Kafka on the Shore (2006) by Haruki Murakami

Ah, Murakami-san. I've quite liked some of your work, but the more surreal of your novels have always seemed to fall flat for me. 

Kafka on the Shore is perhaps the most surreal novel of his I've read, and it's trash. I'm sure that statement will ruffle some feathers, and I'm sure some will simply retort that I 'didn't get it', but in my opinion Kafka on the Shore is utter nonsense with very little substance and almost nothing beyond some unique imagery to make it a worthwhile endeavor to carve through its near-500 pages of bullshit.

Reading Kafka on the Shore is like meeting an oddball at a party. A skinny fellow at the snack stand with dyed blue hair and wearing a smart blue blazer and tie, sipping a non-alcoholic selzer-water and eating fritos dipped in honey mustard. What a curious fellow, you think, he must be interesting! You chat him up about all manner of things; turns out he's actually a lepidopterist. Whoa, never met one of those before! He doesn't drink, nor use recreational drugs, because he believes they're poison and wants to keep his body and mind sharp. He has incredibly deep knowledge about things you've never even considered. His job is to manage inventories of cold film storage for classic TV shows, so he spends his days around golden age television cans and regales you with odd stories about Car 54 and Gunsmoke and how TV just ain't how it used to be. You take down his number and want to hang out with him to hear more about these things you've never thought about; to learn more about the dark corners of life experience you've never even considered.

You hang out with this individual a few more times, learning more and more. But eventually, something starts to bother you. Beyond these oddball pursuits, you begin to get a sense that there's just not much there. You eventually learn he simply hates the taste of beer, and he actually does smoke marijuana every so often. He doesn't actually collect butterflies yet, though he is interested in the hobby. At the moment he just likes to read a lot of Nabokov and finds the hobby a fascinating affectation, so he seeks to emulate it. His vocation is not something he's actually passionate or romantic about—he simply works part time on contract at a warehouse that happens to store these classic TV film canisters, and he's caught a glimpse of them before.

You realize he's just a guy. A regular dude. There's really not all that much special about him. He goes to work, he comes home, he pays his bills. The things he recognizes as being cool are pretty interesting, you admit, but he doesn't have such a deep, compelling knowledge of them after all.

He has nothing to say beyond, "Hey man, check this out. Isn't this pretty cool?".

That's Murakami's fiction to me.

Haruki Murakami

On the surface Murakami's work seems profound, different, fresh, compelling. But when you dig a bit deeper, there's very little actual substance there. Murakami's fiction is very light on story and humanity, and very heavy on imagery that doesn't actually say much at all. The more I read his stuff, the more I suspect he's an utter charlatan, carefully crafting his fiction so that what you're reading appears to be the tip of the iceberg when, in reality, it's a cardboard prop painted blue floating along on the sea, depthless.

Writing fiction is a strange beast. In my experience, it feels almost like reverse-dreaming. Instead of sleeping and passively experiencing random imagery from your brain, you are drawing that imagery from your brain and putting it down in order to augment whatever story you're planning on telling. You're actively sorting through your own lived experience and pulling pieces from your subconscious to shape your story and your characters in a compelling, genuine manner. Murakami does this exceptionally well. He's completely honest with himself, and the imagery which seems to fascinate him is often quite enchanting. Often times the quirks he's depicting are enough to carry the scene, alone, and his workmanlike prose facilitates this perfectly by getting out of the way and letting the images take center stage.

But there's just not much else there. Murakami is a poor storyteller. His characters are frequently flat and seem to make arbitrary, nonsensical decisions. Many of his novels feature contrived conflict that isn't really all that interesting, or (as is the case in Kafka), no conflict at all. His pacing is often too blown out because he needs to give himself such space to indulge in these episodes of wading into the odd imagery and scenarios he finds so fascinating. Further—and perhaps most egregious—at times he treats his fiction as if it's little more than an avenue from which to explore his fetishistic interests; eg. young girls' breasts, or being masturbated by your sister. If you're hitting me with your kinks, you better be saying something important with them. If you're not using them as a means to a storytelling end that's going to make your fiction more thematically impactful, then you're just engaging in literary masturbation. It's leaving me feeling dirty, like the writer is pulling a Louis C.K. and sitting in the corner jacking off and I'm standing there in the locked room, forced to watch.

The more I read Murakami, the more it feels like his fiction is just a vehicle from which he imparts ideas he finds interesting. That's not a problem, really. The best writers also do this—George R.R. Martin cannot stop depicting romantic hearts stuck in cynical worlds, Ernest Hemingway is utterly entranced with the idea of death and how each mortal man and beast faces it, James Joyce is obsessed with Catholicism and Irish politics. What Murakami lacks, though, and what's so severely damaging to his work, is that there's no storytelling foundation on which all of this imagery might sit, rendering such imagery ultimately meaningless. Martin's characters are so human you'll swear they're standing right next to you, Hemingway's devastating plotting will break you for a full week, Joyce's prose and humor will make you feel the love and the passion of his characters' so deeply your chest cavity will burn with their fervor. Murakami, however, only has his imagery and not much else. His books are a set of really nice windows and skylights sitting on a lawn, with no house into which they might be installed. While they might have augmented a proper story enough to propel it into the realm of profundity, they have zero utility. Yeah, those are some great windows, but who the hell needs just a window? Alone, they're useless. Just like Murakami's imagery.

