1Q84-is it a Bookish Boy's Fantasy Work?

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (2011-in English translation)


My original post on 1Q84  

Is 1Q84 just a  bookish boy's

fantasy novel?

Some general ravings 

question of the day-are the little people in 1Q84 naked when they appear and if some of them are women how come Murakami does not go on and on describing their breasts?

This is a  follow up to my post stimulated by a tweet of wordsandpeace  in which a link to a print review of the book is given.


Here is the tweet which contains a link to the Los Angeles Review of Books review of 1Q84


Tweet that inspired this post by @wordsandpeace




This post is kind of a follow up to the numerous comments on 
my post in which I did voice my disappointment in 1Q84.   Some said I was totally wrong and others said they also thought the same thing and were glad someone said it.    At first I though well maybe I will not post my opinion at all.   Of course I thought my ego might take a bruising if people felt I was simply not intelligent, well educated  or a simply not a good enough reader to "get" 1Q84.   On the other side, I did not want people to see my post as some sort of extreme elitist put down of a popular book.   I read a number of print reviews of 1Q84 (all posted online).  I got the feeling that paid reviewers almost felt they had to at least half way like the book.   I got the feeling many were holding back on their feelings as they knew what those who pay them want them to say about a much anticipated book that will sell big no matter what.


In my post in December of 2009 on Murakami's Dance, Dance, Dance (which I liked a lot) I said Murakami was a "Bookish Boy's" fantasy world writer.   This term was meant to me a play on "Chic  lit"  ( word I never would use).   Here is what I said in explanation of that as it applies Dance, Dance, Dance  (the question is 1Q84 just a bookish boy's fantasy book and if we ask it to be more than that does it then disappoint badly?)


In talking about The Club Dumas a few days ago I characterized it, in a parody of the term "Chick Lit", as belonging to the category of  "bookish boys lit".   By this I mean a book that plays into the fantasies of bookish teenage boys (and the adult versions of that.)   Examples of quality writers who fall in this category are Pynchon, Hemingway, and Dumas.    To me Dance, Dance, Dance is squarely in this category.   (This is not a pejorative label-really it is not-Gravity's Rainbow is on my list of ten best novels ever and it is for sure in this genre.)   One of the characteristic of the genre is the exploration of hidden or darker sides of things, secret knowledge of worlds unknown to ordinary people.    Male characters in works in this genre have uneasy relationships with women.   There is a preoccupation, this is the books expression, with high class hookers.   The narrator of this book reads Jack London and listens all the time to American pop music.   Your bookish boy reads Call of The Wild and The Count of Monte Cristo.   The narrator ofDance, Dance, Dance best friend charges high class prostitutes to his expense account.   

The action picks up.   A number people are killed including several of the prostitutes.   We meet some hard  boiled detectives, your standard seen it all homicide detectives who know enough not to question the owners of expensive call girl rings too much given the level of protection they have paid for.    We get to go along for some fancy meals, paid for by the movie star friend with a lot of  issues in his life, of course.   We get to know some call girls,  a one armed American Vietnam veteran, the 13 year old girl's mother
and a very respectable and nice girl who works at the fancy hotel.   She, of course, is quite beautiful and ends up in love with and in bed with the narrator.  
There are lots of clever plot lines and surprises.   The role of the Sheep Man is meant to baffle us, I think.   There are Science Fiction aspects to the book if the role of the Sheep Man is not seen as a dream or hallucinatory episode

  Dance, Dance, Dance was, to me, a fun read.   It is in the bookish boy genre and one should know that before reading it.    In my classification, a book can be a work of very high quality and be a bookish boy's novel.   Murakami has written a lot of novels.   People who have read them all pretty much put Dance Dance Dance in the middle rank of his books.   Most goodreads.com readers give it four or five stars and every one says it is not his best work.   I guess I would give it four at least.    I look forward to reading his most highly regarded works.   


I know long term readers of my blog were to some extent shocked (though I hope not offended) by my post on 1Q84.   Maybe it was caused because my hopes were so high for the book (I do have the author's pic in my header collage!).   


Look at 1Q84-it seems totally a bookish boy's fantasy book. 


Another question-is Murakami obsessed with breasts?    There are also references to sexual thoughts and conversations with a 13 year old girl by an adult man in Dance, Dance, Dance.   


Somethings are subject to cultural relativism.   I checked and the age of consent for sex is 13 in Japan.  In the Philippines it is 18 as it is in most of the USA and UK.   The Los Angeles Review of Books reviewer said Marukami's obsession with breasts seems a bit "pervy".     Does it seem that way to you?


This quote from Charles Yu's review seems very spot on to me


"There are also, as some readers have noted, a lot of descriptions of breasts in the book. A lot. There may or may not be any relevance or resonance to be found in these (perhaps the asymmetry of Aomame’s breasts is meant to suggest the two moons in the sky, one smaller than the other?). Nevertheless, one passing reference likely would have sufficed, and somewhere in the fourth or fifth or sixth such passage, there is the distinct whiff of perviness. Pervy because of the repetition, but also because, while these descriptions are offered from the POV of a female character (usually Aomame), commenting on either her own body or someone else’s, they don’t sound like a woman speaking. Rather, they sound like a man (or a teenage boy) describing a woman’s breasts, or more specifically, like a teenage boy’s fantasy of a woman describing another woman’s breasts. In addition, there are sex scenes in the book, ranging from silly to rather disturbing, which mostly had me wondering: Are there really people who talk like this during sex? And the love story between Tengo and Aomame, two people who know almost nothing about each other, can at times feel a bit hollow, excessively idealized, lacking the messiness, the unruliness of actual love."{


Does Murakami ever bring a woman into the story (other than the Dowager) without describing the size and shape of her breasts?   


