Tag: Haruki Murakami

I am a huge fan of Haruki Murakami . When I spotted his latest book in our local book store BooksActually – actually it was my wife who first spotted it – I bought it in a heartbeat. I don’t collect books these days as my wife prefers a ‘minimalist’ home. But when it comes to Murakami, my wife knows that it is a sacred space of mine that needs to be left alone. For as long as Murakami keeps on writing, I shall keep on buying. At times, I collect both the English translated version as well as the Chinese translated version.

If you are new to Murakami, I would imagine how daunting it may be to pick a book to start. His classic books tend to have that rawness that can have more impact in terms of plot twists and emotion but the journey could be more irregular. That is to say, some parts could drag on and the plot could become pretty bizarre. His recent books tend to be more refined, more believable, and with a more predictable pace. Killing Commendatore belongs to the latter category.

It is a story of a male artist whose marriage is falling apart and he paints portraits to pay the bills but it is not necessarily something he is passionate about doing. Killing Commendatore is a journey of this artist rediscovering his passion and in the midst of it, rediscovers himself. Through this journey, this artist encounters different characters – real and surreal – including one that spawns from a painting. There are different threads of stories running in parallel interacting with one and other – which is typical of Murakami’s writing style.

Killing Commendatore is a fascinating read. I would recommend this book to readers who are new to Murakami as well as to those who are familiar with him.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is a fascinating read. In fact, this is my third read in the span of a few years. Each pass I am able to spot more linkages between the plots. And more passages highlighted for future reference.

Like many of Murakami novels, Colorless is filled with mysteries. The main character – a 36 years old Tsukuru Tazaki – recounted one moment in his college life, that he had contemplated to commit suicide. It all started with a group of five back in school. Every one with a name associated to a color except Tsukuru.

Soon, the other four friends began to use nicknames: the boys were called Aka (red) and Ao (blue); and the girls were Shiro (white) and Kuro (black). But he just remained Tsukuru. How great it would be, he often thought, if I had a color in my name too. Then everything would be perfect.

Out of nowhere, all four friends of Tsukuru have refused to talk to and to meet with him. The shock was so intense that he had lost the will to live.

“That was the first time in my life that anyone has rejected me so completely,” Tsukuru said. “And the ones who did it were the people I trusted the most, my four best friends in the world. I was so close to them that they had been like an extension of my own body. Searching for a reason, or correcting a misunderstanding, was beyond me. I was simply, and utterly, in shock. So much so that I thought I might never recover. It felt like something inside me had snapped.”

Tsukuru recounted his story because his new girlfriend Sara wanted to know more about this emotional burden that has been hindering the relationship. More so, Sara wants Tsukuru to face his past. As Sara has once said:

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

This sets off the direction of Colorless with the ultimate rewards of Sara becoming Tsukuru’s serious girlfriend and Tsukuru getting to know exactly what went on with his four best friends abandoning him at the same time.

The good news is that this book is an entertaining read from beginning to end. The not so good news is that at the end of book, you still would not know the answers to the two ultimate questions. But here lies the brilliance of this book. We could imagine what the outcomes would be. But we may never grasp what is real. Like our main character Tsukuru once experienced. There are going to be plenty open questions.

And he couldn’t grasp the boundary between dream and imagination, between what was imaginary and what was real.

What I love most about Colorless is how well planned the plot is. Sara does not appear often in this book. But she drives the entire story. She uncovers the issues and she wants a resolution. Even as Tsukuru (and the readers too) has no clue on what to do next, Sara drops hints at the crucial moment on what is to come. She is like the prophet, always one step ahead. While many including I would debate on what Sara would do with Tsukuru when all is resolved, I am leaning towards a happy ending because Sara comes across to me as someone who knows exactly what she wants. Her moves are reliability predictable. I doubt she has any agenda except to remove this emotional burden of Tsukuru so that their relationship can move forward.

Now, the story between Sara and Tsukuru is easy to summarize. How the mystery unfolds is not. Because the subplots are subtly linked through different time lines and storyline. And how the dreams affect the imagination which in turn distort the reality adds another layer of abstract to the story.

Putting all that aside, there are consistent references to having to make hard decisions, though seemingly unrelated during my first read. Let’s think of body and heart.

In this dream, though, he burned with desire for a woman. It wasn’t clear who she was. She was just there. And she had a special ability to separate her body and her heart. I will give you one of them, she told Tsukuru. My body or my heart. But you can’t have both. You need to choose one or the other, right now. I will give the other part to someone else, she said.

(This would make a good conversation. In real life though, which would you choose and why?)

