The City? Walls???

I eagerly look forward to each new Haruki Murakami book, but in the last few years they've ceased to be day-one events for me. I have really fond memories of midnight release parties at Green Apple Books, mingling with other literature fans as we nibbled on Japanese sweets and played trivia games while waiting for the latest novel to officially go on sale. Part of that was disrupted by the pandemic, and I've also felt a bit underwhelmed by the last couple of books from him. I still like them, but it's hard to keep that magic going after so many years.

 

That said, "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" is my favorite Murakami book in a while, probably since 1Q84.

MINI SPOILERS

Which is kind of interesting. A recent gripe I had with "Men Without Women" was that after reading Murakami for long enough, the tropes get to be a bit too noticeable. Passive male protagonist: check. Missing persons and/or things: check. Cooking spaghetti: check. Earlobes: check. Wells: check. Moons: check. Inscrutable women: check. And so on. Things that seem especially magical and otherworldly the first time you read them start to feel cliche after a while.

The writing in TCaIUW felt especially engaging and compelling. Which is especially funny after my complaints about repeating tropes, since by the second chapter or so I was going "Wait a minute... haven't I read this book before?!" It was super-duper-familiar, and not just in a deja vu sort of way, but I was positive I'd read it before. The protagonist was in a town filled with unicorns, worked in a library reading dreams, there was a high wall around the town, he'd been separated from his shadow... I knew that I'd read all this before. It didn't take too long to click into place: this was one of the two alternating stories of "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World", one of my favorite novels.

In Hard-Boiled, the novel alternated between two seemingly unconnected stories. The "noir" story had a great detective character, very sardonic and brash, whose investigations lead him literally underground, where he encounters the INKlings (Intra-Nocturnal Kappa). The "fantasy" story was the one I was reading now, with the town with the unicorns and a high wall and a shadow and stuff. It was very unclear how, or even if, the stories tied together: was the detective the man's shadow? Were the INKlings connected to the unicorns?

TCaIUW starts off with a similarly alternating structure, but this time, the linkage is very clear. The first story - let's call it the "real world" - is narrated from the first person to the second person. The narrator/protagonist is a nameless boy, 16 years old at the start, who has fallen in love with a 15 year old girl. We learn that these two teenagers, in their romantic but chaste relationship, came up with the city together: based on dreams from the girl and conversations between the two of them, they invent the many details of this otherworldly city. Much later, the girl gives a confession: the "real" her actually lives in that imaginary city, and the version of her on Earth is just her shadow. In this novel, the "fantasy" part occurs when the boy, now grown up, somehow manages to cross over into that city, seeking the great love of his life.

There's a lot of great fracturing over the course of the story. The division between the man and his shadow is really poignant. He is sort of able to reconnect with the girl from his youth, but this version of her has no memory of anything outside of the town, and definitely no feelings towards him. Near the end of the "fantasy" portion the main rejoins his shadow and they prepare to escape, but at the last moment the man decides to stay behind in the town while his shadow leaves. And yet, despite choosing to stay, he wakes up again back in the real world, reunited with his (now mute) shadow.

This leads into a really nice passage where the man quits his job working for a publishing company and moves to a small rural town to be a librarian. There are more odd characters here and mysteries that are gradually revealed, bringing more of a supernatural element into the real world. Some of the most startling moments in the book occur when something from the fantasy/dream world appears in the real world, like seeing that the old head librarian casts no shadow, and wears a watch without any hands, and receiving a highly detailed map of the walled city from an autistic boy.

MEGA SPOILERS

The fracturing continues. The boy M** disappears, crossing over into the fantasy world. The man is bitten in his ear during a dream, and subsequently the narrative shifts back into the fantasy world, where the man is once again, but without any memory of his time back on earth. He sees the same autistic boy, but does not recognize him at all. This leads me to wonder: maybe the man didn't return to Earth after all. Maybe it was only his shadow that did. But his shadow thought he was the real man.

This is a vaguely disquieting thought, which is why I particularly appreciated that Murakami addressed it. In one earlier conversation with Mr. Koyasu:

"Sometimes I just don't understand myself," I admitted honestly. "Maybe I've lost sight of me. I don't have a sense that I'm living this life as myself, as the real me. Sometimes I think I'm merely a shadow. When I feel that way, I get this restless feeling, like I'm simply tracing an outline of myself, cleverly pretending to be me."

"The real self and his shadow are essentially two sides of the same coin," Mr. Koyasu said in a quiet voice. "Depending on the circumstances, they can change roles. That's how people can overcome troubles and survive. And tracing something and pretending to be something are very important sometimes. It's nothing to be concerned about. Because the person here right now is indeed you."

There's so much to unpack here! I don't think Murakami really goes in for allegory, but my mind immediately goes towards trauma in the second paragraph here. When someone goes through a traumatic experience, they often need to dissociate, locking away their "real self" and inhabiting the body of a "shadow self" to survive a terrible experience. If the trauma is long-lasting, they may continue acting as the "shadow" for a long long time, to the point where it becomes unclear where the trauma self starts and the real self ends.

But the second half of that paragraph is really powerful as well. You are you: the things you are experiencing moment to moment, the decisions you make, those are your reality and all you need to focus on. It's easy to get lost in a dizzying haze of what-ifs and second-guesses, and we should instead focus on the present moment. We are who we are.

And, of course, that leads me to remembering Kurt Vonnegut's epigraph in Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Our shadow may not seem real, but actions we take as the shadow are our real actions: we can't hide behind the shadow as an excuse.

END SPOILERS

There's a lot more I'd like to write about but don't have much to say: some really great female characters in the second half of the book (an increasing strength of Murakami's over the years), terrific dreams, subdued humor.

I was surprised to have the novel end with an Afterword; as Murakami writes, he has never included an afterword before, but felt that this book deserved one. He lays out the timeline: he originally wrote "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" way back in 1980 as a novella, back when he was running a jazz bar in Tokyo and experimenting as a writer. It was really meaningful to him, but he felt there was something more to do with it. After the initial success of his first two books, he pulled out TCaIUW and built on it, with the idea of a "double feature" that plays two stories off each other before eventually merging, which eventually became Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Then, forty years later, he like most other people was quarantined at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. He had long wanted to revisit TCaIUW, and now as a mature author in his 70s he felt he could do it a justice that he couldn't in his 30s. So he went back to that story, crafting it again. He thought he was done after Part 1 but sat on it for a while, and realized that the story continued into Parts 2 and 3.

Knowing all that makes it even lovelier. I think of a jazz artist riffing on a familiar tune, of a classical composer varying a theme, of a master artist making the superior version of a painting. I want to re-read Hard-Boiled again and see just how similar they are - the main specific thing jumping out at me is that, at least in my memory, in the older book the dreams are contained in unicorn skulls, while in the newer book they are contained in eggs. I love the idea of the walled town as a sort of crossroads between multiple stories - it probably isn't that, but I like that idea! In any case, this has been a deeply satisfying book from one of the great masters.

Commendable

I enjoy reading, but there is a very short list of authors whose books I will buy immediately on release and drop everything to read. Haruki Murakami is one of those few. The last few novel unveilings have taken on a somewhat ritualistic form. I scrupulously avoid all information at all about the book (one reason I use the Mini Spoilers nomenclature on this blog is to honor folks like me who would prefer to know absolutely nothing about a work prior to starting). Green Apple Books in San Francisco hosts midnight release parties for the new books. The previous events for 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki featured a limited number of autographed books and attracted hundreds of readers. This year there weren't any signed copies of Killing Commendatore, just some limited-edition swag, and only a few dozen showed up. It was still a fun and well-run event, though, with a Murakami-inspired playlist, free Sapporo, Japanese snacks, and a fun scavenger hunt through the rambling bookstore. I started reading the novel on the BART ride home, and just finished it.

I often cite Kafka on the Shore as my favorite Murakami novel. It was also the first novel of his that I read. I suspect that this is a pattern: people who first read Wind-Up Bird generally prefer that, people who first read 1Q84 prefer that, and so on. That isn't a coincidence. Our first exposure to his dreamy, calm, detailed, otherworldly prose has a big impact. Murakami is well-known (and often liked) for his adherence to repeating tropes and touchstones: cats, wells, moons, vanishing people and animals, passive male protagonists, classical music, jazz records, small humanoids, ears, weird sexual encounters. These motifs can build resonance across multiple unconnected novels; unlike David Mitchell, there are never any overt links between his books (except, I suppose, for the Trilogy of the Rat), but the interior of most of his novels have to do with the unexplained correspondence between seemingly disparate objects and events, and that sense of quantum entanglement may be amplified across multiple novels. For better and worse, though, the later novels you read will grow less surprising. You're expecting something odd and unexplained to occur, so it's no longer a shock when it does.