Is the passage in the quote from Yu meant as a joke or is this a desperate  reach for meaning.   The love story between Tengo and Aomame to me is just totally lame.   I can suspend disbelief with the best of them but this asks you to give up any sense of human reality.   Cultural question from me to those who know-is Tengo's having sex with the 17 year old Fuka-Eri acceptable behavior in Japan in the 1980s?   (Oh yes her breasts are described over and over!)


Questions


is there a deep symbolic meaning to all the descriptions of breasts or does the author just like them a lot?


Is sex with 17 year old females considered proper behavior for adult men in Japan circa 1985?   Do you accept Tengo's claim that 17 year old Fuka-Eri somehow used him when they had sex?   


OK on the little people?-Come on does this really not seem silly-can you not read about them and not imagine them  bursting into song as they Dance, Dance, Dance across the pages.    What do they wear, are they naked and if some are women what are their breasts like?   


The figure of the leader and his two body guards.   Is the leader just a child molester with idiots for followers?   


Were you totally bored with the NHK collector material by book two?

The Dowager?-Ok is she right out of a million Gothic novels or what?-this could be a translation issue, partially.    


I am open to totally contrary opinions here so feel free to post any comments you like on this.


I am open to the idea I missed it but only weakly as of now-not feeling that now but Murakami deserves the benefit of the doubt.   Maybe I will reread in a year or two.


Mel u

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (2011 -in English translation-944 pages)

The Reading Life Japanese Literature Project

Prior reviews of Murakami.  

Of the 840 posts on my blog, this is the hardest one for me to write and publish so far.  

Hummm.   Maybe someone needs to say this.      1Q84 is not at all a good work.   I almost feel like saying it flat out stinks.   I have read numerous blog posts analyzing 1Q84 in lofty terms for its  weakness and merits and profundities.        I am sure the status of Huruki Murakami (1949-Japan) is so high that no editor would ever dare say anything to him  as they know the book will be a big seller and a lot of money will be made from it.    I think people, including me, liked some of the other work of Murakami so much that they really wanted 1Q84 to be his War and Peace.  I wanted it to be the book that would get him his Nobel Prize.      There was a lot of prior to publication publicity on this book that had hopes really high.  (A lot of the hype came from book sellers and press reviewers paid for their services who may not have felt comfortable just saying what they really felt.)

The big romance in the book was really not credible.  The little people that figure so heavily in the book reminded me of the Oompa-Loomas in Willie Wonka and the Chocalate Factory.   I wondered what clothes they wore as they emerged from people, did they all have uniforms or what and I was waiting for them to burst into song.   The character of "the dowager" was kind of interesting but, maybe this is the fault of the translators,  to keep calling her that over and over reminded me of something out of a bad rewrite of a Daphne de Maurier novel.  

The novel was very repetitious with the same things being told to us over and over.   I have seen it suggested that  1Q84 should get the infamous "bad sex award".  I got sick of hearing about the life of an NHK collector.    One of the central characters, The Leader, is a serial pedophile.   The main female character seemingly has an immaculate conception with the baby of her old elementary school sweetheart.   The details of how this supposedly happens and their reunion and how it came about are among the really bad parts of the story.

The religious cult that plays such a big part in the book was completely uninteresting.   Kenzaburo Oe has done a much better job with this sort of thing in his Somersault.   

If I had to say what parts of this book I liked best, I would say I liked the descriptions of the bodies of the adult women.  OK and I know this is not a real intellectual reaction on my part!  Murakami is a master at describing  the bodies of women.  (I know this is hardly a complement to the book!)

If I had gotten this book as an ARC from a brand new author I would not have finished it unless I was being paid to read it and I do not   think many others would finish it.

OK who should read this book?   If  like  me,  you are really into the work of Murakami you should probably read this book to experience it for yourself and satisfy your curiosity.   If like me you are very into Japanese lit you probably need to read it.   I bought it  as a  Kindle edition for $11.00 on Amazon.   Please do not pay the full $30.00 price unless that amount of money means nothing to you-just wait a few months and you will be able to buy it for $10.00 or less from an Amazon merchant.     I do not endorse this book to anyone else.     If Murakami produces another novel, I will for sure still give him the earned on his old books respect of reading it but I  will not be as excited to do so as I was when I started 1Q84.

I feel bad to write this but I feel a need to express my feelings.    If some are offended by my words, just look at the 100 plus other posts I have done on Japanese literature, including 11 on Murakami and you will see I am almost never negative on a work I read.   If anything, I sometimes get to carried away with the love of what I read.

I am sorry to be so negative but I want to be honest.  

You can find lots of blog and other posts going into the great depths of this chunkster-just do a book blog search on them.   I think from reading them a lot of people are having  hard time admitting to themselves the truth about this book.

I love the Japanese novel.   There are so many good even great books and short stories. It is an inexhaustible field I will be reading in for the rest of my life.    I do not yet think there is a Japanese novel that could be ranked in the top 10 or maybe even top 40 on a world's best novel list.   For sure 1Q84 does not belong on such a list.

I know some people will not like this post and may wonder if I am having a bad day or something.   No, not as I can see and I look for that if I post something negative.  

Please feel free to tell me I am totally wrong on this.

Mel u

Hard Boiled Wonderland and The Edge of the World by Haruki Murakami

Hard Boiled Wonderland and The Edge of the World by Haruki Murakami (1985, 416 pages)

My Prior Posts on Haruki Murakami


The Reading Life Japanese Literature Project

I think it is a safe bet that one or maybe even the most blogged about new book in translation for the rest of 2011 will be IQ84 by Haruki Murakami (1949, Japan).  It is coming out in October and is nearly 1000 pages long.   I have posted on a number of his novels and short stories over the last two years.   He is one of my favorite writers and his picture is featured in my header collage.   Reading Hard Boiled Wonderland and The Edge of the World almost completes a read of all of his in print translated novels for me.    If he does not win the Nobel Prize for Literature soon, it can only be because the committee does not want to give it to a  Japanese writer so soon after Oe Kenzaburo won in 1994.