In the context of corporate ‘brainwashing’ though executive training:

I have some good news for you, and some bad news. The bad news first. We’re going to have to rip off either your fingernails or your toenails with pliers. I’m sorry, but it’s already decided. It can’t be changed. Here’s the good news. You have the freedom to choose which it’s going to be – your fingernails, or your toenails. So, which will it be?

(That pretty much sums up what real world can be like at work.)

And finally, the resolution.

“And in order to do that, I had to cut you off. It was impossible to protect you and protect her at the same time. I had to accept one of you completely, and reject the other one entirely.”

To go back to my leaning towards a happy ending, let’s go back to the final conversation between Eri (Kuro) and Tsukuru.

“But it’s strange, isn’t it?” Eri said.

“What is?”

“That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time.”

Tsukuru nodded silently. He thought he should say something, but no words came.

What was it that he wanted to say as he was pondering upon whether or not Sara would accept him in the very end of the book?

Not everything was lost in the flow of time. That’s what Tsukuru should have said to Eri when he said goodbye […]

What then survives the flow of time? I believe that it is hope.

We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something – with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.

While I am happy to be able to extract that much from the book, one side-plot still eludes me is on Haida (Grey).

Haida became Tsukuru’s best friend after Tsukuru has decided that dying was not the best option moving forward. Besides, to will his heart to stop was as he found out later an impossible task. Here are what I have gathered from the story of Haida.

• Grey is a mix of black and white. The two colors that symbolize Shiro and Kuro – the two girls in the original group of five. It seems to me that Haida is a male replacement of the two.
• The sexually insinuated dreams between Tsukuru, Shiro, and Kuro has been once replaced by a dream involving Tsukuru and Haida, also sexual in nature.
• To me, the original group of five reminds me of a hand with five fingers. It was natural. Haida has come across as the sixth finger.
• Haida once recounted a story of his father (also called Haida) to Tsukuru. At one point, Tsukuru thought the story came from Haida himself.
• Haida (the father) has met a jazz pianist called Midorikawa (Green) who in possession of (1) a mysterious small bag, (2) a special ability to see aura, and (3) a deadly burden that temporarily granted him the special ability but would cost him his life unless he could pass this deadly burden to a willing party.
• Haida (the father) did not accept. Midorikawa has then disappeared.
• Haida (Tsukuru’s friend) all of a sudden disappeared from Tsukuru’s life.
• The story of his father may have been the story of Haida himself.
• One of Tsukuru’s side mission is to find out what happened to Haida in order to fully remove his emotional burden. The book does not seem to have a resolution on this side-story.
• Years later, a formaldehyde jar containing two severed sixth fingers are found in one of Tsukuru’s train stations.
• This jar, I presume, belongs to Midorikawa – the mysterious small bag. So the story is real. Could this be the resolution?

So many ways to interpret the story. Did Haida accept the deadly burden and hence explains his second disappearance? Did he have the special ability all along or only after his first disappearance? Is that why there were those surreal moments between him and Tsukuru? More importantly, how does this story branch relate to the main story, if at all?

Still, Tsukuru felt that Haida’s clear eyes had seen right though him that night, to what lay in his unconscious. Traces of Haida’s gaze still stung, like a mild burn. Haida had, at that time, observed Tsukuru’s secret fantasies and desires, examining and dissecting them one by one […]

One constant theme in this book is about death and disappearance, heartache and reconciliation, reborn and recover. That much I can be certain of.

ISBN 978-4-16-382110-8

1Q84 is the 10th Murakami book that I have read.  There are similarities when compared to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.  It is divided into three books that span across three consecutive time periods.  Each chapter is named using a phrase found inside that chapter. 1Q84 further explores the concept of free will versus destiny and fate.  Having a page count of 925 covering the topics of cult religion, love and friendship, murder and violence, history and philosophy, 1Q84 is an ambition work of literature.  In addition, 1Q84 opens us to the world of alternative realities and it embeds stories within a story.  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has a theme on Big Brother.  1Q84 – a world that bears a question – switches the theme to Little People.  I took my time in devouring the entire book slowly and I enjoyed every bit of it.  For those who are new to Murakami, he is a Japanese writer and has won literature awards such as Jerusalem Prize.  Milan Kundera and Don DeLillo are among the prize winners whose work I also enjoy reading.  In view of this, perhaps I shall explore that list further in order to expand my reading horizon.