Kafka on the Shore is a nonsensical story with vast pretentions of grandeur. Murakami gives us two empty vessels to follow; an angsty, horny teenager and a developmentally disabled old man. The teenager reads as if he's written to be intelligent and interesting, though I found him mostly petulant and boring. The old man was the more likable of the two, and his quirk was something I found endearing and interesting, but ultimately not much is done with it. The real problem is that neither of these characters have any concrete conflict driving them forward. There's very little forcing them to change, and so we meander through the plot with them, never fully invested in their struggles, never fully caring about who they are. Murakami hits you with some shit, sure—an incest fetish, some shocking depictions of violence against animals, and various bits of nonsense I find impossible to take seriously (building a magic flute, oh my!)—but without a concrete story to carry it along, it all felt meaningless and silly, like a Jackson Pollock, except it's just random house paint spilled on a driveway rather than something constructed on an actual canvas.

If you enjoy the surreal and aren't a big stickler for, you know, actual storytelling? Maybe you'll like this book. I hated it and I'm eager to move on from it to something else.

⭐

Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) by Haruki Murakami

I've read a lot of Murakami lately so I I took my time with this one.

Murakami seems to have begun to come into his own (or at least discovered some new inspiration) after the publishing of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle . Both this and Wind-Up Bird were deeper, more fruitful reads than the book published immediately prior, South of the Border, West of the Sun —Which I would not recommend.

Sputnik Sweetheart has a more intriguing premise than most of Murakami's novels, which start off relatively uninspired and then careen between different, nonsensical-yet-intriguing vignettes. It also pleasingly abandons some of the more common tropes he had been relying on up until this point that have begun to grow tired to somebody like me who has read most of his stuff. There are no lost cats and no wells (though they're mentioned to cheesy effect to those of us who have read Murakami before), though jazz does make an appearance. Sumire is probably his best, most 'whole' female character yet, and his exploration of her sexuality feels genuine rather than the perverted musings of a horny old man (a common criticism of Murakami that I've never found accurate), and he avoids any cloying sentiment that often gets caught up in love-triangle-literature. It's also paced far better than South of the Border—which was a novel clocking in at a scant 200-pages that felt like it was twice that length due to its meandering melodrama and the monotonous time we were forced to spend in the protagonist's less-than-pleasing brainspace.

This paciness was helped by Murakami's strong scenario writing. Being stranded on the top of a stopped Ferris Wheel, for example, is such a viscerally terrifying experience, much like the well of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. That said, you can still see the same tropes redressed in different clothing; though the Ferris Wheel incident is affecting, it serves little difference in the story as the well did in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. So I do still sometimes have a difficult time putting up with Murakami's formulaic tendencies, but this book is well-executed enough that it's still worth reading.

Sputnik Sweetheart is as underrated a Murakami book as Dance Dance Dance , except you don't have to read three books before Sputnik for it to have its full impact, like you do with Dance since it's book #4 in a series.

I'm looking forward to getting into some of Murakami's most famous works—Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84—as my chronological read of Murakami's oeuvre continues.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Elephant Vanishes (1980-1991) by Haruki Murakami (In-Progress)

The Elephant Vanishes is Murakami's introductory volume to his short fiction. As with other authors of short fiction, this first volume is somewhat rougher than some of his later stuff.

Reading Murakami is akin to comfort food to me—not because of his weirdness or magical realism, but because I find his prose atypically easy for me to consume. It's not beautiful, nor is it workmanlike. It fits somewhere between the two, almost inconsequential. But, puzzlingly, the way the it seems to flow just 'works' for me. I lack the ability to describe it in much better terms. I suspect it's just a 'me-thing'.

That said, I do have a recurring complaint regarding Murakami. I find that he sometimes seems to struggle with populating his work with enough substance to make his more stylistic, imaginative departures worthwhile. There's the formulaic nature of his novels that rears its ugly head once you've read a couple of his books already and know what's about to be coming: the ear fetish, the lost cats, the psychic teenage girls—everyone knows his tropes and has discussed them ad nauseam. But there's also a distinct lack of substance in so much of his work that I find is rarely mentioned. Murakami badly wants to be this abstract, postmodern writer, and I can't help but feeling that so much of his "magical realism" is frequently just complete and utter bullshit. I suspect that he doesn't actually have much to say in many cases, so he's ambiguous by default to try and cover up his lack of substance and affect a more surreal narrative than is actually warranted.

This is not always the case, of course—but even some of his best work is rendered uneven by seemingly arbitrary turns of weirdness that have no justification and add no value to the narrative or the ideas Murakami is trying to explore. An early story in this collection titled The Kangaroo Communique is a good example of this. The perspective, the narrator's voice, and the premise work together to create an intriguing narrative, but it doesn't really seem to have much to say, so it ends up going nowhere and feels more like space wasted in a style-over-substance exercise. 

The best writers of short fiction—the Raymond Carvers and the Shirley Jacksons—say a whole lot with relatively few words. In stories such as The Kangaroo Communique, however, Murakami seems frequently to say relatively little, and the unique voice with which he relays the story to us does not do enough to carry it.

The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami

My experience with Murakami is akin to a couple entering their third decade in marriage. I've already read quite a bit of Murakami's work, so I'm intensely familiar with both his strengths and weaknesses. And I don't believe this collection is entirely weak. On the contrary, there are quite a few stories present here which I find quite worthwhile. 

Barn Burning is an incredible piece of short fiction. It's one of my very favorite short stories I've ever read. It's so strong that I'd consider this entire collection worth a purchase just for this one. The popularity of Barn Burning subsequent to the Korean film adaptation in 2018 led me to review it separately—see the full review here. Short summary: It's an excellent, ambiguous piece of fiction that accomplishes everything it sets out to do. It's choice Murakami.

