Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of It All
From browsing the racks of bookstores in Japan I was aware of the fact that he was well-known, but I had only a dim understanding of his popularity. I remember reading A Slow Boat to China in my Japanese class. It was one of the first things besides manga that I read in Japanese and understood well enough to enjoy. It was a nice, succinct little story that whet my appetite for reading more Japanese fiction and more Murakami.
By the time I decided to take on Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, my reading comprehension had improved quite a lot. I enjoyed it quite a bit, partly because of the satisfaction of reading a novel - aimed at adults! - in Japanese at a pace fast enough that I could enjoy it. The rest was probably because of the way it mixed so many familiar elements. A lonely and frustrated male protagonist, film noir stereotypes, B-grade fantasy and science fiction...it all came together in an interesting if not terribly cohesive way. Still, I did enjoy it as a light bit of reading, and it's probably Murakami's best work.
That pleasant experience, along with the recommendations in Tim Rogers' essays, spurred my interest in reading more of his novels. Over the past year and a half I've read about eight of his novels, usually as a break from more challenging (in terms of both content and style) reading. I must admit to a certain laziness, since they are pretty light reading.
His work seemed to have something that made it as universally appealing as Coca-Cola. This observation that turned out to be almost hilariously more apt than I could have imagined when it first came to me, most likely because I assumed that it must be something other than blandness. Murakami is a serviceable writer, and he certainly knows how to appeal to a wide audience, but I can't remember any ideas in his writing that excited me like other books have. Nor do his characters seem to have any particularly strong convictions or internal struggles that make them interesting. I think it's this passivity that makes it easy to identify with them for most of Japan's current society.
I think this worked best in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, probably because it seemed like a natural response to the more bizarre events of the story. The friction between the disparate elements and the fantasy setting also helped the mood. Murakami keeps playing with the same basic characters and elements, but the results are much less interesting when he's trying to recreate something he's already done better. His later novels, particularly After Dark and The Sputnik Sweetheart, seemed to show how dull the same basic story he uses is when it's stripped down to its most basic form.
Norwegian Wood is similar, in that it's really just a pretty trite love story that borrows the 1970's setting primarily for nostalgia purposes. There's so little done to tie it to the story that it seems like a cynical ploy to make the book more accessible. During the late fifties and sixties, people were protesting in the streets over the security treaty with the US. The national assembly was stormed and seized, protesters died, and things got so bad that visiting US officials had to be rescued from mobs by helicopters. Political activism, particularly some extreme kinds of leftism, had national attention. The self-admitted loner main character of Norwegian Wood mentions a few demonstrations and how he doesn't feel much about them (or too much else). What a jump from the characters in Oshima Nagisa's films from the sixties, who perceived society's inadequacies and responded in means that were sometimes criminal! It seems like too far of a stretch for such a short time. At best this book is like the Beatles song that it takes its name from - fluff that is pleasant enough but doesn't really grab you.
In a recent post that he made, my friend Sergei's careful analysis and literary knowledge put into words something that I'd vaguely felt but couldn't nail down. Murakami writes the same basic story over and over, slightly varying a very limited palette of common elements with different settings in almost exactly the same way as anime or Japanese video game plots. When I started writing this I honestly wasn't planning on being so harsh on Murakami, but after reading a lot of his novels (including his two most popular ones), it's hard not to get the impression that he's essentially reworking the same basic story over and over.
The main character is always a frustrated male who can't really get into the world around him. He's the literary equivalent of the main character in a romantic comedy anime or a silent RPG protagonist, essentially a blank slate that the reader can project himself onto yet is somehow the center the story. Murakami almost goes out of his way to mention his love for drinking and casual sex in order to endear him to the reader. At the same time, he plays up the fantasy angle by pairing this bland and inadequate character with a (slightly) mysterious woman. They bumble along together, having a few inane conversations and going through some slightly mysterious events that seem to happen just to keep the story moving along. In most cases the she is either killed off or disappears somehow. Occasionally some figure will threaten to threaten the main character for accidentally getting caught up in some shadowy organization that seems to be behind all the mild weirdness going on. For all of their supposed influence and power, it's hard to imagine why they would feel threatened by Murakami's typically apathetic main characters.