Some readers of my site have asked why I am so into Murakami’s books.  It is hard to describe.  But in the best I can, his unique style works for me.  Murakami tends to spend much effort in building the characters as well as the environment that wraps around the plot.  When writing in the mode of realism, Murakami put much details onto every single elements making them alive and real.  When writing in the mode of surrealism, Murakami describes the unimaginable so well that you feel as though you are sucked into this surreal vision.  The author is meticulous in crafting the plot, down to the very detail that links multiple plots into one.  His works are often filled with mystery that readers have little idea on where the story is heading.  In my limited reading experience, I have not read any book quite like his, in the same quality level.

Book 1 begins with the story of Aomame.  She is inside a taxi stuck in a traffic jam listening to classical music played on the radio.  On one highway, she has decided to get off the taxi, walk down the emergency exit and take a subway.  Before leaving the taxi, the driver says the following.

“It’s just that you’re about to something out of the ordinary … And after you do something like that, everyday look of things might seem to change a little.  Things may look different to you than they did before … But don’t let appearances fool you.  There’s always only one reality.”

That pretty much kicks start the concept of an alternative reality.  And before the author reveals the nature of Aomame’s appointment that cannot be missed, chapter two brings in a new character called Tengo.  He is a mathematics teacher by day and writes literature as his hobby.  He is about to encounter a writing competition submission by a seventeen years old girl.  Her story Air Chrysalis may read like a fantasy but it is slowly shifting into the very reality Tengo lives in.  How are the two main characters going to interact in 1Q84 when they have no such possibility in 1984?  This book by and large follows a structure that toggles the stories between Aomame and Tengo.  Throughout the book, there is this concept of light and shadow, or maza and dohta.  There are enough logos and hooks that make the twin stories connect, and not feeling disjointed.  Murakami varies the timeline too by allows part of the plots to overlap in time.  The result is that although the plots run in different threads, the overall story is not confusing.  Characters may overlaps.  But Murakami is meticulous to distinguish what each character knows in their story line versus what he or she speculates or does not know.  Taking all in, 1Q84 is a magical read.

Readers who are used to the author’s first person writing style may feel a need for a certain adjustment when reading 1Q84.  The twin stories are written from the third person perspective, with main characters’ thoughts written in italic and in a first person style.  It does feel odd in the beginning.  But this works better than some authors who switch the alternate stories in first person style whereby confusion may become a major hindrance to reading.  Among the three books of 1Q84, I would rank book two high in action and entertainment value.  Because of that, book three seems a bit slow.  It feels as though Murakami is trying very hard to control the pace, to impart upon us this sense of anxiety and lost, danger and death – slowly and steadily.  As always, patience readers are rewarded accordingly.  I don’t see a need to rush through the plots.  There is a reason and time for everything in life.

I would say 1Q84 is perhaps Murakami’s most polished work to date.  The hard copy design is beautiful.  On the front cover, there is a picture of a woman and at the back, a man.  On alternate pages, the page number and the book title is reversely printed.  Even the inlaid pictures of the moons are reversed comparing the ones in front and the ones at the back.  After finished reading the book, I cannot think of a better art design than this.  I have read 1Q84 in English and I am looking forward to reading the same story in Chinese.  I could be wrong to think that the Chinese version may be closer to the original Japanese version.  But I am keen to see the difference between the two – English translation versus Chinese translation.

Similar to my previous book summary entries, I am going to share some of the favorite quotes I found in the book.  I am often careful in not giving out too much spoilers.  If you intend to read the book, you may stop here and return to see if these are your favorite quotes too.

A while back, my friend and I had a lengthy discussion on practice versus talent.  On page 65, Murakami talks about talents versus instinct.

You can have tons of talent, but it won’t necessarily keep you fed.  If you have sharp instincts, though, you’ll never go hungry.

As for the next paragraph, I like the way the author describes the situation when communication breaks down.

[She] fell silent again, but this time it did not seem deliberate.  She simply could not fathom the purpose of his question or what prompted him to ask it.  His question hadn’t landed in any region of her consciousness.  It seemed to have gone beyond the bounds of meaning, sucked into permanent nothingness like a lone planetary exploration rocket that has sailed beyond Pluto.

“Never mind,” he said, giving up. “It’s not important.”  It had been a mistake even to ask [her] such a question.

I do enjoy reading some of the dialogues between two people.  Here is one on a dog.

“How’s Bun?” she asked.

“She’s fine,” [he] answered.  Bun was the female German shepherd that lived in his house, a good-nature dog, and smart, despite a few odd habits.

“Is she still eating her spinach?” [she] asked.

“As much as ever.  And with the price of spinach as high as it’s been, that’s no small expense!”

“I’ve never seen a German shepherd that liked spinach before.”

“She doesn’t know she’s a dog.”

“What does she think she is?”

“Well, she seems to think she’s a special being that transcends classification.”

“Superdog?”