MINI SPOILERS

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed Killing Commendatore more if it was the first Murakami novel I'd read and not the twelfth. The start was especially slow and unengaging. I was reminded of a meme making the rounds on Twitter recently that took the format "We forced a bot to [read/watch] over 1000 [pages/hours] of [White House press briefings / Friends episodes / TED talks / etc.] and made it write its own. Here's what it came up with." The first 40 pages or so of this novel feel a bit like a Mad Libs parody of a Murakami book. Aimless male protagonist? Check. Woman leaving? Check. Attractive woman initiating sex for seemingly no reason? Check.

The book starts hitting its stride when the actual Killing Commendatore appears: there's finally some mystery and purpose to the story. It still feels very drawn-out: the writing is quite good, and it's interesting to learn more about (but never fully understand) Menshiki. The book gets really good at about 500 pages in, but that just leaves around 100 pages to explore this heightened, fascinating world before ending. The length itself isn't a problem - I was completely gripped by 1Q84 from start to finish - but if I hadn't already been determined to finish this book I might not have stuck around until it started getting good.

One aspect that struck me almost immediately was the protagonist's profession as a painter. I found myself thinking of Bluebeard, a Vonnegut novel that also featured a painter and is also one of my less-favorite books from a novelist I generally adore. Murakami writes a lot about painting: technique, motivation, impact, the creative process. I'm fairly certain that this is all a metaphor for writing. Painters and writers seem to follow fairly similar creative processes: it's an activity a person does by themself, in a solitary setting, putting in a great deal of work over a long period of time, before sharing the finished project with the world. The creator must balance their commercial and artistic needs. The artist/writer develops a distinctive style over time, and can evolve that style or mindlessly replicate it or rebel against it. The artist/writer tries to reveal something in their work, and in the process may find something new about it.

Color is a big element of painting, and the protagonist spends some time mixing his paints to get things right. I was struck by how, late in the novel, he repeatedly refers to Menshiki as "Colorless", which, of course, is also how Tsukuru Tazaki was called in his previous novel. I don't remember characters in earlier Murakami novels being called "colorless," and I'm curious if this is a newly-emerging Murakami trope. Menshiki remains an enigma throughout the novel, even though he probably speaks more than any other character. Why, exactly, is he colorless? He does seem to have some passion, or at least motivation: he harbors some feelings for his old girlfriend, and has some sentimental and/or emotional connection to Mariye. He seems to be carefully-controlled and deliberate, a man of habits and purpose. There's an intriguing comment by the Commendatore late in the book which suggests that Menshiki is missing something. There's a kind of absence inside of him, and that absence creates a danger, something malign that may threaten Mariye. Is that absence the loss of her mother? I don't think so; I don't get the impression that his life significantly changed after they broke up. It seems more like that absence is an inherent quality of Menshiki himself, something he has always lacked.

Menshiki and the protagonist have a lot of (fairly oblique) conversations about things being "natural". This seems to be especially important to the protagonist; it feels like it takes Menshiki a little while to grok what he means, then afterwards he also often references natural-ness. I'm not totally sure if this is something Menshiki truly believes, or if it's his method to endear himself to the protagonist. In some ways, the "natural"-ness seems to be the polar opposite of Menshiki. As far as I can tell, to be "natural" an event must be unplanned, unforced. It can flow from circumstance or emotion, but not from logic, and it must have no exterior motivation. The irony is that the protagonist wants events to seem natural even though they very much are not. He's constantly pulled into lies of omission and commission, creating an environment that will strike others as natural even though they're highly staged. But this seems to only mildly bother him. I guess that, as long as the space he's created feels natural and people can act "naturally" within it, it's fine if the actions outside of that space, that created that space in the first place, are "unnatural".

Seen from this perspective, Murakami probably thinks that the slow and ambling pace of the book is a feature and not a bug. The protagonist's life definitely feels natural: he brews coffee, cooks delicious lunches, listens to insects, goes for strolls, praises his students. And takes naps - so many naps! I'm pretty sure there are more naps in Killing Commendatore than in any other book I've read, I'm very jealous.

MEGA SPOILERS

By contrast, my favorite part of the book is the least "natural": Mariye's disappearance, the meeting with the senile and dying Tomohiko Amada, and especially descending through Long Face's trapdoor into the underworld. This segment reminded me a bit of Hard-Boiled Wonderland (the other contender for my favorite Murakami novel): the dark, claustrophobic underground caverns with ill-defined malevolent forces lurking at the periphery of perception is an incredible atmosphere. This all helped the novel end on a very high note for me, like a rousing political speech that leaves you wanting more.

While the overall shape of the novel was sometimes frustrating, the nuts-and-bolts writing was as excellent as always. Here are a few segments that particularly stuck out to me:

"It's like an earthquake deep under the sea. In an unseen world, a place where light doesn't reach, in the realm of the unconscious. In other words, a major transformation is taking place. It reaches the surface, where it sets off a series of reactions and eventually takes form where we can see it with our own eyes. I'm no artist, but I can grasp the basic idea behind that process. Outstanding ideas in the business world, too, emerge through a similar series of stages. The best ideas are thoughts that appear, unbidden, from out of the dark."
p. 203 

I really like the writing here, as well as the underlying idea. That's a cool left-field turn in the penultimate sentence: how did we get from art to business so quickly? This kind of reminds me of when I try to describe the sensation of programming to non-programmers. From the outside programming or business may seem like very dry, analytical, rote activities. But people who are immersed in them see that they're just as creative and passionate as any artistic endeavor.

"The Commendatore is not trademarked. If I had appeared as Mickey Mouse or Pocahontas, the Walt Disney Company would be only too happy to slap me with a huge lawsuit, but if I am the Commendatore, I think we are safe, my friends."
p. 235 

This just makes me laugh. Although his personality is very different, the Commodotore reminded me of Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker from Kafka on the Shore, and I'm curious if any threats or fears of litigation from that work informed this presentation here. Also, I'm not sure if it's intentional, but it's intriguing that Pocahontas is treated as a copyrighted character here, when she was of course a real historical person. Murakami hasn't engaged as explicitly with popular culture in his recent novels, and it's interesting to think of the nexus between history, culture, creativity, and commerce. Walt Disney is free to appropriate native peoples' culture in its movies, but attempts to reinterpret those same characters may run up against an army of lawyers.

Truthfully the physical pleasure she provided me left nothing to be desired. Up till then I'd had sexual relationships with a number of women - not so many I could brag about it - but her vagina was more exquisite, more wondrously varied, than any other I'd ever known. And it was a deplorable thing that it had lain there, unused, for so many years.
p. 292

Even when he's writing about fairly conventional sex, Murakami always sounds so weird. But I'll take a dozen pages of this oddly affected prose over one more description of a thirteen-year-old girl's developing breasts.

He said, "There is very little I can explain to my friends about Tomohiko Amada's Killing Commendatore. That is because it is, in essence, allegory and metaphor. Allegories and metaphors are not something you should explain in words. You just grasp them and accept them."
p. 302

I feel like this one paragraph is the best explanation I've read yet of Murakami's writing.

All of us are, without exception, born to die, and now he was face-to-face with that final stage.
p. 524

Brutal and honest and powerful. I am curious if Murakami is feeling his own mortality more now as a nearly 70-year-old man.

"Goodness, no! I am a Metaphor, nothing more."
"A Metaphor?"
"Yes. A meager Metaphor. Used to link two things together. So please, untie my bonds, I beseech you."
I was getting confused. "If you are as you say, then give me a metaphor now, off the top of your head."
"I am the most humble and lowly form of Metaphor, sir. I cannot devise anything of quality."
"A metaphor of any kind is all right - it doesn't have to be brilliant."
"He was someone who stood out," he said after a moment's pause, "like a man wearing an orange cone hat in a packed commuter train."
Not an impressive metaphor, to be sure. In fact, not really a metaphor at all.
"That's a simile, not a metaphor," I pointed out.
"A million pardons," he said, swear pouring from his forehead. "Let me try again. `He lived as though he were wearing an orange cone hat in a crowded train.'"
"That makes no sense. It's still not a true metaphor. Your story doesn't hold. I'll just have to kill you."
p. 550

I laughed out loud at this. This novel is finally getting good! And it only took 550 pages! 

"To tell the truth," she said, "I'm pregnant. I'm happy to see you, but don't be shocked to see how big my belly's grown."
"I know. Masahiko told me. He said you asked him to."
"That I did," she said.
"I don't know how big you've gotten, but I'd like to see you in any case. If it's not too much of an imposition."
"Can you wait a moment?" she asked.
I waited. She appeared to be leafing through her appointment book. Meanwhile, I tried hard to remember what kind of songs the Go-Go's sang. I doubted they were as good as Masahiko had claimed, but then maybe he was right, and my view was perverse.
"Next Monday evening is good for me," Yuzu said.
p. 608

I included a bit more context here just to hopefully help capture how completely random it is for the protagonist to start thinking about the Go-Go's music. Another laugh-out-loud moment for me, sandwiched inside a really moving and emotional scene.