Hard Boiled Wonderland and The Edge of the World  could almost be subtitled A Tale of Two Cities.   The odd  number chapters are set in a place called Hardboiled Wonderland.   It is narrated (none of the characters are given names) by a human data encrypter who has been taught how to use his subconscious mind as a key to decoding encryptions.    He works for some sort of government like organization whose work is in turn opposed by a shadowy underground group of people called semiotics who try to steal data from the organization.   It is all very Kafkaesque with strange meetings in odd buildings with officials who both make little sense and seem to have the key to unlocking the secrets that will explain your seemingly senseless life to yourself.

The even numbered chapters are set in a strange very isolated town which is The End of the World.   This section of the novel is very much in the tradition of magic realism and is really brilliantly done.   It is a scary place but for sure an interesting one.   The town is surrounded by a wall nothing can get through in either direction.   The nameless narrator is in the process of being integrated into the very strange life of the town.   His job is to be a dream reader.   There are also lots of unicorns in the town.  One of the common things that does link up both worlds is unicorn skulls.

The puzzle of this novel, among many others, is to see what the structural and thematic connections of the even and odd numbers sections can be seen to be.  If  you know please leave me a comment!

Hard Boiled Wonderland and The Edge of the World is really a fun read.  Like most of his work, there are some sex scenes and Murakami is a master at describing the bodies of women.   In most all of his works, you will find a woman who for no clear reason throws herself at a "nerd" like central male character in the book.    There are all sort of really enjoyable references to mostly American movies and music and western Literature in the book.   People who went to college in the late 1960s will relate well to the Bob Dylan references.

I read both this and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann on my PC, switching back and forth.   Once I thought I was reading Mann's work when I was in fact reading Murakami and admit I was very shocked by what I thought was the quite explicit sex scene that seemed so out of place in Mann.  I laughed at my reaction when I figured it out!

I endorse this book for all Murakami fans (most of whom probably read the book long ago).   I do not suggest it as a first Murakami.    It was translated in 1991 by Arthur Birnbaum.

Will you reading IQ84 soon?

Mel u

Two Edwardian Englishmen take on Haruki Murakami in a Paranormal Short Story Match

"The Cobweb" by Saki (5 pages, 1902
"The Bowman" by Arthur Machen (4 pages, 1917)
"The Elephant Vanishes" by Huruki Murakami (1987, 17 pages)

Can Two Odd Englishmen from the 1910s

Really Stand up to Huruki Murakami

A Paranormal Contest

I am really enjoying participating in Carl V's R I P reading event devoted to Horror and Paranormal Literature.   My last post for it was devoted to short stories by two American authors, O Henry and Sherwood Anderson, and the world's second best short story writer, Guy de Maupassant from France.   

Today I plan to look at two short stories written during the early years of the 20th century by Englishmen and one from the towering Japanese writer Huruki Murakami.   Can two maybe a bit odd Englishmen stand up to one of the world's greatest living authors.

I have posted extensively on Saki and Huruki Murakami in the past (I think I have more posts on Saki than any other book blog) so I will  focus first on Arthur Machen.

"The Bowman" by Arthur Machen

"The Bowman" by Arthur Machen was totally loved by the English reading public on its first publication.   It has to be one of very best uses ever of the short story as  a device for raising public morale during a war.   

Machen (UK-Wales-1863 to 1947) had a huge influence on paranormal writing.   He is best known for his novella The Great God Pan which Stephen King has called possibly the best horror story ever written.   He was a strong influence on P. K. Lovecraft and almost every writer who published in the pulp magazines where horror and paranormal stories got there start.   His life is interesting.  It seems he first developed an interest in the occult when his wife died of cancer.  He was for a time involved with The Order of the Golden Dawn headed by A. E. Waite.   He had a life time belief in "little people" only some can see.  (There is a very good article on his life, background and influence here.)

The story begins on a WWI battleground in France.   The English are being slaughtered in the 1000s by a much larger German army. (This work is understandably very anti-German).   Thousands of brave Englishmen are being cut down by German machine guns and canons.   A highly educated Englishmen recalls the very famous battle of Agincourt in France in 1415 when a greatly outnumber army of English men destroyed a much larger and better equipped French army through the use of long bows.   Every soldier had learned of this battle in school and it is great source of pride to the English.   Suddenly this man calls out, in Latin,  to St George (the patron saint of England) for the help of the Welsh and English archers from this battle just as all seem doomed to a certain death.   Suddenly thousands of what are described as "shadowy" archers appear among the English.   The air darkens completely as millions of arrows are launched at the Germans.   Everywhere on the battle ground we here shouts of "The Archers are here" and "St George has saved us".  The English soldiers were saved.   The German soldiers attempt to retreat but their officers begin to shoot their own men in mass for cowardice but soon the all  the Germans run from the battlefield.  Hundreds of thousands of Germans are found dead on the battlefield but none has a mark on their bodies.   The German  authorities attempt to claim it was a gas attack.    

I think  "The Bowman" was in its place and hour of need, a work of genius.   I think even now anyone who feels he is of English inheritance at all will be moved by this story.  I can see how one could say it is jingoistic but that is what was needed.   I will take a look very soon at Machen's most famous work, The Great God Pan.     My guess, forgetting who is a better writer, that Machen's story will be read widely long after Saki and Murakami are read only by specialists in ancient literature.   

"The Cobweb" by Saki

I really like Saki (Hector Munro 1870 to 1916-UK) a lot.   He wrote a lot of short stories, pretty most all with surprise endings.    Most of the stories are set among the upper crust of society in England in the early years of the 20th century.   His works tend to be gentle satires.   His prose style is very mannered and he may seem effete to some but I love his stories.   He was over the draft age for WWI (43) but he volunteered for service and was killed during the war.   One thing nobody associated him with, including me until I read "The Cobweb", was the paranormal.   One of the unfortunate associations in paranormal/Gothic/occult stories is the assumption that quite old unattractive women are sinister.   "The Cobweb" takes place on a remote farm.   It has passed from hand to hand in a family as people die off.  The only fixture is an old woman who works there.   No living person  can be found who knows how she got to the farm.  It just seems like she has always been there.   The atmosphere of the story is very Gothic.   The woman begins to see traditional occult images of coming death.  Everyone just takes it for granted she is seeing signs of her own death.    This Saki and there is a twist but unlike all of his other stories, it will not make you smile.   This is a story for Saki fans and those who want to read a story of the occult from England in 1902.   