“Maybe so.”

“Which is why she likes spinach?”

“No, that’s another matter.  She just likes spinach.  Has since she was a pup.”

“But maybe that’s where she gets these dangerous thoughts of hers.”

“Maybe so.”

The next paragraph – I believe – is not written by Murakami and is taken from a book called Sakhalin Island by a Russian writer, Anton Chekhov.  I find it a beautiful read.  And its style blends well into the story.

… The roaring sea is cold and colourless in appearance, and the tall grey waves pound upon the sand, as if wishing to say in despair: “Oh God, why did you create us?”  This is the Naibuchi river the convicts can be heard rapping away with axes on the building work, while on the other, far distant, imagined shore, lies America … to the left the capes of Sakhalin are visible in the mist, and to the right are more capes … while all around there is not a single living soul, not a bird, not a fly, and it is beyond comprehension who the waves are roaring for, who listens to them at nights here, what they want, and, finally, who they would roar for when I was gone.  There on the shore one is overcome not by connected, logical thoughts, but by reflections and reveries.  It is a sinister sensation, and yet at the very same time you feel the desire to stand for ever looking at the monotonous movement of the waves and listening to their threatening roar.

How would you write about ‘time’?  Here is the author’s attempt in describing time.  That is a pretty interesting way to observe time and us.

[He] knew that time could become deformed as it moved forward.  Time itself was uniform in composition, but once consumed, it took on a deformed shape.  one period of time might be terribly heavy and long, while another could be light and short.  Occasionally the order of things could be reversed, and in the worst cases order itself could vanish entirely.  Sometimes things that should not be there at all might be added onto time.  By adjusting time this way to suit their own purposes, people probably adjusted the meaning of their existences.  In other words, by add such operations to time, they were able – but just barely – to preserve their own sanity.  Surely, if a person had to accept the time through which he had just passed uniformly in the given order, his nerves could not bear the strain.  Such a life, [he] felt, would be sheer torture.

Through the expansion of the brain, people had acquired the concept of temporality, but they simultaneously learned ways in which  to change and adjust time.  In parallel with their ceaseless consumption of time, people would ceaselessly reproduce time that they had mentally adjusted.

I like the way Murakami describes reality.

… where I’m living is not a storybook world.  It’s the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.

And here is the most cryptic message of all.  I think that has something to do with beliefs.

If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.

1Q84 has also quoted Karl Jung.  I now recall that quite a few of my favorite books quote Karl Jung.

It is as evil as we are positive … the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive … The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacity to be perfect, the Shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil.  For it is just as sinful from the standpoint of nature and of truth to be above oneself as to be below oneself.

Within the story of 1Q84, Tengo is given a task of ghostwriting a fantasy book written by a seventeen years old girl.  In that story, there are two moons.  Tengo’s editor keeps on telling him that when writing something out of ordinary, more details need to be added so that readers are able to visualize.  But how?  Later on when that story diffuses into the main story, here is Murakami’s take in describing a scene with two moons.  He further infuses this symbolic vision into some of the characters, making this paragraph read more like a prophecy.

No doubt about it: there were two moons.

One was the moon that had always been there, and the other was a far smaller, greenish moon, somewhat lopsided in shape, and much less bright.  It looked like a poor, ugly, distantly related child that had been foisted on the family by unfortunate events and was welcomed by no one.  But it was undeniably there, neither a phantom nor an optical illusion, hanging in space like other heavenly bodies, a solid mass with a clear-cut outline.  Not a plane, not a blimp, not an artificial satellite, not a papier-mâché moon that someone made for fun.  It was without a doubt a chunk of rock, having quietly, stubbornly settled on a position in the night sky, like a punctuation mark placed only after long deliberation or a mole bestowed by destiny.

Here is one on hope and trials.

Wherever there’s hope there’s a trial … Hope, however, is limited, and generally abstract, while there are countless trials, and they tend to be concrete.

I also happen to like how Murakami describes clouds.

The clouds continued to scud off toward the south.  No matter how many were blown away, others appeared to take their place.  There was an inexhaustible source of clouds in some land far to the north.  Decisive people, minds fixed on the task, clothes in thick, gray uniforms, working silently from morning to night to make clouds, like bees make honey, spiders make webs, and war makes widows.

Finally, a quote by Tolstoy, another Russian writer.

All happiness is alike, but each pain is painful in its own way.

