knew that the more perfectly a nun submitted to the will of the Superior, the more perfectly she submitted to the will of God. She directed her thoughts to her Innocent Spouse, who was executed for crimes he could not commit, and accepted her penance with a nod."

Salzman also shows the camaraderie and unexpected humor of the Los Angeles Carmelite cloister, within earshot of the freeway but worlds away, where Sister John lives a rigidly disciplined life with seven other nuns, each with a distinct personality. And he's just as good at drawing a picture of Sister John's unhappy childhood, through flashbacks to her life as Helen, an unloved girl abandoned by her mother to the care of weary, distant grandparents.

Sister John is a wonderfully appealing character, full of goodness but with real, human wounds, at times just as prone to bitterness and selfishness as anyone else. But perhaps Salzman's biggest accomplishment is in writing a novel that explores Christian faith from an almost anthropological distance but still makes palpable the emotions that draw people to religious life. "Lying Awake" makes us -- even, I'd bet, those for whom religion is a foreign country -- understand what's at stake in one woman's conflict between a mystical, transporting faith and a more prickly, mundane faith grounded in responsibility to others in the here and now.

--Maria Russo

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"