Once the great purge was complete, my fiction collection was reduced to just twenty-seven novels. Three of the twenty-seven are by Haruki Murakami. Why this disproportionate number of books by one author?* Do I just happen to be crazy about Murakami? Well, kind of, but it’s also that in the latter stages of my reading career I have become more and more focused on foreign language novels. The peoples of the world are all so different and yet all so much the same, a lesson that must be learned and relearned. It is because of this that in the final six chapters of the After the Purge project, I will be discussing only one Anglo writer–and that one a cultural outlier in his way.
So what about Haruki Murakami? The great thing that strikes me is that his work is so absorbing, so difficult to put down, and at the same time so much of it is so quotidian, so unspecial. Murakami is one of the least poetical authors I know. The events that take place in the lives of his characters and the emotions that they feel are not really narrated in the manner of most novels. Rather, they are carefully and analytically described, as if each sentence had been prepared as part of an official report. Why is this not boring? It’s true that some interesting and extraordinary events occur in Harukami’s books, including magical ones, but even these are usually described in a spare, dry style. You could easily say that much of Murakami’s writing is–to use his word–colorless. So why is it that his books so quickly and thoroughly draw us in? Well, for one thing, the writing is often really funny. But that’s only a part of it.
Let’s look first at Norwegian Wood, the novel that made Murakami famous. Before NW, Murakami had published several earlier novels and had enjoyed moderate success. His 1985 book, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, had been a magical fantasy. Appearing in 1987, Norwegian Wood was much simpler, at least superficially, with no magical elements at all. It was something of a nostalgia piece, whose main characters were all college age students back in the sixties, twenty years prior to the year the novel was published. It was partly a portrait of that era and in it Murakami critiqued both sides of the classic sixties divide, that between student revolutionaries on the one hand and amoral careerist climbers on the other. But that wasn’t all. It was really about young love, idealistic and uncompromising. And it had sex in it. There wasn’t too much of it and it was more reported than narrated, but that was surely one reason that the book sold ten million copies in Japan plus two or three million more copies world-wide. And speaking of sales, the website Ranker.com (as retrieved on 7/11/18), lists Norwegian Wood as the 76th highest selling novel of all time. (Reaching for a grain of salt here? You wonder about their methodology? Never mind.) Wikipedia reports that world-wide sales of Norwegian Wood totaled about 12.6 million. For what it’s worth, that’s at least two million more copies than The Cat in the Hat, The Joy of Sex, or A Brief History of Time; but it is also roughly thirty-five million fewer copies than such true classics as The Bridges of Madison County, Anne of Green Gables, or The Hite Report. In any case, it is, as I have confirmed on rereading, a classic and sadly beautiful story in the coming of age tradition.
Published twenty-five years after Norwegian Wood, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is another Murakami book that doesn’t depend much on magical elements. It recycles the themes of youth remembered, but it is more focused on a single mysterious event, something that the title character has never understood and which he strives to come to terms with many years later. This book is distilled Murakami: no magic, no sex, very few cultural signifiers from either the past or the present, and no final answer to the central question. It is a quest novel consisting of some not particularly dramatic events and some potentially important conversations that don’t always seem to move things along very much. But there are waves beneath the surface, events that are neither explicit nor explainable, currents powerful enough to move the reader as well. (The word that can be spoken, says the Tao, is not the true word.) Like other Murakami protagonists, Tsukuru is indeed rather colorless in some ways, but not so colorless as he thinks he is. He has the reader’s sympathy immediately and constantly; the fact that we care so much about him is mostly what keeps us turning the pages, unable to turn away. The novel’s finale is both undramatic and unforgettable.
Kafka on the Shore is also a quest novel, but this is Murakami vivid and unbound, and I have to say that it is my favorite novel of the three. It has a younger but also quite sympathetic hero. The plot is picaresque, a fundamentally magical journey to escape an Oedipal curse; it rocks, rolls and rambles. The characters range from unusual to bizarre. There are a host of political and cultural references as well as several talking cats. It also features a Mazda Miata MX-5, a car model with which this writer is quite familiar and that Murakami himself is said to have owned.
Judging from my brief forays onto the Internet, Murakami is something of a divisive figure. Earlier, I wondered why his sort of writing wasn’t boring. Apparently, for some people, it is boring, as boring as all get out. Stultifying. Some call Murakami one of the most overrated novelists ever. Oh well. Count me on the other side of that divide.**
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*I have also kept three John Hawkes novels, but as I explain in my posting on Hawkes, that’s because two of them are really skinny (easy to keep and transport) and because they all have beautiful cover art. My Murakami books, on the other hand, are all fat and their covers are so-so.
**But though I did keep three Murakami novels, you may notice that 1Q84 was not among them.