The paperback version of “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” is more than 600 pages long.  It sat inside my bookshelf for a long time because I was not sure if I have the patience to digest such a mightily thick book (to me that is).  I brought it along anyway for my trip to Hong Kong.  I did not manage to finish reading it because I was distracted by a fantasy book I picked up at the airport.  It took me another week in Singapore to finish it off.  If not for my holiday, it would take mightily long for me to complete.  Now I am looking at his new book “1Q84” that I bought in Hong Kong with deep concern.  That too looks thick, divided into three books like “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle”.

“The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” is surprisingly engaging.  I was glued to the story not wanting to put down.  Not many story books these days have this effect on me.  The book is not quite a page turner in a sense that it takes some effort to digest the content.  But it is worth it.  From start till the very end, I had no idea which way the story is heading.  Book One is titled “The Thieving Magpie” and it documents the events that happened between June to July 1984.  Then we have Book Two titled “Bird as Prophet” for events that happened between July to October 1984.  The last books is “The Birthcatcher” that spans a longer time frame of October 1984 to December 1985.

After reading the first few chapters, I concluded that this book has a very strong “Murakami” feel.  As in we could have wiped out the author’s name and avid readers would immediately identify the author.  While the setup may be as such, the story has evolved into something it is unexpected of.  Each character added into the story carries with him or her an unique story.  Centered to the story is the narrator, a man who is ordinary and laid back, whose wife is becoming more distant as days go by.  And they have recently lost a cat.  It seems like such an ordinary story but it is not.  It get more and more complicated and interconnected as the story unfolds and as the little parts chained together.  At some point, I wished I had drawn out a relationship diagram like some of the fellow readers would have done.

Authors like Murakami write stories that lead to open interpretation.  I am sure some of you may interpret “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” in a completely different way.  But here is mine.  There are a few themes that have emerged.  First is fate versus free will.  The entire story, or at least a good part of it, is driven by fate and prophesies.  Every character seems to exist for a specific reason to fulfill one’s fate and affect others to fulfill theirs.  If it is prophesied that someone is not going to die outside Japanese’s soul in World War II, he or she no matter what will not die.  But that does not mean a happy ending.  And in a morbid way, death may not mean a bad ending either.  It is how fate plays out and people will have to accept the circumstances.  Free will then becomes an illusion.

And then we have our narrator who is surrounded by fate and prophesies of others (and his), by and large goes with the flow, but unafraid of pursuing what he ultimately wants.  That opens up the second theme of this something that exists inside us.  This concept is perhaps the most abstract concept coming from this book.  Most of the time, as a reader, I am unable to pinpoint or even visualize what this something is.  This something could be sinister and evil.  Some use this something to hurt others.  Some possesses this something as an ability to heal others that are bothered by that something inside them.  Like the subject of psychology, it takes time and word to describe that something.  And hence the rather long stories that each character carries.

The good news is that as far as I can remember, there is some kind of closure for each character’s bizarre ‘somethingness’.  Some may demand a bit of open interpretation but it is there.  The third theme I can see is the theme of reality versus the unseen world.  Within the boundary of the story, what is real and what is not?  We are taught that literature that is narrated in first person may not be entirely trustworthy as we are seeing the world through the narrator’s eyes.  But what if those chapters that are outside of this rule may not may not be real within this boundary?  This book has missing chapters that we know should exist within the story’s boundary but are not revealed to us.  And yet some chapters that are revealed to us may not even exist in the eyes of the narrator.  To make matters more intriguing, there seems to be some invisible linkages between certain characters.  Are they the same person or entity?  How do they relate?  Explicitly, this story is divided into a physical reality and a realm that exists only for the soul.  Hence, summing all up, “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” is engaging, but it does take time to digest.

The fourth theme I can think of is more like a metaphor.  A metaphor that depicts politic as secretive and dirty.  It is probably one of the harder concept to grasp in this book.  What does defilement of body and mind mean?  How does one possibly become a ‘prostitute of mind’?  While reading the book, I kept on wondering if some of these concepts are lost in translation, or simply misunderstood due to cultural gap.  That, together with the triviality of hacking into a computer like many Hollywood movies are the only tiny complaints I have with the book.

Similar to some of the recent book summary I have written, below are some of the memorable quotes.  Is knowing your future a blessing?  Or is it a curse?  If you are to know that you cannot die till a certain age, how is it going to change your life?

When the revelation and the grace were life, my life was lost.  Those living things that had once been there inside me, that had been for that reason of some value, were dead now.  Not a single thing was left.  They had all been burned to ashes in that fierce light.  The heat emitted by that revelation or grace had seared away the very core of the life that made me the person I am.  Surely I had lacked the strength to resist that heat.  And so I feel no fear of death.  If anything, my physical death would be, for me, a form of salvation.  It would liberate me for ever from this hopeless prison, this pain of being me.