"The Elephant Vanishes" by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami (1947-Japan) is by far the most read Japanese writer in the world today.   Some see him as one day the 3rd Japanese Nobel Prize winner for Literature.    I think his forthcoming IQ84 (October 2011) will be one of the most blogged on books for the rest of the year.     (There is additional background information on him in my prior posts on his work.)

"The Elephant Vanishes" (translated by Jay Rubin) is a very well done and set up story.    To compress things, an old elephant is given to a town by the owners of a local zoo when the land the zoo  is on was sold to developers.   At first the town leaders did not know what to do with the elephant.   No zoo will take him as he is old and they all already have elephants.    To kill him is out of the question so they set up a house for him with airtight security.     He is taken care of by the same elderly man who cared for him many years at the zoo.    One day the elephant just disappears (he was also chained up by his leg with a key only the city leaders had).   Everyone assumes somehow the keeper stole him but it just seems impossible.     The narrator of the story develops an obsession with trying to figure out how the elephant disappeared.   Murakami does his normal great job with the characters in the story.   There is even a failed romance.      I want to leave the ending of this story unspoiled.   Murakami makes use of magic-realism to explain how the elephant disappeared and I found this ending a little forced.

OK how does the dust settle in this read off?

For sure I think "The Bowman" has had and will continue to have the most readers.  Of this story many of its readers love it and that includes new readers.   It has been and will continued to be read by people who see Saki as a bit silly (OK sorry for that) and Murakami as over their head.   (It will probably never be taught in German High Schools!)   People will like the stories by Saki and Murakami but they will not love them they will not tell others about them.   As I said, "The Bowman" is a war time story and it screams that out to us.    Murakami's  story is the best plotted and the only one with any real character development.   The Saki story is clever and well written but no more.

You can read "The Bowman" and "The Cobweb" at East of the Web:  Short Stories.   There a lot of short stories that would be perfect for the R I P challenge.

I read "The Elephant Vanishes" in The Oxford Book of Short Stories and it also is included in other collections.  

Has any one any experience with Arthur Machen to share with us?  

Mel u

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2002, 612 pages, translated by Philip Gabriel)

The Reading Life Japanese Literature Project

Kafka on the Shore is the 9th work by Haruki Murakami (1949-Kyoto, Japan)  that I have read in the last year.      Obviously I greatly enjoy and appreciate his creations.    Some of his work, including Kafka on the Shore is in the tradition of magic realism.    He is a great story teller who explores the deeper themes of post WWII Japanese culture mixed in with surrealistic episodes, sexual encounters, history, reflections on literature, philosophy and popular culture that have made him a best selling author world wide.     His books are  all a lot of fun but they will make you think about broader issues and they do not shrink from the horrors that underpin  the sunlit world of consumer Japan and the world beyond it.    Many of the books, for sure including Kafka on the Shore, have symbolic themes and puzzles that those so inclined can have fun unraveling.    

As soon as I read on the back cover of Kafka on the Shore (brilliant book title) that one of the central characters was a man who could speak to cats I knew I would like it.   (There are a terrible few pages of violence against cats which I admit I skipped.)    There are two central characters in this book.   Kafka is a 15 year old runaway seeking his mother and sister.     He ends up being sheltered in a marvelous private library run by a beautiful older woman (there is a " bookish boy's fantasy" theme found throughout the work of Murakami).    Kafka begins to read the corpus of the great early 20th century writer Natsume Soseki.   It is exciting to see young Kafka try to find his place in the world while living in a library curated by a beautiful older woman.

The second major character is Nakata, an older man who cannot read but who can speak to cats.   He receives a small disability check from the government but his main income comes from his work as a tracker of lost cats.  The story about how he lost a large portion of his intellectual capacity at age 16 is a great side story taking us back to WWII.    Nakata had never been more than a few kilometers from his home until his most recent cat track assignment took him way outside the area he was comfortable in.    He is befriended by a truck driver who helps him in his quest.

There are a number of philosophical references in the work.     One of the minor characters is a beautiful prostitute who calms down  excited customers by talking about philosophical issues.   There are a lot of references to western music, from Beethoven to the Beetles.   

Kafka on the Shore is a fun read.    Murakami has a wild imagination. .    There is really a lot to enjoy in this book and little to dislike.    Parts of the book are very explicit sexually.     You can tell Murakami really enjoys the physical beauty of women.  The sex scenes are very erotic though told very much from a male point of view.  

My next Murakami will be Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.  

Mel u  

Pinball, 1973 By Haruki Murakami

Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami (1980, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 79 pages)

Pinball, 1973 is book two in a trilogy by Haruki Murakami along with Hear the Wind Sing, the first in the series and Wild Sheep Chase, the final work.    Dance, Dance,  Dance also continues the plot lines of The Rat Trilogy (the rat is a friend and sometimes business partner of the central  character, Buko, who is the narrator).     Pinball, 1973 is Murakami's  (1949-) second novel.    It has long been out of print in English translation.   Sometimes you can find a used copy for sale on Amazon (they have some now for $25.00 USA).      Murakami has stated that he will not allow Pinball or Hear the Wind Sing to be republished in English as he considered these works to be inferior to his later novels.    I wanted to read Pinball but did not want to pay the price for this short work.   I was  happy when a very considerate commentator posted link to a  pdf file of the work.

