Haruki Murakami, November 2005

[kokopopo]

You don't analyze a dream, you just pass through it. A dream is sometimes healing and sometimes it makes you anxious. A narrative is the same--you are just in it. A novelist is not an analyst. He just transforms one scene into another. A novelist is one who dreams wide awake. He decides to write and he sits down and dreams away, then wraps it

Comments

[kokopopo]

I think maybe Murakami is saying he can't be nailed down as a writer because the writing process (at least as he practices it) is remote from the rational, analytical process required to nail it down.

I thought the reviewer was generally off the mark, and didn't care for Murakami's work. Murakami, as I read it, was using dreams as an analogy for his creative process, which is not a product of a rigidly analytical process, not suggesting he is a mere cipher of dreams. Nor does Murakami suggest all dreamworlds are per se esthetically satisfying--who would?--but that is the position to which the reviewer responds.

I also read Murakami to suggest something about the organic nature of narrative.

Elsewhere, the reviewer suggested that certain recurring items in Murakami's work, like cats and jazz, are "fun enough the first time around, but irritating as they recur." Most of the rest of his review is similarly dismissive.

I would suggest that "The Shingawa Monkey," the last story in this collection is as ingenious, poignant, and subversive as anything Murakami has written. However, I would expect it to irritate the reviewer.