"Menshiki himself is not an evil man. He is a decent sort, one could say, with abilities that exceed those of most people. There is even a hint of nobility in him, if one looks hard enough. Yet there is a gap in his heart, an empty space that attracts the abnormal and the dangerous. It is there that the problem lies."
p. 646

I talked about this a little up above. It's an interesting concept, that there isn't an evil presence inside a person so much as a space that allows entry to an alien danger. Unlike David Mitchell, Murakami very rarely depicts straight-up evil; the sense you get more often is of something harmful and mysterious. 

"I think it's cool," Mariye said. "It's a work in progress, and I'm a work in progress too, now and forever."
p. 664

This is really sweet. I love this metaphor.

"Perhaps nothing can be certain in this world," I said. "But at least we can believe in something."
p. 673

Man, I love this. It sums up my personal attitude towards religion and politics and all sorts of important, controversial domains. We can't know the truth, and it's important to remember that fact and remain humble. But we can decide to believe something, and then pursue that belief with our full hearts.

END SPOILERS

I liked Killing Commendatore a lot. Particularly after the mild disappointment of Men Without Women, it was encouraging to read something so engaging. It's one of my least favorite Murakami novels, but that says much more about me and about the strength of his other books than it does about this entry. There are still elements that I'll be mentally chewing over for a while, and it's that lingering sense of intrigue and unexplained phenomena that I most treasure about this author.

Solitary

I enjoy writing up these reviews, or posts, or whatever I should call it when I write some stream-of-consciousness text about a book I just finished. I have a hard time with short stories, though. I enjoy reading these collections, but generally walk away just thinking "Those were good!" and/or "Each story was different from the other!", without much else to say that would motivate me to write something up. That's kind of how I feel about Men Without Women, the most recent tome from Haruki Murakami that I've read. But since I frequently claim him as one of my favorite authors, I feel like I should put something up here for completeness sake.

MINI SPOILERS

This is definitely one of the more accurate titles I've seen to a short story collection. The final story is called "Men Without Women," but every single story in here features a male protagonist who is losing, has lost, and/or is mourning a particular woman. As is so common in Murakami, the men are almost always passive, and it is the woman who initiates the act of loss, generally by dying or sleeping with another man. Apart from that, they're fairly varied. Some are more reflective, others more focused; some are narrated directly, others by distant characters recounting their own stories.

Reading them all back to back like this does make it kind of hard to ignore some of Murakami's ticks. A lot of those are pleasant eccentricities that I've come to love: his fondness for cats, for disappearances, for moons, for ears. But it also emphasizes his history of presenting women as inhuman characters. They're not bad: he loves and admires women, granting them talents and powers beyond the reach of his apathetic male heroes. But he introduces them and treats them like creatures, strange animals or divine messengers, who may understand the souls of mankind but are unknowable in return. There's an odd and, frankly, unsettling way his male characters think about women, more as a scientific problem to be solved or a source of inspiration than as another soul, a sentient human with whom to commune.

What's especially odd about this is that I feel like Murakami has gotten a lot better on this front lately. In particular, Aomame from 1Q84 is one of my all-time favorite Murakami characters and seemed to completely break the mold from his earlier work, as an awesome point-of-view character with a rich interior life, her own ambitions and shortcomings. The women here feel like a massive step back, to the point where I wondered if this was a belated release of earlier work of his. Judging from the copyright page, it isn't, and all these stories came out in the last several years.

So, anyways. That kind of kept me from being able to fully enjoy most of these stories, which probably says more about me than about the book; I doubt it would have bothered me much when I first started getting into Murakami over a decade ago. There is one story here that I absolutely loved, called Kino. It really does seem like a greatest hits of Murakami-isms, down to the jazz records and unexplained snakes and relentless door-knocking (which simultaneously evokes and inverts a similar scene in 1Q84). It has the same, uh, (frantically tries to think of a synonym for "regressive") simplistic relational perspective that bugged me in the other stories, but in general it is so good and pushes so many of my buttons that I can embrace it.

Conceptually, Samsa In Love is especially fun, thanks to its delicious conceit: a cockroach wakes from troubled dreams to discover that it has been transformed into Gregor Samsa. I quite enjoyed this one, which is tarnished slightly by, you guessed it, treating its lone female character as just a foil for its hapless male protagonist, but the concept is strong enough to keep it worthwhile for me.

END SPOILERS

I guess that reading this has reminded me of something that I knew before: Murakami's short stories are probably my least favorite forms of his writing. They can still be really good, but, with a few memorable exceptions like The Little Green Monster, Super-Frog Saves Tokyo and The Rise And Fall Of Sharpie Cakes, they don't strike me nearly as strongly as his novels and longer-form nonfiction. Even by those standards, Men Without Women is probably towards the bottom of the list for me. Worth reading, but probably more for completionists than for curious newcomers.

Absolutely

Another book that I really enjoyed but don’t have a WHOLE lot to say about: Absolutely on Music. This is the latest book from Haruki Murakami, but is very different, not just from his novels but from his other non-fiction. Unlike his pseudo-memoir on running and his reportage on the Tokyo subway sarin gas attacks, this is pure dialogue, a transcription of a series of conversations between Murakami and Seiji Ozawa, a celebrated director who conducted the Boston Symphony and many other world-class orchestras.

I’m not a music expert. I grew up in a very musical family, I was exposed to a great deal of music (including classical), and all of my family members play musical instruments, but I was never good at playing and quickly abandoned that pursuit. I do really enjoy listening to music, though. In recent years that’s been much more directed towards modern electronic music, but that early grounding in orchestral and choral performances helped give me a lot more context for the topics Haruki and Seiji discuss.

That said, I’m pretty sure the book doesn’t require any particular background to enjoy. They talk about music, but in a very accessible way: Haruki presents himself as a musical amateur (although Seiji’s afterward seems to strongly admire his breadth of knowledge), and he often has Seiji work through concepts in simple form, drawing analogies and adding color to the items they’re discussing. I really love the tone of their conversations: Murakami will posit a theory or observation, Ozawa will sometimes say “I’ve never thought about it that way before, but you are correct”, and other times say “No, I don’t think of it that way”.

Like all great conversations, this one is rooted in something concrete, but uses that as a launching pad for a variety of other topics. One particular idea that Haruki keeps coming back to is an East/West division: the challenges and opportunities of a Japanese man conducting American and European orchestras, performing European symphonies. He seems much more devoted to this idea than Seiji, who seems interested in it but not particularly reflective. But both of them do note how older Eastern concepts seem to be arising in Western performances, particularly the concept of “Ma”, a sort of deliberate silence with a long tradition in Japan.

The promotional copy for this book plays up the idea of Murakami tying together the act of composing with the act of writing, and making observations on his experience as an author. Frankly, there’s very little of that in the text. Every once in a while he will bring up something from his writing experience, but almost always as an item to contrast the conducting experience, which he seems far more interested in exploring; for his part, Ozawa is the interview subject and not the interview, and doesn’t really press Murakami with many questions of his own. They do find some common ground in their schedules - both rise early and do much of their work early in the day - but Murakami seems much more aware of their contrasts. When he writes, he leads a monk-like existence, isolating himself and working alone in pursuit of his work. In contrast, Ozawa’s profession is inherently collaborative: the whole point of a conductor is working with other people to create something together. It’s a far more social existence.

That said, the last section of the book does get at some more generalizable principals that more clearly transcend the topic of music. As Haruki observes a group of young musicians come together to rehearse and perform a series of string quartets, he makes some very poignant and insightful observations on craftsmanship, talent, ambition, humility, collaboration, and pride that seem like they would be applicable to any other artistic endeavor, or, really, any act of creation.

So, uh, yeah! This is a really enjoyable book… not especially Murakami-esque, but a great example of his personal voice, and a really fun and engaging read on its own terms. Worth picking up, even if you’re not particularly interested in classical music or Murakami.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Short write-up of a micro-read: I plowed through the entirety of The Strange Library while stuck on a Caltrain waiting for a crushed car to be cleared from the tracks in Burlingame. To be clear, this wasn't a long wait, and it's far from the only thing I did on the train. What I'm trying to say is that it's a short book.

I am a little curious why it was published as a stand-alone story instead of in one of Murakami's periodic (and excellent) short-story collections. It might be as simple as the fact that he's an extremely popular author and people will happily buy anything from him. Being published as a short story (I don't think you can even call it a "novella") does allow more creativity in the book's physical design than we would typically see. Chip Kidd, who has designed the various fantastic covers for Murakami's Knopf books in America, got to stretch himself even more this time, inserting some really striking and evocative imagery that helps guide the tone of the book (and, incidentally, pad out its length).

