I‘ve just finished reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami for the x time. Murakami is one of my favorite authors in the world wide world, but it’s hard to describe his books.
To be blunt about it, they’re fucking weird.
For example, in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the lead character, a man whose name you never learn, ends up passing through the walls of a dry well into a hotel room. In A Wild Sheep Chase a man is tasked to find a special sheep with a perfect red star on its body. In After Dark a woman who sleeps her life away is transported through an unplugged TV into another world.
Perhaps Murakami is an acquired taste then.
But if you love him, what a delight on the palate he is.
Murakami may put his characters in the most impossible situations from moment to moment (how does a man sitting at the bottom of a dry well pass through its walls into a dimly lit hotel room with a woman in its bed who has a face he can’t see?), but he does it so well that they become the most natural thing.
His stories may be strange and his plot intangible, but that very ephemeral quality forces you to not force his stories into a logical four by four box, but to just let yourself go with the lyrical flow nesting in his prose.
It’s like listening to the jazz he writes so much about; freeze the music at any moment and you can’t make heads or tails out of it, but take it together as a whole, and what sounds like a jumble of random noise all makes sense.
Reading Murakami, I become wrapped in his world, and I find myself leaving my own reality behind. In every one of his novels, there is an inescapable blanket of melancholy that drapes over me quietly, and sometimes a knife is slipped quietly under the covers into the place where I’ve become one with his characters. When reading one of his books, I find myself unable to work, unable to feel, unable to connect with the reality on this side of the world, and it always takes me a while to recover myself from the strange places he’s uncovered, hidden in between his words.
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Hi Alvin,
I love your blog and its simplicity.
And I love the way you put things into words.
Sometimes I feel like the way you write should be the way I write, if only I put more time into polishing my writing skills.
I’ll come back to your blog.
By the way, I enjoyed Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.
To quote you “Reading Murakami, I become wrapped in his world, and I find myself leaving my own reality behind”
I’ll always drop by.
Thank you KC, those are very kind things to say.