Pinball, 1973 is about a man recently out of college, Buko,  and in love with the freedom of doing what he wants to do and running a small translation business with his friend who he calls, The Rat.    The two friends never occupy the same narrative space in the book and their disconnectedness is one of the themes of the work.   The main narrator lives with twin teenage girls who he feeds and houses.   The girls are almost like pets that provide sexual pleasure.   They lack the intellectual depth to be real friends with  Buko but they help him fight away his loneliness.    There is a big hole in the center of the life of Buko that was created by the suicide of his girl friend.   In order to pass the time and to drive his mind as close as he can get it to an empty space, Buko spends a huge amount of time playing pinball at a nearby arcade and becomes the high scorer on one of the machines (a big deal in the world of pinball!).    Like later  better Murakami works there are references to wells, cats and a bar plays a big part.   (Yes one must also say references to teen age girls are part of his standard plots also.)   Buko get involved in a mystery concerning pinball machines.   (The novel takes place before even the  Pacman game was invented-1980-and pinball machines were much bigger then.)   As Buko points out, all of the machines have numerous images of very large breasted women on them.   I did learn a good bit about how the pinball business worked in Japan in the 1970s.

If you really like Murakami (as I do) and want to eventually read all his novels then Pinball, 1973 is worth the time it takes to read it.  The teen age twins seem added just to play into a male fantasy and sell some books.   The plot like did not pull me in like Wild Sheep Chase did (This is not meant in criticism, Marukumi was just getting started and second rate Murakami beats most other authors best works any way!).     It is fun to see a great writer's talent develop.

      you can read it here

A link to some of my other post on Japanese works can be found here   

Mel u

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami (1982, trans. from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum, 352 pages)

A Wild Sheep Chase is the eighth book by Haruki Murakami  (1949) that I have now read.   Obviously I like and admire his work a lot.    It is the third book in what is called The Rat Trilogy which begins with Pinball which was  followed by Hear the Wind Sing (both of which are sadly out of print-there is chatter they are coming back in print soon-they can be found on Amazon.com at times).   Dance, Dance, Dance which came out in 1988 is sort of a continuation of the plot lines of the Rat Trilogy.

I really enjoyed this book.    It is just flat out a lot of fun.   It was recently the subject of discussion and review by several readers on a read along hosted by In the Spring it is The Dawn.   The posters there covered some of the deeper themes of the book so I will just talk briefly about the book.

The book is kind of a take off of the detective story complete with a visit from a sinister stranger who sends our unnamed central character on a quest for a mysterious wild sheep.    Along the way he meets and has a romance with a prostitute with beautiful ears.    We also learn a lot about the history of sheep in Japan which I found very interesting.     Our hero meets a number of strange and interesting characters.

   There are hints at an evocation of Japanese animism  in the use of the sheep imagery but Murakami does not take it too seriously and neither should we.  There are references to untoward human-sheep encounters so we know it is OK just to enjoy the book without a great deal of thought as to the symbolic meaning of the sheep.     There are many references to American cultural icons.   

I liked A Wild Sheep Chase a really lot as do almost all who post on it.     If you are just getting into the Japanese novel or looking for a first work to read by Murakami I would suggest either After Dark or Norwegian Wood.   

A link to some of my other Japanese reviews can be found here

Mel u

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (1987, 296 pages, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin, 2000)

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My Other Posts on Murakami

Japanese Literature on the Reading Life

I am developing quite a fondness and admiration for the work of Haruki Murakami.   Murakami (1949-) is for sure the best known outside of the country Japanese novelist writing today.   Perhaps he is not regarded with the reverence that Kenzaburo Oe is (winner Nobel Prize 1994) but millions of people world wide are devouring his books.   So far I have read (in this order), After Dark,  Dance, Dance, Dance, South of the Border West of the Sun, Sputnik Sweet Heart, and The Wild Bird Chronicles.    So far I think the scenes set in WWII in The Wild Bird Chronicles are the most masterfully written of his work and I think Sputnik Sweet Heart is the most fun of the works.   That is until I read Norwegian Wood.  There are common themes and artifacts in all of these works.   I have posted on them in my other  posts on his novels so I will just post briefly on Norwegian Wood.   

Norwegian Wood was Murakami's first multi-million copy book.   A lot of people say it is their favorite of his works.   I liked it a really lot also.   It kept my attention throughout.   I felt I came to know the lead characters and I felt sympathy for them.   I have said before (and explained this is not a derogatory label) I see Murakami as kind of writing bookish boys fantasy books.   Norwegian Wood, set in the 1960s and full of American and British pop culture references and well as references to serious novels (Japanese and Western) read by the college student male character is for sure a fantasy book, among other things, for bookish boys and the men they become.    To give a bit of an example a beautiful female friend of the male character constantly talks to him about sex (but he will not get involved with that with her as he has a girl friend of sorts) and tells him she really wishes she had a way to learn about oral sex.   A very erotically described 13 year old lesbian seduces a woman who has never had a same sex encounter in a vivid passage.    In a bookish boys' book the male lead does not have an adult world job (the lead is college student in the 1960s), beautiful women throw themselves at him (Murakami is very good at describing women) and he sees through the corruption of the world of grown ups.    Norwegian Wood  lacks the magic realism element found in some of his other works.    

Obviously I really enjoy reading the work of Murakami.   I think I will read Wild Sheep Chase for my next of his works next as it  is a prequel to Dance, Dance, Dance.     There are deep themes about loneliness etc that are part of all of his novels but this is a book you can enjoy without a lot of heavy thinking.   If it were made faithfully into a movie it would be x rated and some would scream over the scenes with the 13 year old lesbian.

Mel u

"Sputnik Sweetheart" by Haruki Murakami

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami (1999, translated by Philip Gabriel from Japanese, 229 pages)

Sputnik Sweetheart is to me a really enjoyable very worthwhile read.    Sputnik Sweetheart is the 5th work by Murakami that I have read and blogged on.    It is fun, smart, uninhibitedly sexy in its depiction of  the dawning lesbian feelings of one of the characters, in its description of the bodies of the female characters and in the sex scenes, it is fast moving, has some cliffhangers and lets us see the real life of the three lead characters.   As a bonus from the perspective of my blog, all of the central characters love reading and are into the reading life.   In some novels the reading life of the characters is not quite credible,  Murakami has for sure overcome this.