Another solid story was On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, in which Murakami takes the notion of I-should-have-said and uses the framework to construct an affecting short story focused on hindsight and missed opportunities. There's a nice parable here on losing the ability to communicate that continues to ring true among the less socially apt of us—of which I include myself. So I found it to be entertaining and meaningful, and Murakami has returned to this particular motif in future work as well.

Note: This is an in-process review. I'll continue to update it as I read more of this collection.

South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992) by Haruki Murakami

Perhaps this book is the result of Murakami looking at the protagonists he's written before and realizing, finally, that they just aren't all that interesting.

Our protagonist, Hajime, is typical of the men Murakami writes—Unfulfilled, uninteresting, and with no strong desires or momentous events earlier in their lives to give shape to what identifies most protagonists to us: What they want. They rarely show any agency, taking part in the story merely by being the vessel we as the reader use to experience the various weirdlings and surreal occurrences that Murakami dreams up and throws into his books. Murakami's protagonists are almost universally boring, unfulfilled, weak, middle-aged men to whom various interesting things happen to happen to. He's never been a great character writer—or even a good one—And perhaps this was the first time when he actually considered that fact.

South of the Border, West of the Sun is a book about finding purpose and fulfillment in a post-modern world dominated by capitalism, but for nine of its tenths it's focused mostly on masquerading as a book about relationships, sex, and how we sometimes make choices that hurt the people around us. For the vast majority of my read, I wasn't sure that Murakami was even aware of how unlikable his protagonist was. I waffled back and forth considering whether Murakami was blithely unaware of the supreme asshole his protagonist was, or whether Murakami was purposefully crafting a narrative subversion with consideration of his typical protagonists.

Towards the end of the novel it becomes obvious, as the protagonist himself undergoes an epiphany in which he considers his own self-centered, vapid, worthless character and finally begins to consider the people he has hurt throughout the story. The problem with this narrative is that it requires a better character writer than Murakami to pull off. The main character is an empty, uninteresting asshole, and the side characters all lack depth. Additionally, this book lacks Murakami's ethereal, quiet, melancholy atmospheric ability—One of my favorite things about his writing.

This is just an okay Murakami novel. Towards the end it became clear what he was trying to do, but most of the book is an unenjoyable read, and the conclusion left me questioning whether or not he said what he was trying to say in the best possible way.

⭐⭐

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) by Haruki Murakami

As part of Murakami's early oeuvre, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World stumbles a bit in its execution. He was clearly still perfecting his ability to blend these ideas into a meaningful narrative. Hard-Boiled takes a long time to get going, and it's the most exposition-loaded Murakami novel I've ever read (and I've read quite a few at this point), but there's a reason for that. This is a book with an exceptionally big brain: Murakami has long been inventive and imaginative, but Hard-Boiled sees him dipping into science fiction for the first time, exploring notions of transhumanism, biocryptography (is that a thing? it is now), and altering levels of consciousness.

Unfortunately, to make room for such a large brain, it seems to lack a heart. While Murakami's protagonists are usually steeped in malaise and postmodern ennui, I've always related to them on some level. But I found little reason to care about the protagonist in Hard-Boiled, or any other character within its pages. I found myself wishing for a genuine antagonist, as well—I felt Murakami didn't go far enough with the potential mad scientist angle. So while this book tickled my brain, it seldom made me feel any emotion or root for or against any of its characters—something rare, considering Murakami has remained affecting to me despite reading quite a few of his works. It's got a lot of big ideas, but it's light on narrative, and thus reads more like a cloud of neat stuff to think about than an actual story.

That's not to say it isn't a worthwhile read, though. I've never seen Murakami this direct with his weirdness. He's more focused on exploring these themes and ideas than I've yet seen and he manages to remain topical throughout the novel, whereas in other books I feel he dithers about in too ambiguous a manner and often throws stuff at the wall to see what sticks rather than proceeding with a specific idea in mind to explore.

If you're a fan of science fiction and you like reading about big ideas then you'll probably love this. But if you're interested in reading a story and relating to the struggles and changes of human characters, this will leave you wanting in the same way it did me.

It's not a bad book. It's just not to my taste. I've always preferred Murakami's more concrete work (rare among his readers, I know), but I still enjoyed the places he took my brain with Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I just had trouble finding a reason to care about all of the mind-bending window dressing beyond thinking "oh, that's interesting".

⭐⭐

Dance Dance Dance (1988) (The Rat, #4) by Haruki Murakami

Work hard. Live modestly. Look at the big picture.

Dance Dance Dance is surprisingly excellent.

Not that I expected it to be bad. Rather, I didn't really expect anything because Dance hardly gets talked about at all within discussions of Murakami's work. I've heard almost exclusively that Kafka on the Shore or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are his best novels, with small but adamant groups also touting Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or sometimes 1Q84. But there is almost no mention of Dance Dance Dance in these discussions.

Perhaps this is because so few people have read Murakami extensively. He has a reputation for having a short shelf-life, mostly due to the fact that he reuses many of the same tropes over his novels. The fact that Dance is the fourth episode in Murakami's only multi-novel series leads me to believe that people either shy away from picking this up without first reading the prior novels—rightly so, in my opinion—or, they're reading it independently without the proper lead-in of the prior episodes— Hear the Wind Sing , Pinball, 1973 , and A Wild Sheep Chase —which is a mistake, in my opinion, since many of the events in Dance are a callback to prior novels that require your experience with them to have the proper impact.

