People who have read these notes before will know that I am a confirmed Murakami fan. However, I kind of came at his most famous book sideways, by way of a number of other novels which offered a more or less overtly metaphysical, more or less "magical" style. I was slightly surprised therefore to find Murakami here playing it straight. It took me a while to stop waiting for something bizarre and unearthly to happen, but, when I did, it became clear to me that this is very much in line with the others, though here in a "purer", unadorned form.
At one level, this is a relatively conventional coming-of-age love story, said by many to be autobiographical, with a man torn between love for two, very different, women. One is a floating, other-worldly character, who ends up for most of the novel in an equally other-worldly mental health care institution, to which the protagonist occasionally repairs for some soul-mending of his own, while the other, by contrast, lives with her feet on the ground (almost) and constantly challenges our hero to commit and engage - not necessarily only with her, but also with reality.
Now, if that is starting to sound familiar in its shades of metaphysical conflict, well, it is. It's just that here you don't get the overtly magical stuff, and maybe Murakami doesn't even see his story in that way.
Our hero, Toru Watanabe, is a real person with whom it is easy to sympathise. He lives in a world of change, Japan of 1970-ish, at a time of student protests and social upheaval, and in spite of his typical Murakamian detachment, cannot altogether avoid these things impinging on his own life. He ends up making his choice, but not in a way which convinces you that the choice was actually ever really his to make.
This book apparently made Murakami a novelist superstar, to the extent it drove him to leave Japan for a while, because he couldn't stand the attention it brought him. You can see how this book would be a youth cult classic, with its blend of idealism, indecision, sex, self-negation, social change, existential angst and escape. But it is more than that, pointing to the more explicit metaphysical preoccupations of other novels. And in spite of all that, and notwithstanding the time it took me to get through it (my fault, not the book's), this is a novel which reads easily.
Recommendation: absolutely. Of course. Self-evidently. This is the real thing.
At one level, this is a relatively conventional coming-of-age love story, said by many to be autobiographical, with a man torn between love for two, very different, women. One is a floating, other-worldly character, who ends up for most of the novel in an equally other-worldly mental health care institution, to which the protagonist occasionally repairs for some soul-mending of his own, while the other, by contrast, lives with her feet on the ground (almost) and constantly challenges our hero to commit and engage - not necessarily only with her, but also with reality.
Now, if that is starting to sound familiar in its shades of metaphysical conflict, well, it is. It's just that here you don't get the overtly magical stuff, and maybe Murakami doesn't even see his story in that way.
Our hero, Toru Watanabe, is a real person with whom it is easy to sympathise. He lives in a world of change, Japan of 1970-ish, at a time of student protests and social upheaval, and in spite of his typical Murakamian detachment, cannot altogether avoid these things impinging on his own life. He ends up making his choice, but not in a way which convinces you that the choice was actually ever really his to make.
This book apparently made Murakami a novelist superstar, to the extent it drove him to leave Japan for a while, because he couldn't stand the attention it brought him. You can see how this book would be a youth cult classic, with its blend of idealism, indecision, sex, self-negation, social change, existential angst and escape. But it is more than that, pointing to the more explicit metaphysical preoccupations of other novels. And in spite of all that, and notwithstanding the time it took me to get through it (my fault, not the book's), this is a novel which reads easily.
Recommendation: absolutely. Of course. Self-evidently. This is the real thing.
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