On the whole, I thought it was a terrific book. Dark! Very dark. I feel like Murakami has done more disturbing stuff before, but a higher proportion of this book occupies that dark space than any novel of his I can think of.

MEGA SPOILERS

I enjoyed the very Murakami-ish explanation of what's going on with the boy, the girl, and the sheep man. After puzzling things through, the boy comes to what seems like a logical conclusion, which goes something like: "We're all in slightly different universes, and overlapping partially, but the two of you do not overlap." That statement makes perfect syntactic sense, and sounds like an explanation, while not actually explaining anything. Anyways, it's very much in line with his general style, giving the impression of a fully-realized alternate reality while leaving its details completely opaque.

I'm not sure if we can actually work out precisely what's happening with these three, or even the story as a whole. One pretty compelling possibility is that it's all a hallucination. There's a brief statement the boy makes fairly early on, along the lines of "I'm not dumb, but I was bitten once by a big black dog, and my head hasn't been right since." Something about his trip to the library might have frightened him, triggering a waking nightmare.

Of course, since this is Murakami, the rational, naturalistic explanation isn't a slam-dunk. It could all be "really" happening, which is especially worrying if you follow the boy's train of thought about the scene repeating in libraries all around the country.

While it isn't supported in the text, I've also been drawn to thinking about the significance of this taking place in a library, and among books. When the boy reads about the Ottomans, he becomes a tax collector, fully inhabiting the body and memory of this character from history. Is it possible that the Sheep Man and the girl are characters in their own respective novels? The boy has read both of them, so they share space inside his head, but one novel does not have knowledge of what another contains. (I don't think this is actually the case, but it was a fun thought experiment for me.)

END SPOILERS

In general, The Strange Library feels like a very condensed version of Murakami. We encounter a large number of the signifying elements and emotions that are hallmarks of his work, and see them deployed effectively in a very brief, efficient story. I hesitate to recommend this to first-time Murakami readers, since the overall impact of the book is much less.... buoyant, I guess, than I'm used to. But for those who already enjoy his worlds, and want another taste, this is a great little nibble.

Liszts

Considering what a short book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is, it shouldn't have taken me this long after getting it to finish it. There are multiple reasons why! I was already deep into S, and that story was sufficiently complex that I worried I would lose the thread if I took a break partway through. Also, new Murakami novels are rare and precious things, and I wanted to savor this treat as much as I could.

Colorless Tsukuru is a great little book. In fact, it might become one of the books I recommend to people asking how to get into Murakami: not because it's one of my favorites, but because it's a low-investment way to get a taste of his beautiful writing style while easing into his odder elements.

MINI SPOILERS

I should declare my prejudices up front: I'm a huge fan of Murakami's more bizarre books, and enjoy his quieter, human ones. Colorless Tsukuru definitely belongs to the latter category; I've been hearing a lot of comparisons to Norwegian Wood, and I think it's a good comparison, although South of the Border, West of the Sun may be a better one.

The writing is, of course, wonderful. I think he's always a good writer, but the quieter books like this let me focus more on his excellent craftsmanship, instead of focusing on the strangeness of the story and the setting. I think he's particularly good in crafting his characters here. Murakami characters have historically tended to be either enigmas or blank slates, often combining cryptic pronouncements with a few vividly-sketched personal affectations. The cast in Colorless Tsukuru is very believable, and even though the novel isn't very long, we get a good look at not only these characters but their relationships with one another and how they changed over time, growing up from childhood to the cusp of middle age. There's a fantastic economy of prose in the way Murakami creates these people and uses them in this small story.

One aspect that rang particularly true to me was Tsukuru's self-image. As the title states, he is "colorless": the other four members of his close-knit circle of friends each have names that include colors (Black and white for the girls, red and blue for the boys), but Tsukuru's name just means "builder" and he is therefore colorless. He accepts this as a metaphor for his life: in contrast to his friends, who each have talents and personalities that distinguish them, he sees himself as just sort of present, without anything special to contribute. Only much later, decades after the group split apart, does he learn from multiple people that he did have a role: he was considered "the handsome one", and was broadly liked by all.

Anyways, that felt very realistic to me, and probably does to a lot of people. I know that I always think (and have thought) of myself as a very boring person, and am genuinely surprised whenever people say that they think of me as "X". Again, though, this is probably very natural. Each of us can only see the world through our own eyes, and our own experiences are our always-present baselines. We don't see what's remarkable in our own lives, because it isn't remarkable to us, because we live with ourselves all the time.

Even when Murakami is restraining his stranger impulses, he retains a latent potential to create magical environments, and I think some of that feeling suffuses even his more "realist" novels like this one. There are no miracles, no supernatural phenomena: but you still get the sensation that some other forces might be at work behind the scenes, tugging at the seams of our reality. This comes across through vivid dreams, second-hand anecdotes, and other deniable but non forgettable sources.

Although Colorless Tsukuru is a fairly tame novel by Murakami standards, it still is a Murakami novel, and one of its many aspects I love is his embrace of ambiguity. Certain mysteries are solved over the course of the novel, but they raise other questions that can never be answered. Some specific and horrific crimes remain open, with no worldly culprit in sight: one gets the impression that the criminal(s) could only be identified by investigating behind the fabric of the world. Tsukuru has caught a few glimpses of that world, but unlike some other Murakami protagonists, he doesn't travel into it.

MEGA SPOILERS

The stuff about Shiro's rape and eventual murder was, of course, profoundly disturbing. I'm not exactly sure what to make of it, but it's hard not to think about Tsukuru's repeated "erotic" dreams of her. He considers and rejects this possibility, but it does make a certain kind of Murakami-sense: the souls of the five friends were so tightly joined, they may have been able to visit one another even across vast distances while they dreamed; and, since Shiro had no control over what happened to her in Tsukuru's dream, she was a victim of his (unconscious but real) lust. I wonder if we might be seeing a mirror image of this in Tsukuru's dream-encounter with Haida: is Tsukuru appearing in Haida's dream, the same way Shiro may have appeared in Tsukuru's?

And, while I'm even less certain of this, what if Tsukuru's brief unwilling fantasy about strangling Shiro near the end of the book caused her murder many years before? That happens in broad daylight, in Finland, while in the middle of another conversation, so it doesn't seem like it could possibly follow the same dream-power from before. Still, it's a creepy idea, that simply visualizing an ill act on another person, across time and space, could cause it to happen.

Tsukuru is certainly not the only potential suspect, though. Late in the novel, we catch our first mention of "bad elves", creatures of Finnish folklore who wreak havoc on innocent humans. They're a tempting explanation for the unexplained stories we've encountered before then: Midorikawa the jazz pianist, six-fingered people, and of course the central problem of what happened to Shiro. Tsukuru himself is certainly not a bad elf, and the various misfortunes visited on his group may be the result of some mischievous spirits.

END SPOILERS

After the weighty, dense and bountiful 1Q84, you can see Colorless Tsukuru as a piece of relief. The language is beautiful, and it paints a striking scene that manages to be haunting while not being openly supernatural. In one important way, it does continue from 1Q84 in creating vivid, human-seeming characters. While their lives overlap with small amounts of trademark Murakami oddness, for the most part they feel very relatable: the struggles they undergo are the same ones most of us endure as we grow up, drift apart, define ourselves, and make our way in the world. This won't become my favorite Murakami novel, but it's one that resonates very strongly with me, and I'm sure I'll continue reflecting on it for a long time to come.

Wandering Thoughts

Here's a little grab-bag of items that don't seem to merit their own blog posts, but are still interesting to me!

I attended the midnight release party for Haruki Murakami's new book, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Like the last release party I went to for 1Q84, it was hosted by Green Apple Books; unlike last time, it was held in their brand-new Inner Sunset location instead of their classic Clement spot.

It was a really fun event! The new bookstore looks (and smells) wonderful. They're sharing the space with the video store that used to have the whole building, but have built it out for themselves, with extremely tall ceilings and a great use of space. It was a good turnout; I'm bad at estimating crowds, but I'd guess somewhere around 200 folks showed up. Even though the footprint of the new store is much smaller, it seems to be more open, usable space, and so it didn't feel quite as cramped as the 1Q84 event had three years ago. They did a great job at running the event, including some competitions like a Mad Libs twist on Murakami passages and a trivia contest; the winner of that one correctly answered 7 out of the 15 questions! I do kind of miss the Sapporo beer from last time, but there was still a really nice spread of snacks and drinks.

The vibe was really interesting. Reading is such a solitary activity that we pursue in isolation, and a touchstone moment like this is one of the few times that readers emerge from our shells and socialize with one another, bonding over our shared love of something we each experience individually. It's kind of a weird juxtaposition of stimuli, though... the streamers and buckets of beer say "party!", while the stacks of books say "you're in a library, please speak quietly!" Everyone seemed to have a good time, I got to chat with some new folks and old friends, and I even walked away with a signed copy of the book. I'm batting two for two and loving it!