There are basically only three characters in Sputnik Sweetheart.   The narrator, a young man whose name we never learn, works hard at fitting himself into a society that stresses and enforces conformity at the cost of expressing or even feeling his true emotions and thoughts while working as an elementary school teacher.   The narrator is good friends with a woman named Sumire.   Sumire has always had negative feelings toward sex but she begins to develop strong sexual feelings toward the third character in the novel, Miu.   Miu is in her late thirties and is beautiful but does not seemingly return the feelings of Samire.   (All of the women in the works of Murakami are very described almost as if they were works of art.)   Samire is put through significant stress by her feelings for Samire as they are not the kind of feelings society expects her to have.

SH of Books, Quote Poetry made a very perceptive comment on my post on The Wild Bird Chronicles, namely that there are recurring things in the novels of Murakami.   In reading just four of his novels and six of his short stories I can see recurring falls down wells, sheep, trips to Greek Islands with beautiful women, a preoccupation with prostitutes, a central character without a real world adult job (I am assuming that a male elementary school teacher is as uncommon a figure in Japan as it is in the Philippines and the USA), conversations with girls below 18 about sex  and a lots of cats.    I do not want to give away much of the plot of Sputnik Sweetheart as I think a lot people will read this book in time.   Some shocking things happen and there are interesting side plots along the way.   The section devoted to the Ferris wheel is really well done.

Sputnik Sweetheart can be very much enjoyed for the fun of the narrative, the sex scenes, a mystery at the heart of the book and the trip to the Greek Islands.   Murakami is also what I have called "a bookish books writer" in that a lot of what he writes about plays into the fantasies of male readers.   For example, in Sputnik Sweetheart a beautiful woman offers to fly the elementary school teacher for free to Greece.   The novel centers around themes of loneliness and the inability to really bond with others caused in part by the demands of society.    The use of the term "Sputnik" evolves from a misunderstanding of an English word but the image of a satellite revolving in isolation around a central figure with which it has no real contact can be seen as a kind of a summery  for the themes of the book.  

Sputnik Sweetheart was a very enjoyable read.    I recommend it without reservation.

I am debating what Murakami to read next and would be happy to get some suggestions.


Mel u

"The Wind Up Bird Chronicles" by Haruki Murakami

The Wind Up Bird  Chronicles by Haruki Murakami (1997, trans. by Jay Rubin, 607 pages)

The Wind Up Bird  Chronicles is my fifth work to read and post on by Haruki Murakami (1949- Kyoto, Japan).     It is one of the "big books" of the post WWII Japanese novel, literally at 607 pages and in terms of the place of esteem it occupies in that body of literature.

There have been a number of recent blog posts on this work.   In The Spring it is the Dawn began a read along some time ago (which I missed out on as I had other items I was reading) which generated a lot of really good posts which cover a lot of the themes of the book.    Given this I will just say a bit about the book and explain what I like about it and make a random observation or two.

The book centers on an unemployed (he quit an OK job because he did not enjoy it) man, Toro, whose cat has disappeared.    He begins a search for his cat and then his wife disappears also.   Toro meets a lot of very interesting characters in his search for his wife and his cat.       He employs a female medium to help him find his cat and his wife.   Her sister was a prostitute at one time and is now a psyche prostitute of sorts.   I noticed in Dance Dance Dance that one of the themes of what I called "Bookish Boys Lit" (as a play on chic lit) is a central character who has no real adult world job (like Toro had and quit).   One of the near defining marks of a bookish boys lit book is the appearance in the story line of  beautiful prostitutes who seemingly fall for the lead male character and provide him with super high quality free sex.   In Dance Dance Dance the adult male lead character also has extensive conversations of a sexual nature with a female under 18, just like Toro does.   I am not making a negative value judgement in seeing this as a bookish boys book.   Here is the genre (I think I made up this category but maybe I read it years ago somewhere) in a nutshell: male character with no adult job who does not like the adult world, beautiful women   who fall for no reason one can see for the lead character, picaresque adventures and secret wisdom gained or revealed.

The book revolves around  the adventures Toro has on his search for his wife and his cat.   A lot of the book is taken up with stories by characters he meets along the way.   I thought the parts of the book that were devoted to the experiences of a now elderly ex soldier about his experiences in the Japanese Army while serving in China were a complete marvel, simply a master piece of narrative exposition.   I for sure felt like I was getting an honest account of the ex-soldiers experiences.   There is a kind of emotional disconnect in the mind of the lead character (hence the preoccupation with prostitutes) but he is deeply moved by the story of the ex soldier
  

I liked The Wind Up Bird  Chronicles a lot.   In fact I am already 1/2 way through another one of Murakami's books now, Sputnik Sweetheart.  The Wind Up Bird Chronicles  is a good adventure story and keeps us reading with cliff hangers throughout the book.   I do not mean to suggest this a light weight book.   There are some very deep themes in this work.   I am trying to keep my posts shorter and I lot of people have posted on this book in the last year so I will simply say I enjoyed it a lot and hope to read all of his novels in the next year or so.

Mel u

"South of the Border, West of the Sun" by Haruki Murakami

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami (1992, translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel, 1999,    213 pages  Vintage Books)

First I want to express my thanks to Dolce Bellezza for hosting the contest in which I was lucky enough to win a copy of South of the Border, West of the Sun and being generous enough to send the book internationally.   

