I've loved Murakami for
a long time. I have loved him for his fixation on death and sex, and
for his strange, disillusioned characters that inhabit his strange,
disillusioned worlds. I love the surprising lightness of his touch, and
his
particular sense of melancholy, coloured with a kind of sweetness
that is his alone.
His new book reminds me
of his early work, and particularly Norwegian Wood, and I found it
engaging and very difficult to put down. I read this book over the
course of a day. I couldn't walk away from it. Murakami does not push
his magic realism in this novel. There is a quietness in the story, a
persistence of memory, and a struggle for understanding that is
understated and compelling.
Tsukuru Tazaki narrates
this story; a man who has never quite recovered from being rejected by
his close group of friends in his late teens without so much as a
reason given, he has drifted through his education on the brink of
death, lost, confused and alone. When Tsukura meets Sara, a
forthright woman whom he begins to care for, he starts to notice the way
his adult life has been atrophied by what happened, and he embarks on
his own kind of pilgrimage to uncover the truth, and make sense of
himself at last.
This novel was resonant
for me; the fixation how a moment in our life can change us forever, how
it can recur in our thoughts again and again until we can make sense of
it; the mythologising of our youth, the seminal moments that mark
us. To my mind, Murakami has his fingers on the pulse of lost souls,
and when I read him, the strangeness of his characters' outlooks on
life feel true, feel raw, feel relatable. Tsukuru is a man at odds with
his world because there is a part of him missing, a vague geography that
he cannot mark on a map. He is vulnerable and he is young, and Murakami
allows him to live simply in the pages.
I wonder how much of
Murakami's language is lost in translation, because there is something a
little stilted in this book and it made me consider the complexity of
translating Japanese into English. Then again, that marked, sparse and
yet strangely lyrical aspect to Murakami's writing is familiar to me, so
perhaps it was the clean line of the narrative in this case,
unencumbered by magical threads, residing in a (mostly) translucent
world, that allowed the language a new kind of stillness. At any
rate, this is a novel that tugs you in, holds you close, and makes
you the kind of promises you made as a teenager, when everything
mattered terribly and everything felt too much, and the world seemed
to begin and end in the friendships you were sure defined you, and you
were certain would be with you for life. First edition hardback (with stickers) released 12th August 2014.
$45.
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