In other reading news, I'm approaching the end of Alan Moore's run of the Swamp Thing. I don't think I'll give that a full write-up, but will mention that I've really enjoyed it. It's much more of a horror book than I had expected, and gets really shockingly macabre at times. The series started before DC started its Vertigo imprint (and, if I remember correctly, it started Vertigo largely because of the rise of mature stories like Swamp Thing), and it can be far more gruesome than even titles like Sandman or Transmetropolitan that later ended up on Vertigo.

But, of course, Swamp Thing isn't mainly remembered for its very effective scares. Even today, it feels fresh and revolutionary; at the time, it must have seemed mind-blowing. It's all the more impressive that it manages to be so creative while working within the constraint of following a character who Moore didn't create in the first place: but, Moore completely tears down the Swamp Thing, acknowledging everything known about him up until that point, then rebuilds him into an entirely new creation. The story becomes thrillingly abstract for long stretches of time, dealing with timeless themes and celebrating concept like patience and acceptance. It always seems a little jarring when, say, Batman shows up for a crossover issue. Swamp Thing seems incredibly far removed from the standard superhero plots of hero-versus-villain.

The influence of Swamp Thing on Sandman is abundantly clear. Preludes and Nocturnes, in particular, with its many experiments in horror, seems to draw inspiration from Swamp Thing (even including an indirect crossover in the person of John Constantine). I've also recently read Miracleman, another Alan Moore title that has finally come back into print after decades of legal wrangling. Miracleman also shares many similarities with Swamp Thing; however, Miracleman and Sandman have almost nothing in common, which is interesting... the transitive property isn't particularly strong in comics.

MINI SPOILERS for Miracleman

Miracleman is a bit like Swamp Thing (and I guess technically Sandman for that matter) in that it's a reboot of an established, classic, but not-very-popular comic-book character. I'm a bit fuddled by all of the intellectual-property controversy around the title, but I think the character was initially known as Marvelman, and was changed due to copyright reasons or something. Anyways, that's not important. The Marvelman book starts off with a perfect pastiche of a 1950s comic: the very two-dimensional art, static images, confidently bold exclamations in speech bubbles, and so on. These lay out the story of the Miracleman family, focusing on an incident when they repel an invasion from the future.


I didn't really appreciate how well-done the art was until it shifted into the next part of the story, set in "modern" times, picking up the story of Miracleman. I don't want to spoil exactly what happens, but it's an absolutely brilliant approach to the reboot, one of those rare cases where they perfectly honor all of the canon of the existing story, while also creating a perfectly blank slate for telling whatever new stories they want to going forward. (The effect is on par with the great reboot of Star Trek, although the underlying technique is quite different.)

The content of the story itself isn't quite as intriguing to me as Moore's other stuff, but I think this is another case where it was much more important at the time it came out; it can be hard to recognize sources of innovation when you've grown up in a world influenced by that innovation. Miracleman seems to do a particularly good job at accepting the tropes of the superhero comic (secret identity, rivalries with supervillains, assisting a mundane civilian populace) and dealing with them as if they were real problems (can two people of vastly different status share a meaningful relationship? does the government have a right to manipulate in order to serve a greater good?).

The book also includes a really interesting set of comics that deal with the Warpsmiths, a bizarre and very alien interstellar race. They remind me a bit of some similarly strange outer-space races that Swamp Thing encounters late in his story.

END SPOILERS

So, yeah... Miracleman isn't quite as mandatory as Moore's other work, but is still definitely worth checking out for anyone else who enjoys his writing or is interested in the history of comics. I'll probably pick up the second volume after it comes out later this year, and hopefully continue on to the stretch that Neil Gaiman wrote.

Speaking of comics: Guardians of the Galaxy is really, really good! Like almost everyone else, I hadn't even heard of these characters before the movie came out. Honestly, that might have helped. People already have preconceived notions about how, say, Spiderman or Batman are supposed to look and behave, and may get distracted or irritated if a movie strays too far from that baseline. But I have absolutely no idea how, say, Drax the Destroyer is supposed to behave, so the filmmaker has much more leeway in crafting the character to the movie and not the other way around. In any case: it was a really fun movie that combined beautifully imaginative sci-fi settings, quippy humor, and a strong sense of camaraderie and adventure.

I think that's it for now. I'm about 200 pages into S and 2/3 of the way through a replay of Dragon Age 2, so expect posts on those in the not-too-distant future, as well as the Murakami. Cheers!

Kyuu

Phew! I plowed through the last third of 1Q84. It ends quite well - it doesn't wrap everything neatly up, of course (no Murakami novel has ever done so), but I think it will satisfy most readers hoping for some sort of resolution or closure. It's more akin to the closing of, say, "A Wild Sheep Chase" than to "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World."

For the most part, the third volume continues the things I loved about the first two volumes. The plot directly continues, we get more exploration into the characters' backgrounds, and a few mysteries are resolved. There are several differences as well, some of which must be structural changes from the original Japanese text, others might be from Murakami or from the translator. In particular, I think that the first part of the book used metric units (certain individuals of short stature are described as being about a meter tall), while the last part used imperial units (those same individuals are about a yard tall). Also, while I loved the language, the last part of the book did seem to introduce some tics that I wasn't as fond of.

MINI SPOILERS

Tengo in particular, and I think some other characters as well, come down with severe cases of echolalia - lots of "dialogs" are more like monologues with an echo, as someone will say something like "Sakigake is searching for a dohta," and Tengo will say, "Sakigake is searching for a dohta." It isn't actually annoying, but is a bit perplexing. It's a bit similar to his conversations with Fuka-Eri in the first volume, though I kind of preferred those, because in those cases he's kind of trying to translate her by turning her statements into questions (or, in the Japanese, adding a "ka" to the end of what she says). Here, I'm not too sure what purpose it serves, either in the story or stylistically. (I'm not saying that there is no purpose, so if anyone has thoughts about what the significance might be, please let me know!)

Other than those very minor complaints, though, I pretty much loved the ending. The biggest and most noticeable change is the introduction of another point of view: in addition to Tengo's and Aomame's perspectives, we now get Ushikawa's as well. This was a really nice way to open up the story a bit, still keeping the focus on the central relationship between the would-be lovers and adding some more perspective on their situation. I thought the choice of Ushikawa was an interesting one; personally, I would have loved to get inside the head of a character like Komatsu, who is already involved in the plot and has a lot of personality. Ushikawa has some great personality too, though. He's definitely an outsider, and I enjoyed the way Murakami treated him... he honors Ushikawa's skills, but makes sure that we don't develop too much sympathy for him. I was vaguely reminded of Flaubert's treatment of Charles - we're getting a full, three-dimensional character with some admirable qualities, but we're not meant to actually like him too much.

So, yeah... Ushikawa has been involved in the story for a while, and we got to know him pretty well through his association with Tengo, and now we can actually peer inside his head, into his sad, slight life. Again, he's kicked around by society, and I do like the way he can plow ahead and do a good, thorough job even with the social impediments caused by his massive ugliness. He occupies an interesting spot, working for the villains but under just as much threat from the villains as the heroes are.

The second volume ended very dramatically, with Tengo and Aomame both perched on the edge of huge developments: Aomame had discovered that she couldn't return to the real world and was a few millimeters from ending her life; Tengo had rediscovered his memory's version of Aomame, seemingly presented to him through the auspices of the Little People. Both of those developments are necessarily backed away from in this last book. Aomame just changes her mind, and gets on with her life; soon, she renews her focus on reuniting with Tengo. Tengo never again sees that air chrysalis with Aomame, though he patiently waits for it for a long time.

Several new elements were very successful. I thought that the NHK fee collector was probably the scariest part of the whole book, right up there with the Little People. Part of that may have to do with some social phobias of my own - I get uncomfortable when strangers come knocking at my door, and the kind of verbally abusive and judgmental ire that the NHK fee collector doles out are the stuff of my nightmares. I really like the way that Murakami spins out this scenario, across multiple doors, multiple visits, and a varying set of tactics that tightly orbit around a very mean core. I also like how Murakami dangles a very intriguing explanation before us - that Tengo's father, whose body is gripped by a coma, is sending forth his spirit to do the only thing he was ever any good at, abuse people to make them pay up. It's interesting how Tengo himself is never visited by the specter, but others close to him are. The collector doesn't seem to have any great supernatural insight - in particular, he doesn't know the actual names of the people staying in the apartments, just the names listed in the building. That makes me wonder if his spirit may actually be making rounds throughout the whole neighborhood, but can only be perceived by those who are aligned with Tengo's story... similarly to how only some people can perceive the two moons.