The next one is on money.  It is a rather long quote.  I like the punch line at the end of the paragraph.

The address – an office building in the wealthy Akasaka district – was the only thing on the card.  There was no name.  I turned it over to check the back, but it was blank.  I brought the card to my nose, but it had no fragrance.  It was just a normal white card.

“No name?” I said.

She smiled for the first time and gently shook her head from side to side, “I believe that what you need is money.  Does money have a name?”

I shook my head as she was doing.  Money had no name, of course.  And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money.  What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.

And here is one confession from a girl to a man in the form of a letter.  Often when I think of my personal weakness, I seem not have a straightforward answer.  Perhaps, the answer is as simple as this.

I’m sorry, though.  I know I should never have done that to you (or to anybody).  But I can’t help myself sometimes.  I know exactly what I’m doing, but I just can’t stop.  That’s my greatest weakness.

Finally, there is one quote on work.  It could be something most of us can relate.

Lately, it’s really been bothering me that, I don’t know, the way people work like this every day from morning to night is kind of weird.  Hasn’t it ever struck you as strange?  I mean, all I do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it.  I don’t have to think at all.  It’s like I just put my brain in a locker before I start work and pick it up on the way home.  I spend seven hours a day at a workbench … then I eat dinner in the cafeteria, take a bath, and of course I have to sleep, like everybody else, so out of a twenty-four-hour day, the amount of free time I have is nothing.  And because I’m so tired from work, the “free time” i have I mostly spend lying around in a fog.  I don’t have any time to sit and think about anything.  Of course, I don’t have to work at weekends, but then I have to catch up on the laundry and cleaning, and sometimes I go into town, and before I know it the weekend is over.  I once made up my mind to keep a diary, but I had nothing to write, so I gave up after a week.  I mean, I just do the same thing over and over again, day in, day out.

By pure chance, I bought both “A Wild Sheep Chase” and “Dance Dance Dance” in HMV during sales on the same day.  Also by pure chance, one of my blogger friend, JoV, once dropped a comment here implying that the stories of these two books are linked.  So before I headed to my holiday, I frantically researched online on which book comes first.  It is “A Wild Sheep Chase” followed by “Dance Dance Dance”.  I read Sheep on the plane and Dance during my holiday.

If you are into the literature of Murakami, reading these two books enabled you to witness an important juncture a writer has encountered in his writing career.  Sheep is the last of the Rat Trilogy, the only one from the series that the author was comfortable in having it translated into English.  Dance was written after he has gained international recognition.  Straddled in between is Norwegian Wood that propelled Murakami to the international fame.  Now you get the picture.

Sheep is unlike some of the Murakami books I have read.  The beginning two-third of the book reads like a detective story.  A page-turner with plenty of dialogs.  The story involves a main character who takes life as it is, seldom plan or have a dream for anything; an ordinary girl with extraordinary ears and she works in three different jobs at the same time; a professor who is obsessed with sheep; a friend who has disappeared a long time ago suddenly contacted the main character via mails.  The story is, for lack of a better word, a wild sheep chase.  According to the narrator, sheep was unseen of in the ancient Japan.  And like – I suppose – dragons and unicorns (my interpretation) – such creatures could be seen as deities.  In the book, there is this notion of sheep-made-man and becomes all powerful or even man-made-sheep that becomes something I am not sure how to put in words.  Because of my Catholic root, such notion appears to have a religious reference, especially when Christ according to our tradition is portrayed as the Lamb of God.  Interestingly, Sheep has no further exploration on the topic of religion.  Only a borrowed image to turn Sheep into a fantasy, and a comedy.  I have thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the book even as I might have questioned the literature value within.

The turning point is the last third of the book.  I suspect that is also the turning point of Marakami’s writing style.  There are more internal dialogs within the main character.  The author’s sense of the surrounding has been heightened and sharpened.  The plot becomes dream-like – a signature writing style that exhibits in his later books.  When the story was ended, I wanted more.  As far as the Rat Trilogy is concerned – Rat being the name of the runaway friend – the story has ended.  But there are far more open questions left behind.  That is when “Dance Dance Dance” comes into the picture.

Unlike Sheep, Dance does not begin each chapter with a title that foretells what is to come; unlike Sheep, Dance does not have the plot progression based on a set of clear and defined clues.  In fact, I would describe Dance as a wandering adventure.  For a majority of the plot, I have no idea as in where the story is heading, and I doubt if the main character does.  The main character (now has a name) is in search of someone he loved (also now has a name).  It starts with vivid dreams that lead him back to Dolphin Hotel, a hotel that is featured in Sheep.  I can see there are a fair bit of parallelism between the two books.  The role of his friend Rat in Sheep is now taken over by his old classmate Gotanda.  The hotel, now being rebuilt, is still the center of the story.  The symbol of authority has morphed from mafia gang into police force.  Some characters from the past have made an appearance in Dance.  Dance is still a detective story at the core, but the plot becomes more subtle, more surreal.

