Content Crucible

Author Haruki Murakami opens his 1987 novel Norwegian Wood from the perspective of a 37-year-old man, Toru Watanabe, arriving in Germany by plane. As he hears an orchestral cover of The Beatles song “Norwegian Wood” play over the speakers, memories of his early college years—a time rife with love and loss—overtake him. The story then delves into those years, from his best friend’s suicide to his struggles to maintain relationships, all set against the backdrop of a student protest movement at the university he attends.

Gigi Grogan, a senior student at Mandela International Magnet School who read Norwegian Wood last year for her language and literature class, says Murakami’s writing immersed her in the story. She later chose the book for discussion in one of her oral exams.

“I thought it was really well-written, and the character development throughout the book was pretty significant,” Grogan tells SFR. “I just thought the themes Murakami writes about were just so rich and important to literature.”

Mandela senior India Beals also read Norwegian Wood last year and re-read it recently for one of her assessments.

“I think it touches on a lot of important themes, especially as teenagers,” Beals says. “I mean, it’s a coming-of-age story, and so a lot of us, I feel like, could relate to some of those, and we had a lot of great discussions around it.”

Junior Lucas Robbins, Mandela’s student representative on the Santa Fe Public Schools Board of Education, says the novel was “my favorite unit this year.”

Nonetheless, several residents showed up at the Santa Fe Public Schools Board of Education April 17 meeting to object to the book’s inclusion on the school’s curriculum.

Patricia Vigil-Stockton, who lost a bid for the school board’s District 2 seat last year, kicked off the night’s complaints, and cited the February death of an eighth-grade Mandela student from suicide as a reason for her concerns.

“Maybe this book would be acceptable in a college philosophical study, but for a 16-year-old…think about it. Their minds are forming, their hormones are raging. What are we presenting to our children?” Vigil-Stockton asked the board. “I know that [the National Education Association] promotes teacher autonomy, but where is the responsibility and the accountability? Where does that lie, is it with the board? Who substantiates this kind of literature being given to our children?”

Mary Jo Gallegos, who described herself as a local Sunday school teacher, also took issue with Norwegian Wood, describing the book as “pornographic” and “putting ideas of suicide into our children’s minds.” She alleged the district’s teachers “are spending too much time trying to indoctrinate our children with critical race theory” and not enough “time teaching them to read, to write, to think critically.”

Resident Judy Ross, meanwhile, called for the school board to create a reading list for each grade level “owned by the school board,” with teacher input, and to publish it publicly so parents can “weigh in on the list and raise concerns before it shows up on their child’s required reading list.”

Despite teachers’ “best of intentions, they do not have the breadth of experience or grasp of the issues to recommend a book,” Ross told the board.

At Mandela, individual teachers don’t choose curriculum. As an International Baccalaureate school, Mandela offers an academic curriculum that includes a “prescribed reading list” of authors; required international work; and policies that acknowledge the need for approaching “sensitive and mature topics” using “an intellectually critical lens.”

Mandela Principal Randy Grillo declined to comment on the issue.

The students at Mandela who read Norwegian Wood, however, object to characterizing the book as harmful, and all five students SFR interviewed say their teacher gave content warnings for explicit scenes and did not require anyone to read them.

“Honestly, if a kid was just so uncomfortable with reading it, all the teachers here, I can guarantee you, would give you an alternate book or assignment, because there is no intention with any of the teachers to make a kid so uncomfortable,” Grogan says.

Robbins noted the IB program’s encouragement of global perspectives into the classroom, and says a Japanese author’s focus on societal struggles within Japan—such as a high suicide rate—played a major part of classroom discussion.

“Patricia [Vigil-]Stockton mentioned the suicide we had here of an eighth-grader, and that made me mad to hear because that serves as an example of why the book’s important to read,” Robbins says. “No one is reading a book and then going and committing suicide, but that is around us, and that is something we have to deal with that we’ve dealt with in this school…some of those themes are things we’ve experienced and are surrounded with. It’s not like the book was given to us with no guidance or instruction.”

Senior Lily Earnest notes the book covers difficult topics, but says she believes “they were crucial to our learning” and removing books is “a way of ignoring those issues. Literature is a way that we can confront those issues in a safe and comfortable space.”

Beals says watching the board meeting’s public forum on the topic angered her.

“I’ve known two people who have committed suicide, and I think that seeing the way suicide is dealt with in the book, it’s not in any way an encouragement of it, and especially in the way we discussed it during our class,” she says. “You could just tell that these people had never heard the context of the book or tried to understand what the book was about or why it would be included in classrooms.”

Norwegian Wood has faced censorship challenges before. In 2011, Monroe Township Schools in New Jersey pulled the book from required summer reading lists after parents complained about sexual content.

According to the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, 2023 saw 938 attempts to censor 4,240 different titles within public schools, libraries and higher education. New Mexico had the third-least number of book removal challenges: two challenges of seven different titles. During last year’s school board elections, the issue of book-banning cropped up at a public forum for District 2 candidates.

Board President Sascha Anderson says creation or oversight of curriculum is an “absolutely inappropriate role for the school board to take,” and the school board trusts subject matter experts to make those decisions.

“We are always open to parent concerns, and we always take them into account for policy making,” Anderson tells SFR. “It is far outside of the board’s purview to make curriculum decisions, and we’ve seen in many other places across the country how that has become a distraction from important issues like proficiency, social-emotional well-being and academic success.”

In response to the concerns raised at the meeting, Superintendent Hilario “Larry” Chavez—who notes they were the first complaints he’d heard about the book—says the district plans to look into its policies on instructional materials, as well as review the text of Norwegian Wood itself.

“Materials should be vetted, and there’s different levels of vetting that could be the principal, an instructional coach or district personnel,” Chavez tells SFR. “We’re going through a review of our current practices and procedures to see if that needs to be updated.”

He adds: “Just to be clear, this isn’t about banning books. This is about ensuring and vetting the material used in the classroom to verify its age and grade level, and if any material is being used as supplemental, making sure that supplemental material is meaningful and is directly related to the content or the standards being taught inside the classroom.”