Some years ago I went through what’s best decribed as a Haruki Murakami phase. My reading habits are normally varied, but every once in a while I’ll binge on a particular author, and at that precise point he spoke to me deeply. The seeming detachment of his protagonists spoke to my own level of engagement with the world, their surrounding themselves with their interests seemed to me to be the way I lived. Even the fantastical elements chimed perfectly with how I was seeing the world at that point, dystopian, seemingly aimless on the surface but intimating that there was far more to discover. In essence each book seemed to be a pretty cool guy versus the world, both this one and, occasionally others.
This is a horribly reductive view of it, of course, and barely scratches the s of the word “surface”. This is why I don’t write literary criticism. Suffice to say I read him voraciously for a few years and then stopped. Whether it was the similarity of the protagonists, whether the otherworldly elements stared to grate, I don’t recall. I have a theory that, as the stopping occurred around the same time as the buying of first house, expectation of first child I became, suddenly so rooted in the actual world that all of Murakami’s elusiveness, his coolness in the face of the extraordinary, became less meaningful to me. My life had become, in the most precise sense of the word, very ordinary indeed. Since then the novels have sat on my bookshelf, my hand’s hovered over the spines a couple of times, but generally gone elsewhere.
So it was a pleasant surprise to get his most recent novel “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of Pilgrimage” for Christmas.Once reading, it all came back. All the standard Murakami elements are there: the protagonist is well to-do, has an interesting job but is detached from the world, there’s a slight element of otherness, much is left unexplained, all as I remembered. But still, his particular genius is to make you not mind. Indeed, Tsukuru’s distance from the world is foregrounded, one of the main drivers of the plot. His books always place great importance on music, generally classical or jazz, check, Liszt’s “Le Mal du Pays” is an important signifier. There’s always an enigmatic, slightly unknowable female character. Here there are three, each playing an important part, instigator, enabler, closer. There’s the usual sense of a great deal happening off camera, as it were,leaving the reader as lost as the hero. In all, it was like meeting an old, slightly odd friend again, and remembering why you used to hang out in the first place.
*disclaimer, subject worthy of far more than a brief blog post, I know
This is a horribly reductive view of it, of course, and barely scratches the s of the word “surface”. This is why I don’t write literary criticism. Suffice to say I read him voraciously for a few years and then stopped. Whether it was the similarity of the protagonists, whether the otherworldly elements stared to grate, I don’t recall. I have a theory that, as the stopping occurred around the same time as the buying of first house, expectation of first child I became, suddenly so rooted in the actual world that all of Murakami’s elusiveness, his coolness in the face of the extraordinary, became less meaningful to me. My life had become, in the most precise sense of the word, very ordinary indeed. Since then the novels have sat on my bookshelf, my hand’s hovered over the spines a couple of times, but generally gone elsewhere.
So it was a pleasant surprise to get his most recent novel “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of Pilgrimage” for Christmas.Once reading, it all came back. All the standard Murakami elements are there: the protagonist is well to-do, has an interesting job but is detached from the world, there’s a slight element of otherness, much is left unexplained, all as I remembered. But still, his particular genius is to make you not mind. Indeed, Tsukuru’s distance from the world is foregrounded, one of the main drivers of the plot. His books always place great importance on music, generally classical or jazz, check, Liszt’s “Le Mal du Pays” is an important signifier. There’s always an enigmatic, slightly unknowable female character. Here there are three, each playing an important part, instigator, enabler, closer. There’s the usual sense of a great deal happening off camera, as it were,leaving the reader as lost as the hero. In all, it was like meeting an old, slightly odd friend again, and remembering why you used to hang out in the first place.
*disclaimer, subject worthy of far more than a brief blog post, I know
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