No matter the reason, my point is that this book doesn't have the glowing reputation it deserves.

This is the sixth Murakami novel I've read as of my typing this, and I've read all three of the prior books of the Rat series, so perhaps I'm uniquely equipped to receive the quality of this book in ways which not many other folks reviewing this on Goodreads are.

I resolved to read Murakami's works in order of publishing after completing Norwegian Wood (1987) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) earlier this year. Having finished the first three entries in the Rat series (1979-1982), I picked up Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) and Dance Dance Dance (1988) in audiobook form to consume while traveling in Southeast Asia. I began both nearly at the same time and intended to "read" them concurrently since I had just finished A Wild Sheep Chase and wanted the events of that book fresh in my mind when reading Dance—which is a direct sequel to it—but I found Dance to be so compelling right out of the gate that I set down Hard-Boiled almost immediately.

Witnessing Murakami's personal progress as a writer throughout The Rat series is a treat. Each book makes huge leaps in quality. The first two are almost not worth reading. A Wild Sheep Chase is a good book, but very uneven, as its first half meanders along before closing out strongly. And then comes Dance, by far the best book in the series and its conclusion. You can chart Murakami's growth as a writer through each entry in the series even without considering his two "experiments" of his early career (Norwegian Wood, a comparably reserved coming-of-age sexual awakening tale which I loved, and the aforementioned Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a mind-bending trip down the rabbit-hole blending cyberpunk and fantasy which I'm currently in the middle of). And that growth is astounding. He went from a writer who, though already skilled at putting his thoughts into words, was not quite skilled at expressing exactly what he wanted to say, or how he wanted to say it—and perhaps aping other writers he enjoyed a bit too much along the way—to a fully fledged postmodern writer in his own right. It's a bit tough to get through some of his early stuff, but I greatly enjoyed witnessing the growth firsthand and I'm glad I did it.

I've left too many loose ends hanging. So now I'm trying to tie up as many of those loose ends as I can.

In the most concise manner in which I could judge it, I'd describe Dance Dance Dance as the culmination of early Murakami and the best work of his early career.

I find it most easy to compare this book primarily to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, one which nearly everyone who has read Murakami has picked up since it's one of his top two or three most famous works. I find them to be quite similar to one another. They share similar themes of existential worry, the monotony of having your spirit pulverized by ennui, and thirtysomething protagonists who feel lost and unaccomplished. They also feature the same common Murakami tropes that he's famous for: The lost girlfriend/wife, the platonic teenage companion, psychic characters, otherworldly locations. The difference is that Dance executes its ideas in such a more polished, concise, cohesive manner than Wind-Up Bird does. Dance resolves nearly all of the questions remaining from its prior entries along with those within its own pages. Wind-Up Bird doesn't have the added baggage of previous entries and still it does not even answer its own compelling questions; something that bothered me about it and damaged its value in my judgment. Dance also feels far more smoothly paced. Probably it lacks the highest highs of Wind-Up Bird—Kamiya's backstory, or the cause of Cinnamon's dumbness—but it comes nowhere near the lows Wind-Up Bird dips into with its needless ambiguity and contrived weirdness. Dance is also incredibly readable, with Murakami's signature smooth, fluid prose that turns a 10-minute reading session into a ninety minute block in which you realize too late that you're now only going to get 6 hours of sleep before waking for work tomorrow.Murakami's character writing shows a huge improvement over past books, and even trumps some of his characters in later books such The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Gotanda, the narcissistic actor with perhaps more than a bit of a serial killer streak, was a favorite of mine. He reminded me a bit of the Trader in Murakami's short story Barn Burning. I also really liked the character of Yuki, whom I found sounded like a genuine teenager—the teenage "voice" being something that seems par-for-the-course for middle-aged writers to bungle in frequently hilarious ways. The minor characters are also colorful and memorable; the one-armed poet Dick, the subpar and uninspired yet still successful writer named Hiraku Makimura—clearly a self-deprecating reference to the author himself after Murakami's own success following the more mainstream Norwegian Wood, which he published only a year prior to Dance Dance Dance. These characters occupy little pagecount but are memorable diversions nonetheless and serve to break up what could have been a bit of a dry narrative without them.

Like other Murakami lovers, I often find it difficult to articulate why he's so appealing to me. I don't care much for his themes because, as a relatively happy person who is satisfied with my life and facing no existential crisis, I don't much relate to them. And I'm not a huge fan of fantasy or magical realism in the first place. But when I read Murakami he has a way of communicating to me that seems more efficient than other authors are able to. I read him more quickly, I'm more easily able to grasp the ideas he's exploring than other authors, and I feel like I know his characters more intimately with much less exposure. It's as if he has a direct link to my brain. I love reading his work.

Murakami's prose is often akin to comfort food to me—easily and pleasurably consumed, though rarely as soulfully nourishing and impactful as a lot of classic literature I've read. I tear through his work at speed but rarely double back to reread certain passages, or pause to let their beauty wash over me as I've done with English written by Nabokov or a Brontë. Dance Dance Dance, however, is the first time I've felt that notion challenged, and for it to shine even through translation is remarkable.

This book features more profound and poetic passages than any other work of his I've read thus far:

“The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.”

“Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.”

“Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.”

“People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.”

“I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated. I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else.I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality.”

“She was truly a beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all.”

