A Month of Murakami!

The Month of Murakami is over. It went pretty well, and I read seven of his books: Norwegian Wood (1987); Dance Dance Dance (1988); South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992); Sputnik Sweetheart (1999); After Dark (2004); The Strange Library (2005); and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki (2013). I began but didn't complete Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)(still reading). That's a lot of Murakami! But I never hit overload or tired of reading him. The only thing inconvenient was the lack of flexibility and the unusual sense of being constrained in my reading. I like being able to pick up anything that looks good at the moment, but I buckled down and did my best to stick to the mission, and I learned a few things. First, I believe Haruki Murakami is a great writer and may win the Nobel some day. What also became clear is how much Murakami is a writer of emotions, willing to spend many pages delving into feelings, passions, relationships, and examining the mental state of his characters (which may seem a bit melodramatic to some). There are his consistent tropes: wells, ears, sex, mysterious women, jazz, whiskey, cats, loners, socially awkward men, classical music ... the list goes on: he would be a great author to write a dissertation about. Having previously read his first three books, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), Pinball 1973 (1980), and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), I could really see his growth as writer up to Dance Dance Dance, where Murakami truly becomes Murakami and came into his own as an author. His novels also clearly divide into two worlds. The first contains the books that are generally first-person narrated love stories of a sort (such as his most famous, Norwegian Wood), in which the magic or supernatural is kept to a minimum. The other consists of the books that are much more fantastical (such as The Strange Library), with bizarre characters such as Colonel Sanders or Johnny Walker, and present abnormal events and alternate realities; some might call these magical realism but I'm unsure whether they fully fit the definition (in short, magical realism is when magical or fantastical events occur and are accepted in the mundane and everyday world). Most of the books I read this month fell into the first category, and the books I have left to read, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994), Hard-Boiled Wonderland, 1Q84 (2009), and Kafka on the Shore (2002), fit into the second group. I'm not sure if that was intentional, but I guess that most Murakami fans prefer one over the other. And I'm still looking forward to, eventually, completing the books I have left.