It's hard not to get the impression that Murakami's just overrated. I may read Hard-Boiled Wonderland again to see what I think of it now, but I doubt I'll bother to reread any of his other books. I suppose I should try some other modern Japanese fiction authors, since I've had enough Murakami.
By the time I decided to take on Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, my reading comprehension had improved quite a lot. I enjoyed it quite a bit, partly because of the satisfaction of reading a novel - aimed at adults! - in Japanese at a pace fast enough that I could enjoy it. The rest was probably because of the way it mixed so many familiar elements. A lonely and frustrated male protagonist, film noir stereotypes, B-grade fantasy and science fiction...it all came together in an interesting if not terribly cohesive way. Still, I did enjoy it as a light bit of reading, and it's probably Murakami's best work.
That pleasant experience, along with the recommendations in Tim Rogers' essays, spurred my interest in reading more of his novels. Over the past year and a half I've read about eight of his novels, usually as a break from more challenging (in terms of both content and style) reading. I must admit to a certain laziness, since they are pretty light reading.
His work seemed to have something that made it as universally appealing as Coca-Cola. This observation that turned out to be almost hilariously more apt than I could have imagined when it first came to me, most likely because I assumed that it must be something other than blandness. Murakami is a serviceable writer, and he certainly knows how to appeal to a wide audience, but I can't remember any ideas in his writing that excited me like other books have. Nor do his characters seem to have any particularly strong convictions or internal struggles that make them interesting. I think it's this passivity that makes it easy to identify with them for most of Japan's current society.
I think this worked best in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, probably because it seemed like a natural response to the more bizarre events of the story. The friction between the disparate elements and the fantasy setting also helped the mood. Murakami keeps playing with the same basic characters and elements, but the results are much less interesting when he's trying to recreate something he's already done better. His later novels, particularly After Dark and The Sputnik Sweetheart, seemed to show how dull the same basic story he uses is when it's stripped down to its most basic form.
Norwegian Wood is similar, in that it's really just a pretty trite love story that borrows the 1970's setting primarily for nostalgia purposes. There's so little done to tie it to the story that it seems like a cynical ploy to make the book more accessible. During the late fifties and sixties, people were protesting in the streets over the security treaty with the US. The national assembly was stormed and seized, protesters died, and things got so bad that visiting US officials had to be rescued from mobs by helicopters. Political activism, particularly some extreme kinds of leftism, had national attention. The self-admitted loner main character of Norwegian Wood mentions a few demonstrations and how he doesn't feel much about them (or too much else). What a jump from the characters in Oshima Nagisa's films from the sixties, who perceived society's inadequacies and responded in means that were sometimes criminal! It seems like too far of a stretch for such a short time. At best this book is like the Beatles song that it takes its name from - fluff that is pleasant enough but doesn't really grab you.
In a recent post that he made, my friend Sergei's careful analysis and literary knowledge put into words something that I'd vaguely felt but couldn't nail down. Murakami writes the same basic story over and over, slightly varying a very limited palette of common elements with different settings in almost exactly the same way as anime or Japanese video game plots. When I started writing this I honestly wasn't planning on being so harsh on Murakami, but after reading a lot of his novels (including his two most popular ones), it's hard not to get the impression that he's essentially reworking the same basic story over and over.
The main character is always a frustrated male who can't really get into the world around him. He's the literary equivalent of the main character in a romantic comedy anime or a silent RPG protagonist, essentially a blank slate that the reader can project himself onto yet is somehow the center the story. Murakami almost goes out of his way to mention his love for drinking and casual sex in order to endear him to the reader. At the same time, he plays up the fantasy angle by pairing this bland and inadequate character with a (slightly) mysterious woman. They bumble along together, having a few inane conversations and going through some slightly mysterious events that seem to happen just to keep the story moving along. In most cases the she is either killed off or disappears somehow. Occasionally some figure will threaten to threaten the main character for accidentally getting caught up in some shadowy organization that seems to be behind all the mild weirdness going on. For all of their supposed influence and power, it's hard to imagine why they would feel threatened by Murakami's typically apathetic main characters.
It's hard not to get the impression that Murakami's just overrated. I may read Hard-Boiled Wonderland again to see what I think of it now, but I doubt I'll bother to reread any of his other books. I suppose I should try some other modern Japanese fiction authors, since I've had enough Murakami.