January 4, 2024
I wanted to finish this book and this review before the new year, to make this my last official read of 2023. Obviously, I did not accomplish that. I finished the book exactly 23 hours and 58 minutes into 2024, which makes my first book of the year one that I feel extremely uncertain about. While reading, I kept telling people that 50, 250, and even 500 pages into this 600 page book, I wasn’t quite sure if I liked it, but I was hoping the ending would help me settle on a firm opinion. It did not. In fact, the ending left me perhaps even more unsure than before. It's the first thing anyone says when talking about him. But I'll reiterate it here. Haruki Murakami is undeniably a talented and skilled writer. Murakami is terrible at writing about women and writing woman characters. In the first 20 pages, he describes a teenage girl from the perspective of a 30 year old in a way that made me slightly uncomfortable. In the first 30 pages, he explained for a full page the nature of living with someone who menstruates, and how difficult that can be for men. His writing is also near-obsessive about sex, but in a categorically unsexy way. Murakami filters all of his male-female interpersonal connections through sex, both positive and negative. It’s how people share energy, connect to each other, pass through different stages of being. It is a method of exercising power, and it is used as a way to achieve healing. The women are all focused on sex as a vehicle for change, or development, or self-image. None of this is unreasonable, and in fact the idea of sex as a guiding principle for the way humans interact with the world feels pretty grounded in reality, but the way Murakami writes feels very oddly pornographic. Not particularly erotic, not attractive or healthy or even active in many ways. Just sexual, and not for any discernible reason beyond….the author’s interest?
Murakami’s writing style is extraordinarily straightforward. He tells you everything. Everything the narrator is thinking, but also everything the other characters are thinking. Most of the people in this book simply say out loud everything you might want to know about their motivations, actions, and interests. This isn’t a negative, only different from many of the authors I’m familiar with. The one drawback is that there isn’t very much compelling dramatic tension until roughly the last quarter or so of the book. The writing style and the characterization create an environment where everyone seems a bit bored. This is exacerbated by something about the way Murakami writes his protagonist that rubs me the wrong way. It is perhaps related to a kind of ineffable knowledge that he possesses, often guided by a feeling that a particular thing is true, unsupported by either his own experience, or more importantly, the surrounding narrative. Maybe that’s the point, but I found it difficult to sympathize with as a reader. Luckily, the majority of the supporting cast are rather unlikeable, creating an artificial sense of sympathy for the protagonist by default. One of the most compelling sections is a long-form story told by a tertiary supporting character about a secret military operation. This section is disturbing at times, but ultimately very engaging, much more so than any of the present-tense story being told up to that point. Perhaps Murakami is trying to say that the previous generation has more profound things to say about the nature of life than his own. If this is true, I don’t like it much. Perhaps Murakami is implying that only people who live through great crisis have any stories worth listening to. If this is true, I don’t like it much. Perhaps Murakami is simply better at writing adjacent stories, short interludes that break up the narrative. This is supported by other interspersed sections throughout the novel that feature interesting writing and intriguing characters.
There are two aspects of writing that I think Murakami particularly excels at. The first is his grasp of form and structure. This book covers a lot of ground, pushing through a number of different arcs, completely exchanging supporting casts at least twice, and introducing a number of external narratives as additions to the main plot. Yet despite all of these variables, I never felt like I was reading a different book. Everything feels connected, and by the end of the book, all of it’s many varying pieces fit together rather nicely. It remains the same story, through and through. His other great strength is the portrayal of mundanity. Rarely have I read an author that is so able to express the experience of having not very much to do for six months so you make breakfast and dinner and maybe go for a swim or sit on a bench but mostly just wait for time to pass. It feels like such a universal thing, to watch life happen, but Murakami is able to tap into exactly that feeling in a really impressive way.
At the end of the day, I think this book was good - well-written, well-structured, fully realized - but I don’t know whether I liked it. Murakami is clearly an excellent writer. This is unfortunately and severely undercut by his propensity for passive, under-engaged characters, and his obvious issues writing women. In addition, I don’t 100% know what the point was. This could be a personal failure, certainly. Or it could be an over-emphasis on themes and style, which by nature leads to a neglect of the finer points of storytelling and plot. It could also be the presence of too many themes, clouding the overall impression of the book. Generational separation in experience leads to different degrees of fulfillment and different value sets? Secrecy leads to distrust and paranoia? Sex is the lens through which we should engage with our lives? The sanctity of marriage can overcome even supernatural interference? Families disappoint, and your adult relationships are the more important connections in your life? It’s unclear. In any case, reading this book was a useful, and therefore good, experience, even if enjoyable wasn’t necessarily in the cards.
6.5/10
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