alloy-d asked: Having read so much about him on your blog, I've recently gotten into Murakami. I'm nearing the end of _Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman_, and I'm planning on getting one of his full-length novels next. I'm primarily considering _Hard-boiled Wonderland_, _Sputnik Sweetheart_, and _1Q84_. Of course, I plan on reading them all, but is there one in particular that you would recommend starting with?
I wouldn’t start with any of them. The first Murakami novel to read, to my mind, is either Norwegian Wood or Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. They also happen to be his best novels. Norwegian Wood is a simpler story, while Wind-Up Bird is the kind of epic that I think Murakami tried and failed to recreate in 1Q84.
Read Norwegian Wood to gain some confidence that Murakami is worth listening to, and is actually capable of finishing a novel satisfactorily. That’s something you’re going to need when tackling some of his bigger works, because Murakami is not a very good novelistic engineer: the longer his works get, the messier the novel’s overall structure gets.
The story in Norwegian Wood is simple, and I suspect that’s why he was able to tie up the loose ends. The protagonist, whose personality is identical to a half-dozen other Murakami protagonists, is a student in Tokyo in the late sixties—which happens to be when Murakami was a college student in Tokyo. Toru used to hang out with his high school best friend and the friend’s girlfriend, Naoko, until Toru’s friend committed suicide. Now in college, Toru meets Naoko again, and they begin a troubled romance. Naoko has emotional issues, and takes a break from school to go to a sanatorium in the woods. Meanwhile, Toru meets another girl, Midori, who is Naoko’s polar opposite: lively and upbeat, a sort of Murakamiesque take on the manic pixie dream girl (think Zooey Deschanel in any number of films). That’s basically it for plot: what happens next is a consequence of these facts. But you don’t read a book like this for the plot. It’s very much suffused with the sense of surreality that you’ve come to expect from Murakami’s short fiction (and his other novels), but there is none of the physical and psychological anti-realism. It’s the book to show people who are under the impression that Murakami is all whimsy.
If you’ve read Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, you’ve already read the story Firefly, which became the first chapter of Norwegian Wood, and Wikipedia tells me that the title story of the collection is also related to Norwegian Wood.
Wind-Up Bird was Murakami’s most ambitious book before 1Q84, and unlike the latter, I think it succeeds. The plot is too complicated to summarize. There will be times reading it when you’ll think, What the fuck has this got to do with anything? At the end of it, looking at the book rationally, you’ll realize that it really didn’t have anything to do with anything. This book doesn’t tie up all loose ends, but it left me feeling psychologically satisfied even so. It’s not a Lost-level bait and switch: it’s not like the book ever gives the impression that it’s completely logical. Upon finishing it, I felt like I never need to reread the book, but reading other Murakami books, I found myself wishing they were more like Wind-Up Bird.
It’s also his most political book, dealing, as it does, with Japan’s involvement in Manchukuo, the puppet state they set up in Manchuria after invading China in the 1931. That’s just one of many plot threads, although it contains possibly the most harrowing writing of Murakami’s ouvre.
I will admit that I haven’t finished reading 1Q84 yet. I was very excited when I got it, but I got a few hundred pages in and had to take a break. I was planning to pick it up again now that the English translation of all three volumes is out, but reviews assure me that the issues I had with the beginning of the book persist throughout. I won’t tell you that a book I haven’t finished sucks, but I will say that from what I’ve read of it, it’s not his best work and definitely not the one to start with.
Of those three books, I would go with Hard-boiled Wonderland.
Nov 11, 2011