I finally got over my readers block and finished what feels like my first book in months. I feel very pleased with myself. With enforced isolation around the corner maybe we’ll all get a chance to have a little read soon. The book was ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’ by Haruki Murakami. I’m sure there’s a proper word for it but it is two stories running parallel to each other, which you find out as the story evolves are interconnected. One was a cyber punk detective story about a man who ‘shuffles’ information for a quasi-governmental organisation call The System and who finds himself being chased down by first The System’s shady rivals and then some underground sub-human aquatic monsters called Inklings. The story was written in 1985 so imagine all of your favourite dark grimy 80s punk sci-fi films and picture how that could look and unfold. The other is a dreamy story about a man who arrives in a walled town which he cannot leave, he has his shadow taken from him and he works as a dreamreader. The town also has unicorns. It is obvious in any book which is two stories together that they interconnect so it is probably okay to say that without giving too much away.
It seems every Murakami novel, I say every but this is only my third, the men are solitary lonely lovers of jazz and alcohol. It mustn’t be coincidental that prior to becoming an author Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo. The women in his story are never like any women I’ve ever met, they seem both simple and deep and are usually quite promiscuous. I have heard criticism of his female characters as being unreal but I mentioned this to a woman once who suggested the women were merely described from the perspective of the narrator and that this was either how the narrator experienced them or how he viewed women. They couldn’t in that case be unreal and I quite like that description, it seems like an insight worth repeating when I am attempting to sound smart.
Murakami described this as his favourite novel he had written and while it is not his most successful or well renowned it does seem to have won a variety of awards over the years. I enjoyed it but I felt it lacked on to ‘South of the Border, West of the Sun’ and his collection of short stories ‘Men Without Women’ which was the first Murakami I read and didn’t just enjoy because I was feeling like a man without a woman at the time. He has a pained empty loneliness in his work, apparently in this style it is a very Japanese thing, but it feels like something you can connect with in a positive way despite those not appearing to be positive attributes at first. We enjoy authors because of story or language but quite often because we can connect to them. There is a depth to his work that is approachable and relatable, and as I finish his books I am always excited to read the next. If you haven’t read your first yet I think you know what you need to do. You may just have a little time on your hands soon anyway.
Observations and Misunderstandings 