If you like Murakami, Dance Dance Dance is a must-read. It's gorgeous, fluid, profound, and pacey. It's the high point of his work so far, but the barrier to entry is somewhat high, because if you want to get the most out of Dance Dance Dance, I highly recommend that you read The Rat series in order:

1) Hear the Wind Sing (1979)
2) Pinball, 1973 (1980)
3) A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)
4) Dance Dance Dance (1988)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Barn Burning (1983) by Haruki Murakami

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read Barn Burning yet!

I'm a fan of Murakami's work and this is his first piece of short fiction I've read, picked up when I had heard that it was adapted into a film by a South Korean filmmaker last year.

I had heard Murakami's novels were far better than his short stories so I wasn't expecting much and Barn Burning completely blew me away. Murakami skillfully sets the scene with interesting characters and disarms the reader with their interactions with one another. The story takes a darker turn from there and ends ambiguously.

I've had issues with some of Murakami's ambiguity in the past. I thought that it was not used particularly well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—a book I really liked but was made frustrating by an overuse of oddity and ambiguity that came off as contrived and just-because. This is not the case with Barn Burning, which I found perfectly balanced in its use of ambiguity which heightens the story's impact and leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

NOTE: MASSIVE SPOILERS FOLLOW THE IMAGE BELOW! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

My interpretation of the ambiguous ending: I find it overwhelmingly likely that our faux-pyromaniacal Trader murdered the girl.

• He confesses to the lesser crime of serial arson (but still a shocking revelation if you're not aware the guy is actually a freaking serial killer) to the narrator, providing a hint, as serial killers are wont to do to feed their arrogance after having gotten away with their crimes so many times before. And, not expecting the narrator to go to such lengths to try and witness his act of arson, the killer inadvertently outs himself as having lied about the arson when clearly none has been committed. The "barn" he had planned to "burn" that he confessed was "very close" to the narrator was instead the woman in the story--their mutual friend, but the narrator's for longer--and probably he had been planning to kill her since had met her in Algiers.

• The woman wants the narrator to meet her at the airport after returning from abroad with the trader. The narrator is puzzled by this, as seemingly he has been asked there for no reason. But clearly she wants a third party present because she is still a bit creeped out or uncomfortable around the trader and wants a more trusted friend present as a chaperone in case the trader gets weird back on home soil.

• Eichmann's potential execution by suffocation is mentioned, perhaps hinting to us that the murderer smothers her or suffocates her in some other fashion.

• She disappears without a trace, yet mail keeps arriving at her apartment afterwards so that the box is full when the narrator tries to visit her after her murder, signalling to us that she had not moved out in a normal manner and simply not told anyone. She had all but disappeared, informing nobody.

• Before the woman's disappearance the narrator uses cannabis with the trader and notes that the trader looks "different": notably worn down, a bit disheveled, and with 2 days growth of beard. Presumably this is because he needs a "fix" (in this case, good ole murder) in regular intervals or his mental (and thus, physical) health deteriorates. And when the narrator stumbles upon him again several months after the woman disappears/is murdered, the trader is in the same slovenly condition because he must burn a barn kill every couple of months by his own admission. Further, his car outside the coffee shop exhibits this same fatigued, dirty visage as the trader just prior to killing the woman, and the trader himself is inside chugging multiple coffees, which would indicate he is not feeling at peak and needs to kill sometime soon.

This is a great short story and not at all what I expected from Murakami. I loved it and I can't wait to read more of his short fiction.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) (The Rat, #3) by Haruki Murakami

I read A Wild Sheep Chase just after completing Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (the two notably rough entries with which Murakami began his writing career) and having previously read Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (my dual introductions to both melancholy, introspective, concrete Murakami and magical, weird, surrealist Murakami). I felt after completing these four works I was well-equipped to handle the rest of Murakami's work, and I'll be proceeding in order of publication from here on out.

With Sheep you can feel Murakami beginning to warm up to what would become his signature style. It's hard to compare it to his first two novels as the scope is so much vaster, but it's generally a more worthwhile work in my opinion, with bigger ideas that are more skillfully executed. Gone is the meandering, arbitrary cloud of a narrative that made up his first two novels, replaced by a more structured narrative focused on the oddball MacGuffin that is searching for a demonic, possessive Sheep. This plotline was so weird it was impossible for me to take seriously, which may have been the point. Luckily, this being my 5th Murakami novel, I've long since learned to stop trying to analyze where Murakami's taking me or how he's getting me there and begun to switch off my brain and allow him to do his thing.

This book felt like a rougher first pass of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. While it resolves much of its ambiguity in a far more satisfying way than that book (unsurprising considering Wind-Up Bird was subject to a damaging series of editing upon its translation that removed several key portions of the story), but its pace is not as tight as Bird's, and its diversions and its motifs are not nearly as compelling as those found in its descendant. Sheep starts very slowly and only get moving at a satisfying paced after about two-thirds of the way into it. Wind-Up Bird felt like it was cruising along the entire way and felt much lighter than its 600 pages, while Sheep feels every bit of its 350. I also felt his prose was rougher and that this book lacked some of the more quotable pieces of wisdom often present in Murakami's work, but perhaps that's just subjective. This is really all to be expected as Murakami was just beginning to find his style. That said, from all the praise I've heard for this novel (it's named in his Wikipedia page as one of his most noteworthy novels), I expected it to be a bit better. It certainly helped me to discover what The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does so well, and it helped me learn just how much I actually enjoyed reading that book.