I have so far read and posted on two other novels by Murakami.    After Dark was the first Japanese novel I had ever read.    I think it is a good selection as a first Japanese novel. (Since then I have read works by over 50 works by Japanese authors.   The more I read the more I appreciate the incredible richness of the Japanese novel.)      My second work by Murakami was Dance, Dance, Dance.   Dance Dance Dance is a middle book in a three part series which I read in part because I got it in a book swap.    I enjoyed it but would probably have gotten more into it had I read the other book in the series, Wild Sheep Chase first.  I also read about half of the short stories in his collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.    I liked these three books but I did not become a real fan of Murakami until reading South of the Border, West of the Sun which I think is a much better book than the first two novels I read.   

One of the things I personally appreciated about South of the Border, West of Sun was that the narrator and one of the central female characters were very much into the reading life.   Some depictions of characters with a love of reading are convincing, some are not and Murakami's were very well done and quite convincing.  

Basically, the novel is the story of the life of Hajime, a man who we first meet in his adolescence.   He is your typical awkward bookish young man but that does not stop him from being obsessed with girls!   In Dance Dance Dance it seemed to me that the protagonist had an immature fantasy based relationship with the women in his life.   I even referred to the book as "Bookish boys lit".   In South of the Border, West of the Moon we see Hajime have his first sexual encounter (described in a very erotic fashion-this is an erotic book).   We see him get his first job, a boring drone type of job he has and dislikes for years.   He grows out of his social awkward stage but he stays pretty much of a loner.   He meets a girl while in high school, Shimamoto who is like him, an only child.   She had polio as a child so she drags one leg behind her.   She is very beautiful and also a reader.   In Japan at the time, only children were considered to have a weak character brought on by over pampering, or so Hajime tells us.   Nothing ever happens with his infatuation with Shimamoto and after high school he loses track of her.   He has some other adventures but one day in a fix up date he meets the woman he will marry.    This changes his life in many ways and does lead to him being a prosperous owner of two very trendy bars in Tokyo.   One day nearly 20 years since he saw her last Shimamoto walks into his bar.   I will not relay what happens as the plot twists are a lot of fun (and as I said there is some very  clearly  described erotic encounters).    We get a good look at Hajime's marriage.  He is a good father and over all was a pretty good husband.   We learn something about how big business works in Japan.   And for sure there are unsolved mysteries and marvelous happenings.    South of the Border, West of the Sun is above all else a lot of fun to read.

This was the first Murakami novel that really worked for me.   I am now a convert to the Murakami camp even though Kenzaburo Oe has been critical of the content of his work, not his talent.  (Basically it seems to be that  Murakami is considered "Too American" in his cultural frame of reference but this has zero to do with literary quality).    

"Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" by Haruki Murakami

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami (trans by Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin, 2006, 362 pages)

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of short stories that were originally published from 1981 to 2005.     A number of the stories were first published in translation in the New Yorker magazine.   I am not normally drawn to collections of short stories.    I was asking myself why.   I think the basic answer for me and a lot of others is that I like to be drawn into another world when I read and the vehicle of the short story is not, for me, conducive to this most of the time.   When I do read a good short story I enjoy it and I tell myself I should read more.    With this in mind I recently acquired Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of short stories in a book trade.   None of the stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman are over 25 pages long and some are much shorter.    In my readings of Japanese literature I have not begun really to read much of Murakami's work.    He is  widely considered a writer of great quality as well as an entertainer of the highest order and were it not for the fact that two Japanese authors have won since WWII many think he would be in line for a Nobel Prize.    Basically you cannot say that you have begun to know the post war Japanese novel until you have read most of his work.  

I read half the stories in this collection and will read the rest one a time as the year goes on.   Each of the stories is unique and are set in modern Japan or at least begin there.   Murakami does a good job in bringing to life the characters in the stories in the short space he has to do it.

 A very typical story and one I liked a lot was "Man Eating Cats" (19 pages).    It centers on a man and woman, college educated young corporate employee sorts, both married who begin an adulterous affair with each other.    Their passion for each other does not seem deep and the affair seems motivated almost  out of boredom.    In time through unlucky accidents each of the spouses finds out about the affair and their marriages and lives are ruined.    The couple decide if they pool their money they can live for about three years without income.   After some research they decide the best place for them to move to (they want to escape their shame) is to a small Greek island, off the tourist track.    While there the male partner reads an article in an Athens newspaper about a 70 year old woman who lived with a number of cats.    The woman dies alone in her apartment and her body is not found for weeks.   In the mean time her starving cats had begun to eat her body.    The man comes to see this as metaphor for his life.   He feels his life has been thrown away for nothing, any future to live a good life beyond mere subsistence was destroyed by his adultery, done just because he could do it.   Here is the ending of the story:

I returned to the apartment and downed a glass of brandy.  I tried to go to sleep but I could not.  Until the eastern sky grew light, I was held in the grip of the moon.   Then suddenly I pictured those cats, starving to death in a locked apartment.   I, the real me, was dead, and they were alive, eating my flesh, biting into my heart, sucking my blood.   Far away,  I could hear them lapping at my brains.   Like Macbeth's witches, the three little cats surrounded by broken head, slurping up the thick soup inside.    The rough tips of their tongues licked the soft folds of my mind.   And with each lick, my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away.

In most of the stories we are introduced to ordinary people.    We get to know them a bit then we  begin to see their lives are not so ordinary.    Seemingly small decisions change  the courses of the characters lives in ways they cannot quite fathom.    The introduction of the element of "magic realism" found in Murakami's longer works is found here in several of the stories.    It might be seen as the attempt of people to make sense of their lives by creating their own myths and  using personal magic to explain to themselves elements of their lives that make sense no  any  other way.

The stories I read in the collection were all well done, all entertaining and all made me think.    I hope to read Wild Sheep Chase, Kafka on the Shore, and  The Wild Bird Chronicles soon.