The overall mood of Dance is dark.  In terms of character development, I in particularly like the relationship between the thirty-odd-year-old main character and a thirteen-year-old girl.  It could have gone wrong in so many different ways because knowing Murakami, the topic of sex is always on the table.  Fortunately, the author has threaded the moral boundary as close and careful as he can.  Majority of the materials turn out to be a good inspiration read for the teenagers, even for adults.  Here is an excerpt on a troubled teen regretting on the things she said and done to the one who is now dead.  The narrator is the main character of the story.

I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition.

“That’s just stupid, that kind of thinking,” I said, nailing her with my eyes. “Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him decently from the beginning.  You could’ve tried to be fair.  But you didn’t.  You don’t even have the right to be sorry.”

Yuki looked at me, shocked and hurt.

“Maybe I’m being too hard on you.  But listen, I don’t care what other people do.  I don’t want to hear that sort of talk from you.  You shouldn’t say things like that lightly, as if saying them is going to solve anything.  They don’t stick […] It’s not a question of manners; it’s a question of fairness.  That’s something you have to learn.”

Yuki couldn’t respond.  She pressed her fingers to her temples and quietly closed her eyes.  She almost seemed to have dozed off, but for the slight flutter of her eyelashes, the trembling of the lips.  Crying inside, without sobs or tears.  Was I expecting too much of a thirteen-year-old girl?  Who was I to be so self-righteous? […]

Yuki didn’t move.  I reached out and touched her arm.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m very narrow-minded.  No, to be fair, you’ve done the best that can be expected.”

A single tear trailed down her cheek and feel on her lap.  That was all.  Beautiful and noble.

“So what can I do now?” she spoke up a minute later.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just think about what comes before words.  You owe that to the dead.  As time goes on, you’ll understand.  What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t.  Time solves most things.  And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.  Is that too much to ask?”

“A little,” she said, trying to smile.

“Well, of course it is,” I said, trying to smile too. “[…] Life is a lot more fragile than we think.  So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets.  Fairly, and if possible, sincerely.  It’s too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies […]”

This is quite a long excerpt.  But I like how the two interacted.  And there is an important message for us too.

Besides the main character’s relationship with Yuki, I also enjoy reading the love story between Yumiyoshi – the hotel receptionist – and him.  I would not go in great detail here.  It is equally beautiful that requires patience to appreciate.

In closing, both books are not to be missed and have to be read one after another.  Sheep first, then Dance.  It is rare to spot an opportunity to witness the turning point of a writer’s career.  This is one.

I have come to the realisation that perhaps there is no such thing as which is my favorite Haruki Murakami novel (my 6th so far).  Even though my familiarity to his style has led me to half-expecting what “Sputnik Sweetheart” would become, there is still this element of freshness that kept me from putting the book down.  And I finished reading it in one day, wanting more.  The opening paragraph would be the best way to introduce the story.

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.  An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains – flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits … In short, a love of truly monumental proportions.  The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire.  And was married.  And, I should add, was a woman.  This is where it all began, and where it all ended.  Almost.

The theme of “Sputnik Sweetheart”, from what I observe, is loneliness, riding onto the framework of unattainable love.  That strong sense of loneliness!  The narrator – a man – falls in love with a lesbian who falls in love with a married woman.  True to Murakami’s style, this book is full of metaphors (“did you see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?“), dualism that leads to surrealism, and characters that come alive in their very own unique style.

What stands out in “Sputnik Sweetheart” is the way the story is narrated and told.  Timeline is shifted to and fro to suit the narration.  Focus is shifted from one character to another and back to the narrator without the readers noticing the change, encouraging us to want to learn more about the characters’ way of thinking and their way of life.  And then, something strange happens to these characters.  The author spends the second part of the book pasting bits and pieces of information together – some from interview, some from his observation, and some from the journals left behind.  Distinguishing what is real from what is not is often not easy, as it is with all of Marakami’s works.  Even as I devoured the very last paragraph of the book, these thoughts lingered: Could this be real?  What happened next?  And in my dreamy state, inside an English cottage at Fraser’s Hill, the follow paragraph from the book has made the most impact to me.

