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inverarity
What's this? Inverarity reviewing something that's not SF/Fantasy? Well, yeah, I've been feeling like my reading choices have been rather narrow in recent years. SFF is always going to be my favorite genre, but I used to read more broadly, so I'm trying to sample stuff outside my usual range. And since I've been pretty down on the literary genre, I've been looking for something that actually appeals to me.
So, Haruki Murakami. I chose him almost at random. I'd never actually heard of him until recently, but he's a very Big Name Author in Japan, and he has quite a significant international following as well. So not only did I choose a random book by an author I'm unfamiliar with, but it's a literary novel translated from the original Japanese.
Here is the Goodreads summary:
Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.
A poignant story of one college student's romantic coming-of-age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.
Norwegian Wood (the title refers to the Beatles song, which is Naoko's favorite) is a coming-of-age story set in late sixties Japan. It's also a romance, of sorts, with Toru caught in a rather sad love triangle with Naoko and Midori. I think the description of Midori as "fiercely independent and sexually liberated" is misleading; while Midori is certainly a free spirit in her own way, she's actually more chaste and conventional than that description would lead you to believe. Really, she's a lot more Manic Pixie Dream Girl than free lovin' party gal.
Since every MPDG must be inexplicably attracted to a mopey loser, Midori finds herself drawn to Toru, who's not such a bad sort (in fact, for the most part, he's a pretty decent guy), but like most nineteen-year-old college students, he can't help being a self-centered prick at times. Toru is the first-person narrator of the story, and so we're treated to his every thought about everything. Sometimes these thoughts are insightful and profound and/or humorous, but mostly they're about as engaging as any nineteen-year-old's ongoing discovery that life, it does suck at times.
But despite my feeling that Toru needed to stop thinking about his dick, I did like this book more than I expected to. Murakami has a wonderful style, at least one that I enjoyed -- it is literary, but not literary in the tortuous prosey way of Cormac Mccarthy or Annie Proulx. He goes into fine but not overly wordy detail about all the little incidentals of life, and is particularly good with characters. Indeed, while I found Toru boring and in need of a good ass-kicking at times, it was all the other characters -- not just Naoko and Midori, but even the minor characters -- who breathed life into what otherwise would have been a pretty tedious bildungsroman.
Some of Murakami's details are so prosaic they border on banality: I actually enjoyed the lingering description of Toru eating a pickle, sharing it with Midori's father, and dwelling on the crunching sound it made. It's not a pointless detail, because it ties that scene with later reflections, but there were other details, and entire conversations, that did seem pointless to me. There are an awful lot of sex scenes in this book, too, and the very banality with which Murakami portrays Toru's pronging makes it less gratuitous, somehow.
This makes me think (1) Murakami probably is really a genius, and (2) I'm sure there are nuances that were lost in the translation of this novel to English.
So, three-dimensional, quirky characters and a style I liked. But for me, the most important part of a book is the story. Well, the ending of Norwegian Wood is pretty much given to you in the first chapter, so there aren't really any twists and turns in the plot. And bottom line, the book is about a college student trying to get his shit together and grow up. Okay, there's also sex, mental illness, student protests, sex, suicide, sex, and quite a bit of sex. But the story wasn't terribly interesting. I continued reading because I liked Murakami's details, the funny anecdotes, the characters revealing their unique, often fucked-up personalities, not because I cared much what happened next.
I think literary genre lovers will like this book. I've heard Murakami described as being like sushi: he's an acquired taste, and some people never acquire it, while others fall in love.
I like sushi, and I think I could grow to like Murakami quite a lot, but I'd really like to read something that's more... interesting.
Please recommend another Murakami book for me! I liked his style and what I've heard about his other books intrigues me, but I'd like something with a little suspense, a little action. Got any suggestions?
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 01:21 pm (UTC)I'm also particularly fond of Kafka on the Shore but it's so unique and bizarre. I also like After Dark because it's a pretty quick read. Enjoy. Murakami is one of my favorite authors and I do have to say, he is definitely an acquired taste but After the Quake is a good one to start with.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 03:12 pm (UTC)I agree with you, in that it's a story about what's happenning now and not about what will happen later. Japanese lit is a lot about the present, about little moments and random sensations, but not so much about a plot with a satisfying ending. Or so I have seem to discover during the semester.
My favourite character was Midori, with all her issues. Naoko seemed to be more of a sort of ghostly presence haunting Watanabe, than a real person. Which worked very much fine, for me.
Translations are often shitty and quite difficult from the original japanese- I confess I have no idea how the English translation is, but my professor insists that Spanish translates better from Japanese than English. He also said that a translation made by a native Japanese will often try to capture the spirit of the book more than a learned Japanese translator, who'll try to be as literal as possible, thus loosing much of the symbolism.
I just begun After Dark, and I'm enjoying it very much. My favourite high school teacher has The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in his favourites list, and I trust his literary taste enough to put in on my reading list. I can't vouch for it directly, though. But if you would like to delve deeper on Japanese Lit, I can recomend Prize Stock, by Kenzaburo Oe.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 07:37 pm (UTC)The greatest twentieth-century writers I have read are Thomas Mann and Andre' Gide. The latter's The Pastoral Symphony pretty much broke my heart, and the former's Doktor Faustus and short stories are things I go back to over and over again, for inspiration and to learn from them. Doktor Faustus also might interest you as a fantasy writer, since it is a textbook instance of how to suggest the supernatural without ever making a certain statement that it either exists or does not. And it contains a haunting, terrifying conversation with the Devil that goes on for dozens of pages without ever losing interest.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 08:03 pm (UTC)I may check out Doktor Faustus, and the Master of Go also sounds interesting, thanks.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-13 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-14 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 07:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 01:39 am (UTC)Never let me go
Date: 2010-06-14 12:27 am (UTC)So this is real life...
Re: Never let me go
Date: 2010-06-14 01:05 am (UTC)Re: Never let me go
Date: 2010-06-14 05:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-14 05:35 am (UTC)Weirdly, I'm looking at Amazon now and I think all my favorites were the ones with 4 stars and my least favorites were the ones with 4 and a half stars. Hmph.
I agree with anon above that Kazuo Ishiguro is great.
Someone saved me the work of analyzing another great writer you might like
Date: 2010-06-14 06:14 am (UTC)http://johncwright.livejournal.com/331497.html
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/331681.html
no subject
Date: 2010-06-14 08:08 pm (UTC)As for Japanese-to-English translation quality, I have yet to actually attempt one, but from first impressions, I think dialogue is probably a lot harder than description. There's a lot of nuance in various things like word choices and verb forms in Japanese that are basically impossible to get across in English. Description, on the other hand, is pretty much always written in the same style, so that would seem to be easier. Take that as you will.
-TealTerror
pHaruki Muralami
Date: 2010-12-23 09:37 am (UTC)Re: pHaruki Muralami
Date: 2010-12-23 10:04 am (UTC)