That's not to say that A Wild Sheep Chase is not worth reading. If you're a Murakami fan, you'll probably enjoy it. I liked it, even though it was uneven and lacked the polish that his later work features. Murakami has a tendency to run off on tangents, which, at face value, seem as if they'd disrupt the pace and devolve into boring exposition. For example, late in Sheep, Murakami spends a dozen pages describing, in detail, how a village in northern Hokkaido was settled. To summarize: Some dudes migrate as far north as possible to get away from paying debts they owe. They learn to farm with the help of a local Ainu (indigenous peoples of the island), they deal with adversity, start families, etc. It sounds like it'd be boring as all hell, but Murakami's talent as a masterful storyteller somehow allows him to spin such seemingly shoehorned tangent into a compelling piece of the whole. It's one of the things I love about him, and something stands out greatly as a strong feature of his work as a whole. A lot of folks will criticize Murakami's tendency to repeat the same calling cards in each novel (passive male protagonists, lost cats, ear fetishes, psychic women, cooking, jazz and classical music... Do I need to continue?), but these diversions into niche historical storytelling, along with his much more obscure, surreal metaphysical themes, are what make each Murakami novel a new enough experience for me to continue exploring his work. I may not always like how his protagonists lack agency, his characters lack depth, or how his plotting always seems too coincidental and convenient, but I can put up with that stuff to experience what I love about him--even in one of his rougher novels, like this one.

 I've got a trip to southeast Asia involving a couple of 17+ hour flights coming up next week, and I've loaded up on the audiobooks. I'll be listening to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World over one of these flights, a novel I'm greatly looking forward to, as it is one of the few (including only Kafka on the Shore from his entire oeuvre) that seems to have garnered universal love from among the Murakami faithful.

I'm excited to be through Murakami's training-wheels phase and to start cracking into some of his most well-respected work.

⭐⭐⭐

Pinball, 1973 (1980) (The Rat, #2) by Haruki Murakami

Both this and Hear The Wind Sing (Murakami's first two novels, which he wrote while owning and operating a jazz club for a living) are nowhere near as poor as I felt I'd been led to believe. Hearing Murakami speak about them in interviews, you'd have thought they were both terrible. And this is not quite so in my opinion.

Pinball, 1973 dials down the Vonnegut-aping of its predecessor and seems a far more focused approach as well. Murakami was slowly finding his voice and made significant progress with this effort. The book is also far more beautiful than Murakami's first even though it feels like he isn't trying as hard and is just going with the flow more often. I found certain excerpts profound.

Murakami captures the feeling of being existentially lost exceptionally in the Rat's chapters and I really enjoyed them. I enjoyed those of the nameless protagonist substantially less, though Murakami's fluid, enjoyable prose kept me reading. The twins come off as a shameless example of wish fulfillment and I found them hokey, but I thought the protagonists interactions with his co-worker were quite charming and genuine and I found the minutiae of his translation job oddly compelling. The pinball portions were presented in an interesting manner, though I'm a layman with no prior interest in the game.

This is an enjoyable read but I still feel like Murakami doesn't quite tie things together enough to feel like a cohesive novel. Murakami meanders about in passages that are little more than glorified journal entries. So far my experience with Murakami has indicated that his books are often made up of superb quality parts that don't necessarily come together as well as they could. This book doesn't even attempt to. Readers criticize Murakami's contrived MacGuffins but at least they drive the narrative forward. His first two novels, though they touch on some intriguing ideas, seem to start nowhere and go nowhere.

That said, you can see when comparing this book and his first that his ideas, themes, and motifs, though small now, are building like a snowball rolling downhill and gradually taking on mass as they become bigger, more complex, more developed, and thus more compelling, as they are in future books. And not only do the vignettes get better, but the books feel more cohesive as well.

Pinball, 1973 is just okay. It's flawed, but still better than I expected.

⭐⭐

My read-through of Murakami's entire oeuvre continues with A Wild Sheep Chase next, and I'm really looking forward to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Dance Dance Dance, both of which I've heard very good things about. (I've already read Norwegian Wood , my introduction to Murakami, which is why I'll be skipping that though it was published between Hard-Boiled and Dance)

NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS

The Rat spent many tranquil afternoons settled in his rattan chair. When he began to drift off, he could feel time pass through his body like gently flowing water. As he sat, hours, days, weeks went by. Occasionally, ripples of emotion would lap against his heart as if to remind him of something. When that happened, he closed his eyes, clamped his heart shut, and waited for the emotions to recede. It was only a brief sensation, like the shadows that signal the coming of night. Once the ripple had passed, the quiet calm returned as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.

Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there" was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.

When the sun went down, and touches of blue filtered into the fading afterglow, an orange lamp would light up in the knob of the bell and slowly begin to revolve. The beacon always pinpointed the onset of nightfall exactly. Against the most gorgeous sunsets or in dim drizzling mist, the beacon was ever true to its appointed moment: that precise instant in the alchemy of light and dark when darkness tipped the scales.

Hear the Wind Sing (1979) (The Rat, #1) by Haruki Murakami

I really like Murakami. There's something about the way he writes and tells stories that really clicks with me. I've read two of his novels already (Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; loved the former and liked the latter) and both flew by very quickly. I enjoyed them enough that I made it a point to read more Murakami, so I decided to start with Hear the Wind Sing—his very first novel—and make my way forward chronologically from there.

I've read quite a bit of internet discussion on Murakami and the general consensus is that he tends to burn you out after you've read just a few of his books since he reuses so many of the same themes and tropes. I started to worry that maybe I was making a mistake picking this up, like I was 'wasting' my 2-3 Murakami books I'd get to enjoy before I got tired of him and wouldn't be able to enjoy later favorites of his such as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Sputnik Sweetheart, or Kafka on the Shore—all of which I've heard much praise for and am looking forward to laying into.

