This review is part of the Literature World Tour.
Haruki Murakami holds a mainstream Western readership in the palm of his hand. Post-Norwegian Wood, we became convinced that he could do no wrong – regardless of the uneven and oddly mundane confusion of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Kafka on the Shore confirmed to us that here was indeed a remarkably imaginative novelist, someone we could trust. And I think that ‘trust’ issue is the crux of Murakami’s pros and cons as a writer: every one of his novels is a different fabulation, and yet they are all the same.
When I was reading his 2007 novel After Dark, I often carried it around in my handbag, and eventually a Japanese friend caught sight of Murakami’s author photo peeking out – and exclaimed, ‘I know who that is! Bored Tokyo housewives are crazy about him.’ Part of the appeal must be Murakami’s sensitive portrayal of marginal characters and their heartaches, as well as his kooky talking cats and the way he makes popular music part of the story. After Dark uses the self-conscious narrative gimmick of telling the story from the point of view of an aerial camera; the voice is disembodied and matter-of-fact – not too unlike Mari, the girl at the centre of the novel. She’s a chilly person, a loner, and the late-night advances of a friendly trombonist and a lesbian love-hotel manager barely reach her. She’s too caught up in escaping from home troubles by reading all night in a Denny’s; she’s trying to forget the fact that her beautiful sister Eri is lost to her after falling into a sinister sleep-like state and completely withdrawing from society.
The story conjures that feeling of the surreality of the wee hours. It weaves an atmosphere of the unlikely conversations that happen under fluorescent lights when the sun is still hours from rising, when the only people still awake have suspicious reasons for whatever business they are engaged in. The human story feels unimportant compared to this feat of recreating a weird ambiance.
Now it’s daylight again, and I’m more interested in looking ahead to what Murakami’s done with his next project. His new novel, 1Q84, will be published by Japanese publisher Shinchosha in two weeks’ time. The author has promised that it’s his most ambitious novel to date, ‘a real doorstop’. There is little information in the public domain about it, though some say it was inspired by George Orwell’s 1984 (the number 9 in Japanese is pronounced like the English letter Q), while others contend that early-twentieth-century Chinese writer Lu Xun, author of the novella The Story of Ah Q, was the inspiration. There is no firm date set yet for the English translation’s publication, so it is up to those bored Tokyo housewives to give the first report – we’ll be keeping a lookout.
Previously in Japan: Jim Murdoch's review of The Master of Go
Next stop on the Literature World Tour: Australia!
