Haruki Murakami
Jan
'08
I first read Haruki Murakami in the summer of 2006. I’ll admit everything here: I read the book Kafka on the Shore because it was recommended by an attractive member of the opposite sex, plus I liked the cover. At the time I was working at a large bookstore with the job of merchandising features, endcaps, keeping up with new releases, etc. It was an exciting job for me which I felt required a creative side as well as an “orderly” side, as features had to be kept nice and tidy but still display illustrious and attention-grabbing colors. There was a certain summertime feature which required this book, so I saw it often.
I can’t recall the significance of the day I decided to purchase it, except that it was part of a 3 for 2 sale and thus I got it for free. I worked my way through it in a manner which allowed me to finish it in a number of days. For the first time in, yes, I’ll say “a long time,” I was reading a book which struck the back of my head and made fun of me for not having read more books like it. I couldn’t put it down, in other words, and I felt guilty that my reading habits had otherwise slipped into the one-book-a-month category, because I was clearly missing out on a lot.
I don’t usually read back covers. It was a habit I had as a child and found myself rejecting a lot of books which might have been very good based entirely on what the back cover noted. In some cases, back covers don’t even get the gist of the book and turn out to be very disappointing (I sometimes read them after I’ve finished a book and decide whether or not it was summarized well). Thus, after a while, I decided to stop reading back covers and instead judge books based on recommendations and covers. As much as you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, so far I haven’t read anything I’ve disliked except Jack Kerouac’s On the Road which had a nice cover but otherwise failed at everything. The Vintage-published Haruki Murakami books have been no exception.
I’d like to defend myself a bit here before I continue. I don’t buy books based on their covers, but it is what initially draws me in. If it were up to me, back covers would include only two things: A small 2-3 short paragraph exerpt detailing a very eye-catching moment in the book which still doesn’t give away anything that would “ruin the book,” and a short biography of the author. Usually you’ll see that summary on the first page, but I’d prefer it on the back cover. It gives me an idea of the writing style and a tiny glimpse into whether or not this book would be at all interesting to me. Of course, I purchase the book based on the writing style. If I can read it, whether or not it seems interesting, the language will make it interesting. Take for instance the book I had read previously to Kafka on the Shore - Salman Rushdie’s Fury. Having read the back cover, as I like to do when I finish the book, I can see that if I had judged the entire book based on that, I probably wouldn’t have bought it. I knew from previous readings that Rushdie’s style flows through my comprehension as smoothly as the way cream cheese always looks on bagels in commercials, so I picked it up. I don’t regret it - now it’s one my favorites.
I recently finished my second two Murakami books, After the Quake (a collection of short stories set at the time of the 1995 Kobe earthquake) and Sputnik Sweetheart (a love story and as the back cover notes, a “profound meditation on human longing”). I have a rule about picking favorites: I have to like at least three before I can call it one. It goes for anything - authors, directors, actors, artists, whatever and etc. Patrick Süskind quickly became my favorite author after I plowed through all of his books last year. Haruki Murakami, however, had to wait, and I don’t know why. I had a lot of reading ambitions last year, but I don’t know why I waited a year and a half (exactly) to continue my journey through Murakami’s books. Kafka on the Shore was just as compelling and amazing as Perfume (both of which were the first I read by each author), and yet Süskind grabbed me and took me along for the ride, not letting go even now while I obsess over the movie version of this tale of a murderer.
In any case, I enjoyed Kafka on the Shore. I described it as “one of the best books I’ve read in a while, in the sense that it is intellectually stimulating and yet still a very nice place to escape.” (The “escape,” as some of you may know, is one of the main reasons I read so much and so often.) “I suppose I do go for action, adventure, and mystery when it comes to reading. I’ve already purchased Tales of the Genji because of its use in this book. Kafka on the Shore is right up my alley - it includes folklore, mythology, philosophy and literary stimuli.” I later learned about “magic realism” and the ways that this book applied to the genre and became entranced, fixated on finding out more about it. I still haven’t read a lot of it; I’m shying away from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, but I’ve wanted to try Milan Kundera; I, obviously, already have Patrick Süskind undertow, but Yann Martel bored me. It’s a genre that fascinates me utterly but threatens my quick understanding of most literature. It’s a challenge that I’d love to experience head-on.
This is all beside the point. After the Quake lingers in my mind in the same way I imagine Sumire lingered in K’s mind at the end of Sputnik Sweetheart; and just the same, it isn’t Sumire’s disappearance and the mystery surrounding it (”like smoke”) that brings my thoughts back to the latter book. It’s the character “K” and the fact that he is the narrrator and insists the story is about Sumire, yet his name is only mentioned once, in passing, as “K.” I long to understand him and his passions and to talk with him along a beautifully peaceful beach, just as he longed to walk alongside Sumire after her disapperance. And it’s mixed with thoughts of an earthquake and the metaphor of life and fiction. Perhaps I read them too close together and should have paused to ponder After the Quake before jumping directly into Sputnik Sweetheart, but I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t want to stop. Murakami sits me down and demands my attention, and I have nothing to do but willingly comply.
I’m reading Mario Vargas Llosa now. He was interrupted by a months’ worth of literature, notably Kurt Vonnegut, John Dunning, and books about Christmas. It’s not that Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter hasn’t grabbed my attention; it’s more that the words are very tiny and sometimes the font hurts my eyes. That, and there are really great stopping points. At the end of a chapter, I can put the book down and forget about it; when I come back to read again, nothing is forgotten. It comes naturally, or seems to. His worlds are comparably different from Haruki Murakami’s and it is because of jumping back into this book that I’ve been able to see the difference in writing styles. Some themes are very similar, including that of “writers.” There are a lot of writers in these books which I’m reading, but they all have different views of their worlds. I tend to agree with Murakami’s writers more often, even though I don’t live in their worlds and don’t have their experiences.
It’s easy to pull out quotes from a book that you enjoy (especially if you’re reading Oscar Wilde) but it’s been difficult for me not to share entire paragraphs, pages, chapters from Haruki Murakami. It reminds me of the entire first half of Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park (another favorite author from whom I’ve read more than three books); I want to copy it into letters to everyone and let them know that yes! this is it! this is exactly how I feel! This is what it’s like to be a writer and to think of the world as a library, as Jorge Luis Borges illustrates, to think of each person as a book, and to consider life to be just another story. How can we make this one more interesting?
But Haruki Murakami, yes, I’ve come to tell you that I’ve read some of his books and he is an excellent writer.
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