Murakami off reading lists in New Jersey

Haruki Murakami's venerated novel of love and mental illness, Norwegian Wood, has been pulled off a reading list for New Jersey teenagers after a rash of complaints from parents.

The novel, which has inspired obsessive devotion from its fans in Japan and around the world since it was first published in 1987, is set in 1960s Tokyo, and tells of 19-year-old Toru Watanabe's relationships with two girls: troubled, vulnerable Naoko and impetuous Midori. The best known of Murakami's novels, it has sold more than 10m copies in Japan and 2.6m in translation.

It was put on the required summer reading list for the 15- and 16-year-old pupils entering the 10th grade at Williamstown High School in New Jersey, with Nic Sheff's memoir of addiction and recovery, Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamines, recommended for senior-year students, aged 17 to 18. After "multiple" complaints from parents to the school board, the books have now been removed from the lists.

Objections were raised in particular to a scene in Norwegian Wood that sees Naoko's confidante, Reiko, relating the time when she was seduced by a 13-year-old girl, and to a "drug-fuelled, homosexual orgy" in Tweak.

"I don't think that's relevant for any teenager," mother Robin Myers said to local paper the Gloucester County Times about Murakami's novel. "I was just kind of in shock."

Fox News interviewed Peter Sprigg of Christian organisation the Family Research Council, and author of Outrage: How Gay Activists and Liberal Judges Are Trashing Democracy to Redefine Marriage, about the controversy. "Here we see the intersection of parental values being offended, the hypersexualisation of our youth and the homosexual agenda being pushed. This just illustrates why a lot of American parents are not willing to entrust their children to the public schools any more," he said.

"To a large extent the educational community and the library community have come under the control of very radical liberal ideology with regard to sexuality, and they view anything that might remotely be called censorship as the ultimate evil. Exposing children to graphic sexual content – that is not as evil as censorship in the minds of some leftwing activists."

The removal of the books follows a decision in Virginia to pull an Arthur Conan Doyle novel from a school reading list, and to remove copies of Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five from the curriculum and library of a Missouri school. The Missouri move is being protested by a host of free speech organisations, including American PEN, the National Coalition Against Censorship and publishing, teaching and bookselling trade bodies, who have written to the school's superintendent calling on him to reverse it.

"This kind of viewpoint and content-based discrimination violates the most basic principle of the First Amendment: 'government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content'," they write. "If students were precluded from reading literature considered inappropriate because of sexual or violent content, they would be deprived of exposure to vast amounts of important material, including Shakespeare, major religious texts including the Bible, the works of Tolstoy, Flaubert, Joyce, Faulkner, DH Lawrence, Nabokov, Morrison, and countless others ... We urge you to provide students with an education that exposes them to challenging materials and diverse ideas and beliefs, that prepares them to make their own judgments,and that teaches them to respect the opinions of others. This is at the core of our system."

Chuck Earling, superintendent of Monroe Township Schools in Williamstown, told Fox News that the Williamstown High School summer reading list was drawn up by a committee of teachers, librarians and school administrators, and approved by the board of education. "They read the books. They didn't feel it was inappropriate based on the language that's used, common language used on the street," he said, adding that students watch film and television which is more graphic than the books.

"There were some words and language that seemed to be inappropriate as far as the parents and some of the kids were concerned," he said. "We were not trying to create controversy. We were just trying to get students to read."

In the future, the summer reading list will include a rating system for books, Earling said, with parents also sitting on the reading list committee. But the superintendent told the Gloucester County Times that despite the controversy over this year's selection of titles, the school will not necessarily play it safe in the future. "You want to spur interest in kids reading that fits their needs not that of people in the 1930s," he said. "Interests change."