I'm happy to say that wasn't the case. I expected a really rough book with Wind, as reception isn't nearly as positive as his later work, and Murakami himself has stated that he's not happy with the book and considers it relatively poor when compared to his post-Sheep work. I ended up liking it more than I expected. I was surprised how developed Murakami's prose already was. I had expected much rougher, but it reads similarly to the later novels that clicked so well with me.

His narrative and characters are very bare, though. It starts strongly when the narrator has an awkward first encounter with a nine fingered girl in which we are placed in media res which immediately grabbed me, but fails to evolve from there and becomes more and more scattered as the novel continues. The characters lack depth, the themes present are weakly explored, and Murakami is prone to stylistic tangents such as odd radio host monologues that don't seem to have much to do with anything, or the portions in which the narrator describes a zany fictional science fiction writer he enjoys (someone had been reading Slaughterhouse-Five around 1979). You can tell Murakami had trouble finding something at the core of this story to write about; something to pull all of these disparate portions of the narrative together. But I suppose that comes with the territory of a first novel by an untrained writer.

I don't regret reading this, but I am looking forward to making my way onward to later novels. It's worth a pick-up for Murakami fans looking to do a full read of his entire body of work like I am, but it's a decidedly poor place to start for the uninitiated.

⭐⭐

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994) by Haruki Murakami

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle yet!

Boy, Murakami is a hell of a storyteller. There were portions of this book that I just could not put down. An event with the veterinarian and the men in baseball uniforms towards the end of the book, in particular, had me slicing through lines with my eyes like an inkjet printer. At the conclusion of that chapter I found my mouth gaping wide open and my lips all dried out. Murakami is that good.

I want to put a warning up-front here: I really liked this book. It's one of the best I've read this year. But this review is going to skew negative. This is precisely because I enjoy the book so much—The good parts are so good that the parts that feel uneven stand out all the more. So, despite reading my coming criticism, please keep in mind that I did still really enjoy this read.

So although the storytelling packs a wallop on the smaller scale, the overarching narrative of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle ended up feeling so disjointed it hampered my enjoyment a bit. I know that sounds contradictory, and that really encompasses a lot of how I feel about this book. I love it, a lot. But I also really dislike portions of it. I can't shake the feeling that many of these episodes would have been better as a mix of short stories and novellas considering the effort it must have taken to tie them together in one 600+ page cohesive narrative. Because so much of it does not feel cohesive. The thread tying all of these branches to the trunk was so thin at times that I didn't really grasp where it was at all. At a certain point I was burning to read through a plot synopsis, absolutely aching to spoil the book for myself. This desire came not from how good the narrative was and how badly I wanted to know the conclusion, nor how hooked I was on Murakami's characters, but because I wanted some assurance that all of this was going to pay off somehow, that Murakami wasn't just making things weird to have them be weird. A lot of it does, and I wasn't disappointed by the story, but neither can I say I felt completely satisfied at its conclusion. Of course, I think that was the goal; this was never meant to be concluded in a neat and satisfying manner.

And that's fine, usually. A good story doesn't have to tie everything together into a nice, pretty bow at the end to be a good story. And this is a weird book. It's pretty out there. I know that's Murakami's thing and that's why people like them, but writing a really weird piece of surrealist fiction is a tightrope act. It's difficult because you can't throw so much odd shit into the narrative that it feels like the odd shit is starting to exist because the writer is thinking to himself "I want this to be a weird book, and here is a weird idea I have. Now where can I shove this in?". And that's the problem I have with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. There's a lot of crap in this book that seems to have no logical reason for existing beyond "Murakami thought up this weird thing and jammed it awkwardly, without reason, into his book".

The weak plotting and characters compound the problem. Welcome to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: or, Every Goddamn Character Is A Psychic. Name every character in this book that doesn't have some kind of supernatural power or affinity. Mamiya perhaps fits the bill, aside from when you consider the psychic experience he had in the well, or the fact that he cannot die when he's on the continent. And maybe Kumiko, but we're led to believe there's something special about her, hence her brother's interest in her. So the only one that really comes to mind is the protagonist's uncle, who appears for a grand total of like 5 pages. Everyone else in this book is a psychic, has some small modicum of clairvoyance, or is magical in some way. Even the goddamn cat has a magic tail. The issue this creates if that for the vast majority of this story is one of these psychics/magic folks--Honda, or Malta, or Creta, or Nutmeg--is telling our protagonist via their magically begotten knowledge to go somewhere or do something, and the protagonist following their words like an obedient dog to move the plot along. It all felt contrived. "Find the cat", "Go down the deepest well", "go people watching", "take all this money and let people lick your face for psychic healing". For the vast majority of this story the protagonist has zero agency whatsoever. He is just following what everyone else in the story tells him. His wife is even missing, and supposedly he's desperate to find her, but he spends three straight days meditating in a well, or he spends more than a week sitting on a bench in Shinjuku doing nothing but people watching simply because, each time, he was told to do so by Honda and by his uncle. It makes no sense. I was yelling my head at him to get off his ass and do something, and was frustrated even further when these seemingly nonsensical choices worked at perfectly for him.