I am reading this book for the POC challenge (now completed with 15 books-I will continue to read for it)
I am also reading this in conjunction with Murakami Month on In the Spring it is The Dawn


I would appreciate any and all suggestions as to my next Murakami read.   I have already read Dance, Dance, Dance and After Dark

"Dance, Dance, Dance" by Haruki Murakami

Dance, Dance, Dance (1995, 392 pages,  trans. from Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum) is my second read of a Haruki Murakami novel.   Murakami's After Dark was the first novel by a Japanese author I had ever read.   I picked it for two simple reasons.   Murakami was the only Japanese author I was familiar with (the book stores in Manila are very stocked in his works) and it was a short book.  I prefer to read a short book by a new author.   I liked After Dark a lot and thought it gave us a good look at part of the Tokyo night world.   Having read around 40 Japanese works since my August 9, 2009 review of After Dark I would suggest it as a good first Japanese novel.   It is often endorsed on the Murakami Goodreads.com group as a suggested first read.  

  I set the book in my TBR area as I wanted to read a diverse range of Japanese authors before reading second works.   I finished Dance, Dance, Dance yesterday.    I found it to be a lot of fun.   It kept my attention throughout.   I felt I understood the central character, a male free lancer writer living in contemporary Tokyo who specializes in restaurant reviews.  

At the start of the book the narrator (it is told in the first person) is thinking about a former sort of girl friend.   She was, in the narrator's words, a high class hooker,  a professional ear model and a proofreader.   He recalls the old hotel where they used to spend time together,  The Dolphin Hotel.   The Dolphin Hotel is a sort  of run down place with a lot of  "character", the kind of a place where nobody there is not quite who they say they are.   (The kind of setting beloved to writers of  stories about the darker side of big cities).   The narrator has not seen his girl friend in a long time so he decides to go back to the Dolphin hotel to see if anyone there has any leads on her.  (He claims he was not her customer but this is an artistically, and otherwise, dubious assertion on the narrator's part.)   To his great shock the hotel has been torn down.   In its place there is an ultramodern tower called the L'Hotel Dauphin.   Nobody there, of course, has ever heard of his ex-girl friend, Kiki.   He is taken by the very attractive female desk clerk in a lovely uniform.  (At the Dolphin Hotel the owner was at the desk.)   He decides to embark on a search for Kiki.  His job gives him a lot of self directed time.   He is a cat lover.
I do not want to give away much of the plot line at all because it very much a fun exciting read.   We get to meet his boyhood friend now a movie star.   We see his developing friendship with a 13 year old girl.  (The narrator seems in his mid thirties).    At times the relationship does cause the narrator to wander into mental images he is not proud about but no lines are crossed in action.   We get to meet a mysterious Sheep Man who may be a dream figure or may be a real figure of some kind somehow controlling the events in the lives of the characters.

In talking about The Club Dumas a few days ago I characterized it, in a parody of the term "Chick Lit", as belonging to the category of  "bookish boys lit".   By this I mean a book that plays into the fantasies of bookish teenage boys (and the adult versions of that.)   Examples of quality writers who fall in this category are Pynchon, Hemingway, and Dumas.    To me Dance, Dance, Dance is squarely in this category.   (This is not a pejorative label-really it is not-Gravity's Rainbow is on my list of ten best novels ever and it is for sure in this genre.)   One of the characteristic of the genre is the exploration of hidden or darker sides of things, secret knowledge of worlds unknown to ordinary people.    Male characters in works in this genre have uneasy relationships with women.   There is a preoccupation, this is the books expression, with high class hookers.   The narrator of this book reads Jack London and listens all the time to American pop music.   Your bookish boy reads Call of The Wild and The Count of Monte Cristo.   The narrator of Dance, Dance, Dance best friend charges high class prostitutes to his expense account.   He was a customer of Kiki.   One night he and the narrator are bored so they order in two girls from a very expensive super discreet agency that the movie star is an important customer off.   The movie star pays for it all.    The narrator goes to Hawaii with the 13 year old girl he is friends with and somebody else pays the bill.   He stays a hotel in a room alone and the girl does stay else where.   A beautiful woman knocks on his door one night, she is described as "South Asian".  She is a high class prostitute that his movie star friend has hired for him.   Not just for one night but for three nights in a row.   The girl provides him with a great services, very erotically described.  

The action picks up.   A number people are killed including several of the prostitutes.   We meet some hard  boiled detectives, your standard seen it all homicide detectives who know enough not to question the owners of expensive call girl rings too much given the level of protection they have paid for.    We get to go along for some fancy meals, paid for by the movie star friend with a lot of  issues in his life, of course.   We get to know some call girls,  a one armed American Vietnam veteran, the 13 year old girl's mother
and a very respectable and nice girl who works at the fancy hotel.   She, of course, is quite beautiful and ends up in love with and in bed with the narrator. 
There are lots of clever plot lines and surprises.   The role of the Sheep Man is meant to baffle us, I think.   There are Science Fiction aspects to the book if the role of the Sheep Man is not seen as a dream or hallucinatory episode

  Dance, Dance, Dance was, to me, a fun read.   It is in the bookish boy genre and one should know that before reading it.    In my classification, a book can be a work of very high quality and be a bookish boy's novel.   Murakami has written a lot of novels.   People who have read them all pretty much put Dance Dance Dance in the middle rank of his books.   Most goodreads.com readers give it four or five stars and every one says it is not his best work.   I guess I would give it four at least.    I look forward to reading his most highly regarded works.  

I read in a few places on the net that Kenzaburo Oe has been very critical of Murakami.   I wanted to know why so I did a bit of research.   Basically Oe feels Murakami  gives too much emphasis to American culture in his works.
This, of course, is a political value judgment (Murakami for sure is the best know Japanese writer internationally) that has nothing to do with the merit of the work of Murakami.   Dance, Dance, Dance does have many references to American pop music, books and even food.   There is one small thing in the novel that did annoy me.   The narrator and the movie star are talking about the prostitute that the movie star sent to the hotel in Hawaii.   They call the agency and the agency asks where she is from.   They say "Oh she is probably from the Philippines".   

Mel u