even more fantasy and science fiction
19. Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami
I don't think I have ever gone back and forth more times while reading a book as to whether I liked it and wanted to keep it.
The first person narrator, a Calcutec or sort of human calculator by profession, is called in to do a job by an eccentric old inventor who has learned how to cancel out the sounds of specific things, only to become enmeshed in a spiral of increasingly surreal intrigue -- from the INKlings, subterranean creatures, from the Semiotecs who are the System's organized crime opposite numbers, and from a pair of freelance thugs.
Chapters are interspersed by the fairy-tale style narrative of a man, separated from his shadow, who lives at a town at the end of the world, reading dreams from sculls for a living, and surrounded by beasts who prove to be unicorns.
I liked the initial worldbuilding a great deal, though I found it frustrating how long we had to wait for the connection between the two threads to connect -- almost half the book. But when the connection came i found it satisfying and somewhat unexpected, though foreshadowing kept it from being a total twist. However as the hidden conspiracy aspects of the plot develop, we end up pulling away from the exterior world he's created -- that is clearly deliberate and plays into the books theme's, but i found it frustrating, since a big part of science fiction for me is wanting to see how the stimuli affect the alternate world.
The descriptions were lyrical and sometimes surprisingly earthy, but the main character is troublingly passive and isolated -- at least, it troubles me. It is hard for me to get into any book where the protagonist essentially plays the role of driftwood on the tides of other people's agendas.
And the interior story, in which only the narrator has a mind, seemed to me to be troublingly solipsistic -- from not enough self to too much, and in neither case enough of a functional interaction with others. It is notable, in that context, that the main character has lost all his friends and his wife without much missing them, and his family of origin isn't so much as mentioned. Everyone who matters to him in the story has appeared in the last week.
Perhaps because he is so passive, the big reveal takes the form of several pages of someone else explaining What's Really Going On to him, which I found rather intrusive and dull. (The interior story has a much more active and compelling mechanism of gradual revelation.) But his reaction to the news and its effect on him is very deftly and delicately depicted.
I don't want to give away the ending even under a cut, because I think it matters to come to it with fresh eyes. But I found it, while poetic, unsatisfying.
The main character interacts with women very much in terms of food and sex, there is a chubby girl (referred to as such for all 400 pages) and a librarian who can eat immense amounts, and these are in many ways their most defining characteristics for him. He also makes a lot of cultural references to novels, movies and music and they are virtually all Western, even though the book is set in Toyko. I wish I knew whether that was the translator trying to find cultural equivilents or whether the narrator is so steeped in American and British culture in the original.
It's a very good book. I'm not keeping it.
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20. Red Spider, White Web by Misha
If you were ever a fan of cyberpunk, and if it's been a while since you've read any, this will knock you on your ass. At least it did me. I had forgotten how *punk* this movement was when it was new, how dissassociative and bitter and dystopian and kaleidoscopic, how much the enemy of linear narrative. A bunch of street artists live on the substinence edges of a Japanese-controlled America in which good citizens trade their freedom for the safety of "Mickey-san" while the rest scrounge fake plastic food and body mods and robot parts and survive attacks from religious crazies and cops and each other and some kind of freelance serial killer. It was too bloody and cynical to be exactly describable as fun, but I'm very glad I read it; it stretched some mental muscles I hadn't used in a while, and it was instructive to see how different, and more alienating, it feels as an old fart of 35 than it did in college, when cyberpunk and I were young together and both took ourselves very seriously..
21. The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto
Set up as the anti Little House on the Prairie, this is the story of the first person narrator and her sisters, who she renames PG (short for pig girl), Mice and Slither , growing up Japanese-Canadian on the prairie where their abusive father is trying and failing to grow rice. As an adult, she wears nothing but pajamas, drives a milk van to round up lost grocery carts for a living, and has two friends, Genievieve and Midori. She has a crush on both, but they fall in love with each other. She is possibly-pregnant by a supernatural creature which causes her to crave cucumbers, and eventually leads her on a journey that involves reconnecting with her childhood best friend Gerald, her sisters, and the chance of a new lover. In spite of the prairie backstory the present-day tale is a very urban fantasy. Many reviews I read presented it as bleak and stark and rather depressing but I didn't find it so. If I had any criticism it is that the quirkiness is layered on so very thick. Still, well worth reading, not least for its refusal to take the expected course about troublesome parents *or* pregnancy.