MEGA SPOILERS

Speaking of which: we get an interesting twist on the whole moons/worlds question in this volume. I'm still not sure what the final situation is, but in the first part of the book, my working hypothesis was that Fuka-Eri initially created the new world by the introduction of the Little People/Story. Then, Tengo entered into that world, and became important to it, by embellishing the story and bringing it to an audience. Finally, Aomame was drawn into it because of her emotional connection with Tengo. In this book, though, it seems more like that sequence is inverted. The world still might have come into existence because of Fuka-Eri, but the novel seems to say that Aomame entered into that world by herself, by her own actions, when she walked down that stairway. This connects nicely with the introduction we get in that very first chapter, of course. Tengo, too, might have followed into the world after Aomame. She presumably was in the new world from the first chapter on; Tengo doesn't seem to have entered it until after he wrote the book. (It's possible that he was in earlier, but given that he invented/discovered the details of the two moons, I place his entrance several chapters in.) In this new reading, it seems like Tengo might have a one-way trip into the world, since he arrived by writing and can't un-write the book; however, Aomame has a two-way path, since she physically entered into it and can retrace her steps back out.

The whole thing is so romantic and lovely, isn't it? It's a little like the myth of Orpheus, but this time it's the woman who travels into a dangerous place, and brings back her beloved.

Minor (but very spoilery) thoughts...

Very creepy that we get more Little People! Now that we've seen two cases of them entering the world, we can draw some conclusions, I guess. It looks like (other than through air chrysalises) they can only enter through being who die, and whose bodies are not disposed of in a timely manner. The goat was left in the cave for days before they emerged; Ushikawa's body had suffered rigor mortis, and they wouldn't be able to cremate it for several more days. I love how this totally invented creepy mythology nicely reinforces our mores and morals about how to handle the dead.

I'm also curious about exactly what world the new Little People are in. Is a new world created each time they emerge? Or have they found a new gateway into 1Q84 after losing Leader and hope of Aomame's child? Or (creepiest of all) have they made it into our world? I'm reminded of the emphatic words of the taxi driver at the very beginning, who insists that there's only one reality. Most of the rest of the book seems to disagree with that; I and the characters spend much of our time thinking about the world of 1984, and the world of 1Q84, and the differences between them and how to return to 1984. But, what if the taxi driver was right? What if, when Aomame went down that staircase, she didn't CREATE a new world, but CHANGED the existing one? In that case, walking up the staircase doesn't transport Tengo and Aomame back to the "real" world, but instead changes the one world back to the way it was before. In that case, though, the Little People have found their way into our reality... into the only reality. Brrr.

I was really, really expecting for the same taxi-driver who dropped Aomame off to be the one that picked them up. I liked the way that Murakami handled this, though. It's a nice call-back to the beginning without being overly symmetrical. And, really, it's very appropriate for what the story has done. At this point, Tengo and Aomame's journey is over; they don't need any more special help from outsiders, they now have each other, and can spend the rest of their lives exploring one another and building a future together.

END SPOILERS

Yep... this was a very, very good book. In addition to all of its other qualities - the amazing language, funny dialog, fascinating plot, surreal imagery - I'm really struck by how well it works as a novel about novels. Not just in the superficial sense of having a book within a book, but it seems profoundly interested in the CREATive aspects of fiction, the way that we build worlds with our words. In the text of this book, it isn't just something to play around with, but a very real and meaningful way that we can touch one anothers' lives, alter our reality, change the course of history, discover our soulmates. In some ways, 1Q84 reads like a love-letter to writing, penned by the master of stories. It's an absolutely remarkable achievement.

1323

I've been flying through Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. It's a really massive book, a bit over 900 pages in a large hardcover. Or, to be a bit more accurate, it's three good-sized books that have been put into one binding for the American market, in kind of an inverse from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Despite the length, it's been an incredibly engaging read for me so far. The plot moves along at a nice clip, with a steady trickle of revelations and explanations and new mysteries, but more than that, the language is as beautiful as always, drawing me ever more deeply into the story.

I've just finished the second book, at a tad under the 600 page mark, and figured I'd take this opportunity to jot down some initial reactions to the book. First of all, my head feels full to overflowing, and I'm worried that I'll lose some of these memories if I wait much longer. Second, from the little I've heard about the book's release in Japan, it sounds like Murakami had initially intended the story to end after the second book. There, the first two volumes were written together, and published separately on the same day; then, after they came out, Murakami decided that he wasn't finished yet, and returned for a third book. (He says that he doesn't plan on writing a fourth volume, but is also unwilling to rule out the possibility.)

I very deliberately stayed away from as much knowledge about 1Q84 as possible during the (very long!) run-up to its US release. This was a LONG process. I've mentioned before that I attended a Murakami interview at UC Berkeley back in 2008, where he announced that he had just finished "... a BIG book." Despite the voracious and growing appetite for Murakami here in the states (a trend which I whole-heartedly endorse), it still took them about three years to translate it, even after dividing the work among two translaters. Jay Rubin translated the first two volumes; Rubin has translated a majority of the most recent Murakami novels, including masterpieces like The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and After the Quake. Philip Gabriel, who translated my personal favorite Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore, handled translation duties on the third volume. Personally, I think it would have been amazing if they could have gotten Alfred Birnbaum to do the first volume, which would have made the whole effort nicely reflect the chronology of bringing Murakami to America's attention. Alfred Birnbaum was responsible for translating Murakami's very first books into English, long before anyone here had any idea who he was, and this includes some of the most touching and idiosyncratic works, like A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

It's been pretty fascinating to consider the various translators and how they interact in creating our perception of who Murakami is and what his books mean. I get the impression that most fanatic Murakami devotees settle on a favorite translator, and that's usually the first one they encounter; the early adopters who "discovered" Murakami before he was "cool" will swear by Birnbaum's style and construction. More recent converts like myself are mesmerized by the intricate yet unadorned sentences found in Rubin. Ultimately, of course, 99.99% of American readers won't ever be able to compare the English with the Japanese versions of these novels, and so it's nearly impossible for us to disentangle what parts that we admire are from the original author, and which hail from the translator.

The surprisingly strong publicity campaign for 1Q84 has included a lot of interesting extra information around this book and these issues, including some great interviews with the translators about, well, translating. Rubin and Gabriel had to do their work in parallel in order to bring the book to market on time. Rubin got a head start, but also had more work to do. This sounds like it led to a fascinating three-way collaboration, where the translators would share notes with each other to make sure that they were being reasonably consistent with one another, and checking in with Murakami once a week or so to help resolve any items that they found particularly difficult or confusing. While they were collaborative, it doesn't sound like any one was dictatorial, which ultimately led to more variety and more flavor. A few tidbits that I recall from an interview with The Atlantic: Gabriel tends to use more contractions (like "it's" and "they'll") than Rubin or Birnbaum; but, in this case, he ended up using fewer than usual in order to match the sound of the earlier volumes. There was some discussion around how to translate the slangy name of one minor character who appeared in both volumes Two and Three. One suggested "Buzzcut", the other thought "Skinhead". They eventually brought this to Murakami, who cast the deciding vote for Buzzcut. Even after all the translation was done, it still passed through a final American editor who helped pull everything together and make the work as a whole unified.

It probably helps matters a lot that Murakami is not only fluent in English, but also an avid reader of American novels. He has famously translated many great American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver (all of it!), and J. D. Salinger. I imagine that this significantly helps his engagement with the translation, as he can not only weigh in on the most literal equivalent for a Japanese phrase, but also what words are most likely to convey a similar emotion or sentiment. That being said, all the translators have cheerfully denied any hope of truly capturing Murakami's essence in any language other than Japanese. Which is just incredible - given that Murakami is possibly my favorite contemporary author, the thought that he might be even BETTER than the diminished form in which I encounter him just blows my mind.

Oh, yeah, there's also a fun video out there that describes the design of the book - how they (meaning Chip Kidd) came up with the jacket cover, the endleaf pages, and so on. There are minor spoilers within the video, so if you want to remain 100% pure you should hold off, but this was one of the few things I consumed before reading the book and it didn't affect my enjoyment of it.

Since this book is so new, I'll be more cautious than usual in my spoiler marking. I'm avoiding any plot or character revelations whatsoever up here. I'll generally and vaguely cover characters and a bare minimum of early plot develops in mini spoilers. Mega spoilers are fair game for everything in the first two volumes.

So: just how good is this book?

Pretty darn good. I feel like it's still sinking in, but so far I've just been loving it. I'm enjoying it much more than the most recent Murakami novel(la), "After Dark". At the moment I'd put it at about the same level as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

The book has a lot of the elements that I love about most of Murakami's novels: the realistic world that gradually slips into a slightly askew, dreamlike environment; the pleasant people who are swept up by baffling events; the portentous omens that heighten stakes while remaining opaque. His writing is probably even better than before, and it was already excellent. He perfectly captures emotions, tableaus, the beats of conversation, the silences within conversation. I think it's that combination that makes me most love Murakami: even though the cores of his stories are often mysterious, each sentence is sparklingly clear.