This nonsense continues until the final fifth of the book, in which he begins making bold, dangerous decisions (buying the haunted/cursed/whatever vacant property, hacking in to Cinnamon's computer to send messages, remaining in the "other" world when told to leave because it's dangerous, following the waiter instead of entering room 208, etc) that don't seem to have any logical foundation. It was such a frustrating experience partway through, thinking "this guy doesn't do anything by himself. He's an empty vessel", only to have him prove me wrong by doing a bunch of weird shit for no apparent reason and have it work out. At best, I couldn't take him seriously as a character. I had zero reason to root for him and instead viewed him as a pair of glasses with which I was experiencing the main narrative. At worst, he pissed me off by doing seemingly dumb stuff which worked out in the end, because--Of course! He had some psychic reasoning for doing so to which we, the reader, are not privy for some reason. Murakami is better than this, of course: He shows it in this very book with the strength of the Mamiya and the Nutmeg & Cinnamon chapters, which, though extremely compelling and well written, feel more like optional, disjointed backstory that is unnecessary to the main narrative of Okada's search for his missing wife. It's the best stuff in the entire book and it's only tangentially related to what is supposed to be the main narrative.

I can hear the criticism already, so I feel like I have to make this clear up-front: I don't believe you have to spoonfeed the reader everything, or that 100% of your story has to make sense. A little mystery and ambiguity gives the story legs and lets the reader chew it over in their brain for a while after completing it. It sticks with the reader and provides some lasting impact. But too often I felt Murakami pushed a little too far with the nonsensical weirdness. There were certain scenes that begged for an explanation, that I felt were even rendered cheesy or contrived when left without explanation. As I grew more familiar with this story there were scenes I read that I could immediately tell were never going to be touched again, and it completely removed any intended impact from me: "Alright, so this is just weird to be weird, then". For example: Why the hell does the protagonist ejaculate when "healing" these people, or whatever? There's zero purpose for it, it just happens because it's weird and will make people feel weird when they read it. Why do the people that are "healed" have to tongue kiss the facial mark? What the hell ever happened to Malta and Creta, who just abruptly dropped out of the narrative partway through, and what the hell happened to the dude who climbed the tree and disappear? Who is the faceless man? Why was Nutmeg's husband dismembered? These questions are just a few of the questions I have off the top of my head that I felt required more fleshing out for a proper climactic pay-off. Instead, they're just instances of annoyance that I try not to think about because they ruin my enjoyment of an otherwise intriguing story. That's not to say all the weirdness in this detracts from the story, there are quite a few examples of proper weirdness that I felt was either justified, or logical enough that they added to the story: the episode surrounding the reason for Cinnamon's muteness and how it was relayed was masterful and eerie, Creta's psychic prostitution posed some really interesting questions, the way in which Noboru Wataya is described early in the book is so strange and compelling and I love the idea of he and the protagonist existing as polar opposites of one another, Lieutenant Mamiya's experience in the well in Mongolia was perfectly written and just as weird as you'd expect for an injured, dehydrated man on the verge of death, both brief episodes in which the singer appears strike a perfect balance of utter oddness while also providing some badly needed character development for the protagonist (holy crap, look at this! He does have emotions after all! He gets sad! He gets angry!).

So it's not all weird just to be weird. A lot of the weirdness is justified and added to my enjoyment of the story. This unevenness made me think that perhaps I missed a lot and there were reasons for this ham-fisted weirdness that made them fit better into the story that I just didn't catch. I took to Google after finishing the book and it turns out: Nope, people are just as puzzled as I am. Entire forum threads and Reddit discussions exist based on speculation for the reasons for this weirdness, and the answers inevitably begin to proceed down the "it's allegory/symbolism" avenue. To me, that's stretching the value of having this weirdness to begin with. To you, it may be different. That's for you to judge.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Norwegian Wood (1987) by Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood was a book I devoured.

I typically read multiple books concurrently. One in physical form, one on ereader. An audiobook for driving or menial tasks like washing the dishes. A short story collection in the bathroom.

Everything slipped into the background as I continued reading my first Murakami. Dumas' Monte Cristo and Kafka's Metamorphosis faded into a pleasant bokeh as Murakami's mood and characters sapped my whole focus.

I'd pick it up and disappear down his well for a few hours. It felt like drifting off into a nap. So much of this book is built on imparting a feeling; his prose flows even through translation and carries the mood without resorting colorful words. It reminded me of my favorite film, Lost In Translation, not so much in that they're both set in Japan, but that the real experience comes not so much from the plot, but the feel and the discourse between the characters. It's hard to get much more into discussing the plot without ruining its impact, so I'll just make a couple of lists instead.

Things Norwegian Wood is about: Estrangement, loneliness, sex, relationships, isolation, depression. The value of finding somebody who gets you, whether platonic or romantic. Having a flask of whisky or brandy handy when the going gets tough.

Things reading Norwegian Wood feels like: Firing up an electric blanket on a chilly day. A cup of tea steaming in front of a sunny, morning window. Rain and wet leaves and threadbare sweaters. My girlfriend's dorm room in the winter in sophomore year of college. The song Optimistic by Radiohead.

Since finishing it I've read many reviews calling this book sad, depressing, or melancholy. I was surprised to see this, as the book struck me very differently. It's certainly not a happy book, and plenty of sad things happen within its pages, but I didn't find it overly bleak either, and it's almost totally absent of the cynicism at the root of similar efforts. To me, it's hopeful; a rumination on death, its impact, and how it's a necessary part of life. It's about perseverance and dealing with tragedy rather than being about tragedy itself. I found the ending few paragraphs masterful in this respect; they left me with my head buzzing. I finished the book, closed it, and stared off into space for a few minutes while I thought about what I had just read. I decided that, more than anything else, it left me hopeful.

I loved this book. I found its characters human and real and I enjoyed the way it made me feel. Maybe you will, too.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