Norwegian Wood Initial Sketches - Penguin Books - Competition Brief

After reading Norwegian Wood and conducting further research, I began creating a set of initial sketches for the design.

Concepts:

1. To use imagery of a firefly which references a scene in the story. The firefly represents short lived life, short lived youth and the natural Japanese scenes mentioned throughout the story. I thought it could be positioned within Toru's hands (in a fluid line style), or in the centre of the page in a striking style (simple to the Animal Farm covers), or even flying away as a hand tries to reach out for it - as a metaphor for Nako.
2. Another of the stories main themes is the relationship between death and life - they are not opposites but death is a part of life. I struggled thinking about a way to visually represent this. I considered maybe a tree split in half - both alive and dead, but this still felt like opposites. Perhaps the tree could have been planted inside a dead tree, showing life being born from death. I also looked at how strands could be interwoven - conveying death and life interlocking together. I then looked at heart rate scans, seen in hospital when a patient is being monitored. I thought perhaps the waves could convey the life spans of all the deaths discussed in the story - but this felt too ambiguous, plus it could have revealed too much of the story ahead of time. Similar to this idea I thought the waves of the heart rate could be made to resemble trees - the lower waves acting as shadows.
3. My final idea was to play on the concept of Norwegian Wood being a Beatles record, which the central characters listen to consistently - sometimes on vinyl, sometimes played on guitar, throughout the story. I thought perhaps the record could be made to look like the red circle of the Japanese flag. I also thought it could be half red, half white - conveying night/day, life/death.