Oh, and he's funny, too. This isn't a comedy, of course - while Murakami has written some flat-out comedic short stories, like The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes, I don't think he's ever written a fully comedic novel - but the characters' wry observations on their untenable situations often make me crack up, as do their musings on the world around them. And, some of those thoughts can also bring me close to tears. The center of this novel is driven by... a kind of lacuna, an aching gap, and while I sometimes feel like this was written specifically for me, I'm guessing that most readers will feel the same way, so effectively does Murakami convey that particular heartache.

Okay, that's all very vague. Let's dip into some

MINI SPOILERS

Structurally, 1Q84 bears some similarity to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. As with that book, this one follows strictly alternating chapters, each told from a distinct point of view. Here, the voice is third-person, and the limited narrator seems to be the same or similar, as opposed to the very different voices in HBW. But still, there's a similar rhythm that the book gets into, and in each chapter, while I'm getting progressively more interested in Tengo's or Aomame's stories, I'm simultaneously looking forward to seeing what the other character has in store.

For both characters, we gradually learn more about each as the story progresses; in a way, we're moving both forward and backwards in time. Both of them are around thirty years old (like me!). We see what they're doing in the present day; as they keep doing it, we learn about the people who brought them into these situations; and gradually, we learn about their experiences in college, in high school, and so on, drifting back to childhood. It's a wonderful, gradual unfolding of the characters, which proceeds organically, constantly offering new depth about each even as the story advances.

Tengo, while not a repeat of any earlier Murakami protagonist, does fit comfortably into the Murakami mold: like the "heroes" of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase, etc., Tengo is a fairly passive individual. At least he has a job, but it's something far beneath his abilities: even though he was a math prodigy in school, and has a passion for writing novels, he contents himself with teaching high-schoolers in a cram school. It isn't much work, and he seems content to do something simple that doesn't require much effort from him. Like those other passive heroes, amazing stuff tends to fall into his lap without any initiative from him. He has a steady stream of attractive young women who wish to be with him, but is content with a long-running affair with an older married woman. The main action in the novel kicks off when he is approached by his editor, who persuades him into a scheme to rewrite a novella submitted by a high-school girl. Much like Toru's search for a missing cat ends up taking away his wife and everything else in his life, Tengo's ghost-writing jaunt will irrevocably remove key pillars from his life and force him into another world.

Boy oh boy... Murakami sure is amazing at crafting three-dimensional characters. At one point Tengo's father describes Tengo as a "vacuum", which is a beautiful phrase, but totally contrary to how I experienced him. Tengo is a large, solid, gentle man, not physically attractive, but who radiates solidity and trustworthiness. He has a good heart, and a strong sense of justice, though they inform his life quietly. Tengo has only rarely asserted himself, and then only in reaction to some external stimulus, though we (and perhaps even he) can't directly draw a line between the two: holding hands with a pretty young girl in the fifth grade gives him the courage to tell his father that he hates accompanying him on his collection route; being persuaded to ghost-write one book, he becomes able to start writing his own book; a visit from a dislikeable and sinister man gives him courage to resist his offer. Tengo has many conflictions - he has never reconciled with his father, and has been unwilling to search for his missing mother or a woman who means much to him - and while he can keep living his normal life without resolving them, they continually percolate below the surface, surprising even him when they bubble up.

The other protagonist, Aomame, feels like a wholly original Murakami character. I guess she has a little of the drive of Crow from Kafka on the Shore, but she is far more self-assured. Like Tengo, she currently takes direction for her assignments, but you get the impression that she would get things done even without the nudges... she's just been lucky to find some kindred spirits who can supply her with useful missions.

I'm fighting the urge to say just what those missions are... I think we find out in the second one of her chapters, so it should hardly count as a mini spoiler, but it was surprising enough that I'd like to leave it unstated for now. In any case, it isn't totally essential for describing her character.

Like Tengo, Aomame is a fully-realized character. At first she seems like she might be a kind of action-movie heroine, and at one point near the end of the second volume she self-consciously apes Faye Dunaway from the (original) Thomas Crown Affair. That isn't what she's really about, though... this is kind of a weird analogy, but she's a little bit like a marine, someone who spends hundreds of days preparing their minds and bodies before a single day of playing with the highest stakes imaginable. We learn a lot about her perfectly toned body, her workout regime (she is an instructor at a health club), and her physical attributes; this isn't just to communicate her attractiveness, although it certainly does so, but also so we can eventually realize that her drive for self-reliance and self-improvement goes all the way down. From her childhood, she has focused on perfecting herself as much as she can, and all the ways she takes care of herself help her ultimate mission of protecting those who are close to her.

Speaking of her body... it's been long enough since I've read Murakami's novels that I had almost forgotten how freaky his sex scenes could be. Well, consider myself reminded! I don't know how one can, or should, rate these things, but this is pretty high up there with what I remember from his other books... the same discomforting scenes of almost-certainly-incest, rape, wildly inappropriate age pairings, and so on. It doesn't really diminish my overall appreciation of the book, but does make me shake my head and wonder if Japanese mores are really that different, or if Murakami comes across as that shocking in the original books.

As I noted above, I had been particularly interested during the run-up to 1Q84's release in reading about the translation efforts. This proved to be oddly fortuitous, since much of the early/middle portion of 1Q84 deals with the publishing process involved in printing a rough manuscript to market. I've experienced a form of this in the technical books that I've worked on, and it was wonderful to see Murakami kind of explore that process in the literary world. Like with translation, there are multiple characters at play: the raw inspiration and creative vision from an author; the eye for quality and the ear attuned to a new voice that a reviewer contributes; the technical skills and writing prowess of an editor/writer; the political and sales work done by a proper editor. In the context of this book, it's meant to be a slightly shameful thing that Fuka-Eri's name alone appears on the front of Air Chrysalis; but really, any book, even one as magnificent as 1Q84, is improved by the work done by reviewers, editors, copy-editors, and the many other people who work behind the scenes to bring the book to market. Heh... to borrow and mis-use Murakami's excellent metaphor, it's a little like a cocoon: the author creates life, and the author alone can make the new thing, but that new life may initially be weak and unprepared for the harsh world outside. The publishing company builds a cocoon around it, sheltering it, and giving it time to strengthen and grow. Then, once it is ready, and no longer needs the cocoon, it sheds it, and flies off into the world. By the time it reaches our hands in the bookstore, all that we see is the butterfly, the beautiful thing created by the author, but it could never have arrived if not for the care and shelter of the cocoon, built by the editor and no longer needed.

1Q84 has a LOT of GREAT analogies for writing, fiction, and the creative process. Many of these were collected into "Town of Cats," a wonderful short story that ran in The New Yorker a few months back. Town of Cats collects several sections that were scattered throughout the first few hundred pages of 1Q84, all from Tengo's chapters. We learn about Tengo's earliest childhood memory, of his mother with another man; his distressing Sundays collecting fees for the NHK and his estrangement from his father; and, in the core of the story, Tengo's trip on a train ride up to his father's nursing home, where he reads him a (fictional?) German story called "Town of Cats," and gently tries to get answers to some of the questions he's had all his life. The story-within-a-story is powerful, and simultaneously seems like a great Murakami story and like an authentic northern-European legend: mysterious, portentous, both direct and strange. The episode ends on an incredible dialog between Tengo and his father; Tengo's questions receive answers that don't seem to line up at all (such as queries about his biological father being answered with a complaint about how people don't appreciate the importance of subscription fees - "Radio waves don’t come falling out of the sky for free like rain or snow"). For much of the conversation, his father seems totally out of touch, and just plain wrong about the things he does say. But, in the end, he utters words that, I think, may be the best, most concise description I've seen yet for Murakami's writing. "If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation." I think that just perfectly captures what Murakami tries to do, and why he's so effective. People who complain about how his stories lack resolution, or how he doesn't make sense or doesn't explain his plots, are kind of missing the point. Murakami is operating one level higher than that of plot, of story, of logic. When I'm reading one of his novels, I feel like it takes my entire mind, as a whole, moving together, to grok what he's saying. It ends up being just as much about feeling, and experiencing, and KNOWING, as it is about explaining. An explanation would cheapen and diminish the outcome, forcing a big and complicated world to fit into a narrow box that happens to accommodate a bulleted list of action points. Murakami creates these big, great structures, and then floats them up for us to look at and ponder. In some ways, I think that approaching his novels is more like appreciating a fine painting than like reading Hemingway.

MEGA SPOILERS

Boy, the Little People sure are creepy, aren't they? I loved the slow reveal that Murakami used on this. Actually, the whole way he used Air Chrysalis in general was terrific. It's introduced very early on, but at first we get only occasional nuggets of information about its contents. It isn't until close to the end of the second volume, when Aomame finally reads it, that we finally get a full start-to-finish understanding of the story. In between, of course, we're able to piece much of it together, between the little we learn from Fuka-Eri's biography, the elements that Tengo inserted during his revision, and a few brief horrifying incidents like the Little People's invasion of the safehouse.

