Book Review by Dennis D. McDonald

This is my first Murakami book. I’m having a tough time pinning it down. Parts of it are whimsical, parts are horrific, and parts are insightful. Some sentences are lyrical and evocative. Others cause one to pause. The English translation (by Philip Gabriel ) is natural sounding to an English language reader but occasionally jarringly familiar (e.g., money is referred to as “dollars” as our characters move about Japan.)

One thing I found most interesting was the easy mix of the day to day mundane with the fantastic and even the horrific. Cats talk. Stones change weight. Shop owners wax poetic about Beethoven. Fish rain from the sky. It’s as if the author while writing said to himself, when an odd idea popped into his head, “Why not?”

I don’t mean to suggest that what we have here is a stream-of-consciousness novel. I suspect that a lot of editing and polishing was involved. I just wish I could have read it in the original Japanese as the excellent translation reads so smoothly and familiarly that, at times, the reader could be just about anywhere in the world.

But maybe that was just Murakami’s style when he wrote this book, most of which, he says in the foreword, happened while living near the shore in Hawaii.

I would like some day to visit Japan and walk the byways, backroads, and alleys to experience some of the mundane aspects of what is described here. Maybe get some insight into why cats are so prevalent in Japanese themed media such as anime. Were a movie to be made, maybe the atmosphere conveyed by something like Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s “DRIVE MY CAR” would be appropriate.

Book review copyright (c) 2024 by Dennis D. McDonald

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