Haruki Murakami, 2011 (May 2014)
It seems that people have strongly divided opinions on this
book, and I am among those who liked it. But I can see why some criticize it.
It’s long and allusive and there is not much action –although
it has suspense and a lot happening on a level below the surface of the
storyline. To enjoy the book, or to get much from it at all, a reader has to
surrender to it and enter into the world Murakami has created. It is a world
where strange and magical things happen, some creepy, some very discomforting.
But underlying the story line is a simple romance, the story of Tengo and
Aomame, connected in some inexplicable way, who overcome personal challenges and
physical threats to come together – reminding me at times of The Magic Flute or Dr. Zhivago. At this level, the story is a touching one as we learn
about the strange turns in their lives (and the mundane details) and the slow
path by which they finally come together. The sweet scene in which they
re-unite is touchingly simple. It would not feel so satisfying if we readers
had not gone through so much waiting and expectation.
Of course, there’s much more than this and most of it is
very mysterious, so for a reader who likes to know what’s going on (and often I
am), this could be frustrating. Just what this parallel world is, why the bill
collector keeps knocking so insistently at people’s doors, whether some of the
characters are even real – for me as a reader, these are puzzles that keep me
interested while the plot makes its slow progress. That they are mostly
unresolved in the end is somehow okay, because in surrendering to the book, I
know that the world is just different here.
I think this is one of the themes of the book: how the
writer creates a new world for the reader, which can come to exist in the
reader’s mind for a while and allow the reader to experience something that
would not be possible in the mundane world. Writerly preoccupations often come
up in the story, as Tengo is an aspiring novelist who proceeds to create the
world in which the story takes place (twice), a sort of Moebius strip plotline.
And this is what authors do, they create a world that is more or less like the
reader’s world and allow the reader to live in it for a while, accepting the
realistic or illogical details as part of the story. When Murakami describes
the concrete details of his characters’ lives, he makes his imagined world more
real, and gives the reader a way to relate to the sometimes strange events that
his story describes. And perhaps this has something to do with his frequent
references to other books and authors who create rules for writers (such as
Chekhov’s rule that if you introduce a gun in Act 1, you have to fire it by the
end of the play, a rule that Murakami shows is not necessarily true in this
world, and perhaps in others) or long meditations on life (such as Proust’s Remembrance of Times Past). And his
frequent humorous notes, including the reminder that, in a story so focussed on
the moon, it’s only a paper moon.
Also, I love the creative book design with its mirrors, shifts adn layers, imaginative, playful and entirely appropriate to the text.
