だいぶん前の話ですが、村上春樹氏の「雑文集」拝読しました。
おもしろかったですが、「ノルウェイの木を見て森を見ず」は
ちょっと往生際悪いと思いました。
以下、Paul McCartney - Many Years from Now by Barry Miles,
pp.270-271, Vintage, 1998 (ISBN 0-7493-8658-4) からの引用です。
(ずーっと前から言っていることなんですが。)
The same black humour crept into 'Norwegian Wood',
which ends with the girl's flat being burned.
John had begun it in February 1965 while on a
skiing holiday with Cynthia and George Martin and
his wife Judy in St Moritz in Switzerland.
When he returned, Paul came over for a writing session
in John's music room in the attic at Kenwood.
This is another example of a song more or less writing
itself, beginning with a classic Beatles play on words:
'having' a girl and being 'had'.
PAUL: I came in and he had this first stanza,
which was brilliant. 'I once had a girl, or should I
say, she once had me.' That was all he had, no title,
nothing. I said, 'Oh yes, well, ha, we're there.'
And it wrote itself. Once you've got the great idea,
they do tend to write themselves, providing you know
how to write songs. So I picked it up at the second
verse, it's a story. It's him trying to pull a bird,
it was about an affair. John told Playboy that he
hadn't the faintest idea where the title came from
but I do. Peter Asher had his room done out in wood,
a lot of people were decorating their places in
wood. Norwegian wood. It was pine really, cheap
pine. But it's not as good a title, 'Cheap Pine',
baby. So it was a little parody really on those
kind of girls who when you'd go to their flat there
would be a lot of Norwegian wood. It was completely
imaginary from my point of view but in John's it
was based on an affair he had. This wasn't the
décor of someone's house, we made that up. So she
makes him sleep in the bath and then finally in the
last verse I had this idea to set the Norwegian
wood on fire as revenge, so we did it very tongue
in cheek. She led him on, then said, 'You'd better
sleep in the bath.' In our world the guy had to
have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I
lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn't the
décor of her house wonderful? But it didn't, it
meant I burned the fucking place down as an act
of revenge, and then we left it there and went
into the instrumental.
George had become very interested in Indian
music and it was his first sitar solo. It's in
waltz tempo 3/4 time, it's a quirky song, like
and Irish folk song; John liked that, we liked
that. So it ended up on the session with George's
sitar on it. It's 60-40 to John because it's John's
idea and John' tune. But I filled out lyrically and
had the idea to set the place on fire, so I take
some sort of credit. And the middle was mine,
those middle eights, John never had his middle
eights.
まず、最後の段落にあるとおり、
Norwegian WoodはJohn Lennonの曲ではなく、あくまで
Lennon/McCartneyの曲です。
（ただし曲毎の貢献度についての二人の主張はたまに
食い違います。人間ですから。）
そして上記はPaul自身による説明です。
他人がこれ以上の深読みをしてもあまり意味はないでしょう。
「ノルウェイの森」が素敵なタイトルであることに
間違いはありませんが、
じゃあ"Norwegian Wood"→「ノルウェイの森」が
誤訳でないかというと、やっぱり誤訳でしょう。
別に誤訳でいいんじゃないでしょうか。
「ノルウェイ木材の室内装飾」の歌や本には、
私はあんまり魅力を感じません。