In some ways, it seems like the Little People are analogs to ancient European folklore about fairies; they aren't necessarily evil, but they certainly aren't good either, and they are so different and so powerful that it's wise to be wary of them. Of course, fairies/faeries have been so diluted by hundreds of years of infantilization that, even if Murakami was European, he would have been wise to create something new to convey that sort of dread, as he has done here. I keep harping on this, but what I love about Murakami is the combination of his incredibly clear prose and his incredibly opaque meaning. Once we do see the Little People, both in Air Chrysalis and walking through the ten-year-old victim's mouth, we see them very clearly: we know that they are a few inches tall at first, that they can change their size but max out at about a meter tall, that they build cocoons in the middle of the air by pulling white bits of fluff out of the space around them. All perfectly straightforward, and simultaneously incomprehensible.

Other than the Little People, I think the two most chilling scenes in the book for me were scenes involving the second moon. Not the part where Aomame first notices the second moon - that was a bit odd, and fanciful, but you don't really know what significance to attach to it, other than a confirmation that she seems to be operating on a different timeline from our own. Rather, I first got shivers in the scene where Tengo describes (I believe it's to his editor Komatsu, or possibly to his girlfriend) how you can tell the world of Air Chrysalis apart from our "real" world: the Air Chrysalis world has a second moon in the sky. That's the point where I realized that Aomame had become a character in a novel, instead of a person in the world. That's creepy enough, but what's worse is that, by that point, we've figured out the connection between Aomame and Tengo. We know that these two people love each other, that they've wasted the last two thirds of their lives apart from one another, and we badly want them to get back together. And now... we know that one of them is, in a sense, no longer "real."

(The way Murakami plays with the second moon in Aomame's world, incidentally, is great. We sense a significant disconnect between Aomame and the people around her, since she notices the second moon and nobody else does. However, we can never be completely sure just what the other people perceive. Does everyone else see one moon while she sees two? If so, that would make her seem a bit more like a crazy person, seeing something that isn't there. Or, does everyone else see two moons, but think that they have always seen two moons and so it isn't worth commenting on? If so, that would make it seem more like Aomame has entered an alternate world.  The book treats this very believably, since it's the sort of question that could be cleared up quickly with a single question, but the consequences of ASKING that question are so dire that Aomame doesn't dare do it. I do suppose that she might have tried something else, like checking a star atlas out of the library while she was looking up old newspaper articles, but I'll gladly let that slide. Ultimately, of course, we learn that the truth is somewhere in the middle - I think that Fuka-Eri may be the one who says that only certain people are able to see the second moon. Naturally, this isn't completely explained, but given the logic of the story I presume that the people who can see this are Perceivers, Receivers, and those directly affected by a Receiver. Oh, and that proved to be an unexpected perk of Murakami setting the novel in 1984 - it's kind of refreshing to go back to a world before the Internet, when people's questions couldn't realistically be immediately answered on their mobile phones. I like that Aomame needed to go to the library to find old news stories, and that her policewoman friend needed to contact the appropriate people in other departments in order to find out about potential crimes.)

The second, and bigger, shock comes near the very end of the second volume, when Tengo rests by the slide in the playground, looks into the sky, and then sees the second moon for himself. This is, of course, a huge jolt. How can an author become a character in his own novel? This forced me to re-evaluate my understanding of 1Q84 (the world, not the book). Well, more accurately, I guess it made me realize that 1Q84 is a world, and not a book. I had thought that Aomame was "just" a character, but no, she's really a person, and so is Tengo as well. The act of creativity started by Fuka-Eri and brought to fruition by Tengo, has become that thing that I so often proclaim to like, "a fully-realized world." Tengo's role has now become inverted, moving from the subject of the story to become its object. He has power in this world - since he helped create it, he's safe from the Little People - but he's also trapped in it, just as thoroughly as Aomame. Hmmm... I wonder if that might somehow be tied to the "purification" ritual that Fuka-Eri insists they perform? What was the importance of "going to the Town of Cats"? Was it his meeting with his father, or was it his absorption into another work of fiction? If the former, then the danger might have been that Tengo was leaving the world of fiction he had created for the "real" world, and so slipping out of the realm he controlled, and into a place which the Little People could penetrate and harm. In that case, the importance of the ritual might have been to bind Tengo's memory with Aomame, who is now in 1Q84 with him, and so keep him from the real world. Or, if the latter, then the problem might have been that Tengo is bringing another work of fiction into 1Q84, a powerful one that affects him, but one that he did not create and does not control. If so, that could have caused the dissonance (thunder and lightning) that he experienced, and by weakening his authorial privilege, he might have made himself vulnerable. In that case, the purification ritual's importance might have been more to distract him from the father-oriented concerns of A Town of Cats, and return his attention to the female-oriented concerns of Air Chrysalis.

I'm sure I'm way off-base on those ideas... but hey, I'm an English Lit major, and I do love my literary theories!

END SPOILERS

There's lots of other great stuff in this book... oh, even if you haven't picked it up yet, you should totally check out the wonderful Spotify playlist that Knopf put together for the book. It has a bunch of the many, many pieces of music referenced in this book. The list is long, and still isn't exhaustive - for example, there are quite a few more Rolling Stones songs mentioned in the book, including some more purely bluesy ones. As with Murakami's other books, the music is far from just background or scenery. At the least, it conveys important insight into characters' personalities; at most, though, it can powerfully drive the story. The single most important piece of music is "Sinfonietta" by Janacek, which plays a prominent role in the very first chapter, and returns and repeats throughout the remainder of the book as its significance amplifies. I'm feeling more regretful than usual about my lack of classical music knowledge, but this is inspiring me to rectify that situation... at least where central European composers are concerned.

Anyways! I must wrap up this post quickly so I can return to Book Three. I'll weigh in again on the entire novel after I've finished it. Right now, though, I'm pleased to report something that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to say: it was worth the wait.

Down Japan Way

I've gotten to be rather miserly with Murakami.  I've gotten to that point where I've read almost everything by him, so I try and stretch out what little remains so that I still have something else to look forward to.  After I'm fully caught up, I'll be in the same position with him that I'm in with Neal Stephenson, where I need to wait for years and years until they put out something new for me.  Murakami actually does have a new novel out, but I've learned that it won't be translated into English until September 2011 (argh!), so I have a long ways to wait.

Anyways.

"South of the Border, West of the Sun" appears to be second-tier Murakami.  I don't mean that in terms of its value, just its profile: you almost never see that title discussed, unless it's part of a pretty comprehensive list of Murakami works.  I haven't run across anyone who declares this book to be their favorite work from him.  I can sort of understand this situation, since the book doesn't have the kind of outrageous, attention-grabbing scenes that you find in masterpieces like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World or Kafka on the Shore.  It does have a great heart, and the quietly powerful skill of Murakami.

It's hard to compare this novel to other novels that he's written, but it actually feels similar to a lot of his short fiction.  He's written plenty of books that don't involve green monsters or bakery assaults, books which are more tuned towards the quiet lives of people and their relationships, or lack of relationships.  SotBWotS fits within this category.  There are a few haunting touches that lead to a slightly destabilized world, but on the whole it's far more realistic than most of his novels.

MINI SPOILERS

Continuing with the short story analogy, this book feels kind of like the longer view of one of those tales.  The narrator describes his life, from childhood through his late 30's, and all the important events that occurred and people he met.  Many of those individual relationships could have driven a short piece of fiction on their own, but here you don't encounter anything in isolation.  You can see how a childhood friendship and a teenaged infatuation later impacted an adult love.  Perhaps most impressively, you can see the everpresent Murakami rootlessness, but it only lasts for the man's 20's.  Later he meets new people, falls in love, starts a family, and actually cares about what he does for a living.  Overall there's a far stronger impression of dynamism here, as opposed to static views of immutable situations.

Geez, I think I just made three programming references in that last sentence.  Apologies.

Oh, and there's sex.  Lots and lots of sex.  For what it's worth, it's much more conventional than most Murakami sex scenes.

The "supernatural" elements in this book are so few that I can easily enumerate them all here.  First, Hajime meets a man who gives him an envelope stuffed full of cash.  A decade later, that envelope disappears.  Second, Shimamoto has a habit of disappearing for long stretches of time, most dramatically when she leaves an isolated cabin without a vehicle.  And... I think that's about it.  I did enjoy these flourishes, though here they are definitely an accent and not the main purpose.

END SPOILERS

All together, SotBWotS is a great read for people who enjoy Murakami's writing style.  I wouldn't recommend it to people encountering Murakami for the first time, or to those who are mainly attracted by his plots, since this doesn't have much in common with them.  Still, it's clearly the same person writing it, and that person is one of the best authors around.  Speaking for myself, I'll take everything I can get.