Apt to have read this in Japan - started in Kyoto, made a dent in it sitting at the bar of an izakaya/restaurant type in Uno Port and finished it in my hotel room that night.
This is Murakami in restrained mode; even when there are hints that the book is about to take off into something crazier at around the mid point - the recounting of Haida's father's story, Tsukuru's weird sex dream (of course there's one), the revelation of why his friends had summarily cut off contact with him all those years ago - it pulls back to the central and rather simple theme of its protagonist's coming into himself, and in a sense coming of age (albeit at the late age of 36), by confronting the unresolved questions, absences and harmful self-beliefs that are holding him back. So the suggestions of the supernatural or irreal are positioned as experientially literalised metaphor for those barriers to Tsukuru's self-realisation, rather than as 'actual' happenings - a device that runs through many of Murakami's novels with varying degrees of stylisation.
It's also on the slight side - its themes familiar and, to a large extent, likewise its moves along the way, and more a sketch than a fully painted piece. And it doesn't have the quiet, plaintive poetry that marked the more subtle of some of his past ones (like Sputnik Sweetheart and South of the Border, West of the Sun). And yet, it still has something - whatever else, his voice still speaks to me.
This is Murakami in restrained mode; even when there are hints that the book is about to take off into something crazier at around the mid point - the recounting of Haida's father's story, Tsukuru's weird sex dream (of course there's one), the revelation of why his friends had summarily cut off contact with him all those years ago - it pulls back to the central and rather simple theme of its protagonist's coming into himself, and in a sense coming of age (albeit at the late age of 36), by confronting the unresolved questions, absences and harmful self-beliefs that are holding him back. So the suggestions of the supernatural or irreal are positioned as experientially literalised metaphor for those barriers to Tsukuru's self-realisation, rather than as 'actual' happenings - a device that runs through many of Murakami's novels with varying degrees of stylisation.
It's also on the slight side - its themes familiar and, to a large extent, likewise its moves along the way, and more a sketch than a fully painted piece. And it doesn't have the quiet, plaintive poetry that marked the more subtle of some of his past ones (like Sputnik Sweetheart and South of the Border, West of the Sun). And yet, it still has something - whatever else, his voice still speaks to me.