Lying there, I close my eyes for a while, then open them.  I silently breathe in, then out.  A thought begins to form in my mind, but in the end I think of nothing.  Not that there was much difference between the two, thinking and not thinking.  I find I can no longer distinguish between one thing and another, between things that existed and things that did not.  I look out of the window.  Until the sky turns white, clouds float by, birds chirp, and a new day lumbers up, gathering together the sleepy minds of the people who inhabit this planet.

The rate this is going, Haruki Murakami could well be one of my most read author, after Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino.

“Norwegian Wood” is the second book I have randomly picked up from Kinokuniya prior to my holiday in June.  Substantially thicker than “South of the Border, West of the Sun” – considering how thin that book is – the two stories are strikingly similar.  Read almost like another one of his ‘autobiographical fictions’, which the translator Jay Rubin insisted in his note that it is not.  “Norwegian Wood” is a myriad of love and friendship through the eyes of Watanabe, from his age of 18 to 37.  A story that anchors between this first love Naoko and another girl Midori.  One that ends with a choice of the past and the future Watanabe has to make.

“Norwegian Wood” is one of Murakami’s earlier works.  Hence, less surreal than “South of the Border”, almost read like a straightforward love story.  By no means make “Norwegian Wood” a lesser work but rather, a different kind of work.  The most striking feature that stands out from the rest of his novels is the structure within.  I notice that each sub-plot involves three persons.  Something would happen to one party, change the entire dynamic, and the sub-plot dissolves, replaced by another sub-plot of three persons.  It is read like a continuation of one sub-plot riding onto the next one.  All the way till the end of the novel, the same structure is maintained.  I personally find this way of story writing original.

A lot of details have gone into the texture of the story.  Hence, I wouldn’t be surprised that some readers have identified “Norwegian Wood” as an autobiographical fiction.  Beyond the detail description of the school compound down to how the buildings are laid out, the characters are distinctly alive.  Down to the tone each character uses, and to the change in tone as the same character face different characters of varied personalities.  It is this level of details I appreciate deeply as I read this book during my holiday.

This book was released in 1987.  I believe it was the same book that elevated Murakami to an International status with the readership grown to millions that year.  Hence, in a way, “Norwegian Wood” could well be one of his most accessible work.  Even as a die hard fan who is in love with Murakami’s special surreal treatment to his stories, “Norwegian Wood” having little of that surrealism still ranks high in my book.  For a simple love story though can be dark, can still be beautiful.

After my holiday, I have visited Kinokuniya again and have randomly picked another two of Murakami’s books.  So, stay tuned for more book summaries.

Everytime when I travel, I bring along books to read and a notepad to write.  For I don’t stop reading or writing, especially not during my holiday.  I had almost finished reading the new book by Paulo Coelho before I boarded the plane so I reckon, I probably needed at least three books to last the two weeks trip.

One thing I really enjoy writing a book summary is the occasion comments I read – both here and in Facebook – from other passionate readers who may or may not see the book the way I do.  And we exchange thoughts.  Prior to my holiday trip, I have read Haruki Murakami’s new non-fiction book.  As always, I shared my thoughts online.  That sparked off an online dialogue with another fan of Murakami which in turn inspired me to pick two random books of his from Kinokuniya.  “South of the Border, West of the Sun” is the fourth Murakami book I have read.  And I enjoy every single page of it – 187 in total.

“South” in essence is a story of romance told from the perspective of a man, from his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, the in-between love affairs, to his marriage.  A typical story that almost all men who have fallen in love can relate.  An ordinary love template.  The details – both physical and emotional – are so vivid that I was brought back in time as a young boy, to the beginning of my fascination to the opposite sex, to the silly things I did driven by my then raging hormone.  However simple the idea is, a story told by Haruki Murakami is never going to be a typical story.  “South” is original; it is genuine; it touches my heart.  I reflect upon my own love relationship, from my mid-teen (I mature late) till today.  It is one book that I would read again.  That’s why I bought the Spanish version during our holiday in Spain.  And I am looking forward to reading both versions side-by-side.

I am probably slightly ahead of time to compare “South” with another earlier work of his “Norwegian Wood” – as that will be my upcoming book summary.  Both novels are of a similar topic, with a center character that strongly resembles the author himself (I make that observation based on his semi-autobiography “Running”).  His later works certainly get more and more surreal and abstract.  A good example is his recent work “After Work”.  On that note, “South” to me, has a subtle surreal after taste.  It makes me ponder upon what is real, and what is not.

Below is a short quote of what I feel as a beautiful way to put forth something so close to reality, something that appears so real to me today.

“No one will weave dreams for me – it is my turn to weave dreams for others.  That’s what I have to do.  Such dreams may have no power, but if my own life is to have any meaning at all, that is what I have to do.” – South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel)