Book Review: Black Vodka by Deborah Levy

'Have you ever had that weird feeling in an airport when you panic and don't know what to do? One screen says Departures and another screen says Arrivals and for a moment you don't know which one you are. You think, am I an arrival or am I a departure.'
From 'Pillow Talk' 

A sense of displacement and atomisation dominate the ten stories collected in Black Vodka. They feature characters in limbo: in foreign lands or stuck between who they are and who they want to be. They believe in love as the means of self perfection and yearn for sex and madness and the chance to lose themselves in others. Yet they pull away from that which they most crave, afraid of the uncertain ground that intimacy entails.

It's classic atomised society, and Levy composes her stories well. They are slight, unembelished, and often largely plotless. These are character shorts that create a unspecific feeling of uneasiness and loss. Deborah Levy's writing is crisp and simple, quite different from the lyrical fireworks that made her Booker shortlisted novel Swimming Home such a electrifying read. Yet she suits this territory well, her style creating transitory stories, perfect reads for reclaimed moments in busy lives.

Levy is purposefully calling to attention a range of authors, from Murakami to Sofia Coppola's film Lost in Translation. But she doesn't just reflect this listless atomisation of life, she also demands that it be noticed and reinforces it. When expressing their aloneness, she gives her characters rare eloquence: they turn to the metaphoric, the awe-inducing, conjuring a sense of wonder in the vast magnificence of the universe and an image of unfathomable depth in the people they are with. Characters talk of air molecules 'forged in the furnace of a star,', a woman seeks a sex change opperation to turn herself into the woman she wants to be, a man becomes an imposter in his bosses history. Levy turns the characters into romantically enigmatic visions of perfectly imperfect people, people we yearn to be and people we yearn to be with. But they are also people we can never be worthy of, people we can never be. And in that, she creates in the reader those same feelings of atomisation that her stories reflect.

Some of the stories are slight to a fault. Others, the slightly longer ones, such as 'Black Vodka', 'Stardust Nation', 'Cave Girl', and 'Simon Tagala's Heart in 12 Parts' - are fantastic snippets flashes of life in transition. Black Vodka is a quiet and subtle book of encounters and possibility. Its difficult to pin down and this is both rewarding and, at times, frustrating. Overall, it lacks the sparkle that made Swimming Home one of my books of 2012, but its a swift, affecting, and, at its best, brilliant.

'There is do much of the world to record and classify, it's hard to know how to find a language for it. So I am going to start exactly where I am now. Life is beautiful! Vodka is black! Pears are naked! Rain is horizontal! Moths are ghosts. Only some of this is true, but you should know that this does not scare me as much as the promise of love.'

Book Review: 1Q84 (Book Three) by Haruki Murakami

Translated by Philip Gabriel

Human beings are, by design, not objective. Everything we do, from how we view the colour of the sky to whether we like or don’t like a film, is influenced by a conflation of factors that go together to make us who we are.

Our problem with objectivity is that our expectations of what something will be like tend to influence how we perceive it. There have been many names and studies given to this sort of tendency, perhaps the most notable being the placebo effect. If an individual expects a pill to relieve their headache, they are more likely to report a lessening of the headache whether the pill has anything in it or not. A review of studies on cough medicine recently concluded that around 85% of their effectiveness related to the placebo and only 15% to the active ingredient itself. Indeed, a doctor once told me that the majority of a doctor’s job is to convey an impression of capability while letting nature takes its course and makes the patient better.

I find the problem of expectations influencing my perception is most clearly displayed in reviewing books. What I take into a reading experience doesn’t necessarily determine whether I like a book or not, but it plays a considerable role in how I feel about it afterwards.

I went into 1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) expecting to love it. Murakami has, for years, been my go to author, the writer I pick up after a boring reading experience, the one who reminds me just why I love reading. Add in the media-hype surrounding this release and the privilege of receiving a pre-publication proof and I couldn’t wait to get started. Yet those who read my review of the first two books might have noticed that no matter how I tried to dress it up with analysis of the sociological issues it raised, I really didn’t enjoy the book. The level of disappointment I felt was directly related to the excitement I took with me into the book.

And this in turn carried over into my expectations for 1Q84 (Book Three). Whereas I took a level of excitement with me into Book One and Book Two, I approached Book Three almost entirely unenthused by the prospect. And I still didn’t enjoy the book. Yet as the excitement with which I approached Book One and Book Two influenced how I subsequently wrote about it, the boredom with which I approached 1Q84 (Book Three) has similarly influenced my this review.

Looking as objectively as I am capable of being (still subjective, I know) 1Q84 is a poor novel. Book Three has a new translator (Philip Gabriel this time), but it is the same tired, bland, repetitive prose. There are chapters where first one character thinks things through in a way that tells the reader exactly what they had already surmised, only for another character to do exactly the same in the next chapter. It’s tedious. I would go as far as to say that every single passage of reflection in the entire book – they are easily distinguished by being italicised and in the first person – could have been cut. They add nothing whatsoever.

There are other developments in Book Three: a new character, a detective named Ushikawa, joins the narrative cast and injects some life into the plot for a while, but cannot rescue the sinking ship. Supporting characters also come into their own, particularly Tamaru who by virtue of not having passages of rumination is one of the most interesting and likable. Otherwise the plot drifts onwards, apparently rudderless, and towards an entirely predictable conclusion.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2009, Murakami said he started writing 1Q84 with two thoughts in his mind: that the book would be about a man and woman searching for each other, and that he’d make “this simple story as long and complicated as possible”.

It rather seems that, in striving for the novel to be as long and complicated as possible, Murakami forgot to consider mundane factors such as the narrative arc, character development, or whether there is any point to it being long and complicated. Proust often appears in conversations, as though Murakami wishes to counter people who criticise 1Q84 for being too long, but it is a false comparison. This is not Proustian prose.

And on the other end of the scale, the book within a book, Air Chrysalis, is often described as a short novel, perfectly formed and lyrically written. In that sense it is like the best of Murakami’s works. 1Q84 is the antithesis of this. It groans under all its unnecessary weight, and the reader does likewise.

It is a conversation in Book One to which I return to sum it all up. When discussing Air Chrysalis, the editor says to Tengo: “People are left in a pool of mysterious question marks…Readers are likely to take this lack of clarification as a sign of ‘authorial laziness’.” Tengo promptly replies that, “If an author succeeded in writing a story ‘put together in an exceptionally interesting way’ that ‘carries the reader along to the very end’ who could possibly call such a writer ‘lazy’.”

I entirely agree with Tengo’s reply. But 1Q84 does not leave the reader with question marks. It answers everything at every step of the way and bores the reader by doing so. Nor is it put together in an exceptionally interesting way – it alternates between two and then three characters viewpoints as they don’t really try to solve a mystery – and neither does it carry the reader along to the very end. It is long and complicated. I had to force myself to keep turning the pages, less out of excitement than need for the closure of completing the journey.

1Q84 (Book Three) was first published in the UK by Harvill Secker on 25th October 2011. 368pp, ISBN: 9781846554056
1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) were published in the UK by Harvill Secker on 18th October 2011. 624pp, ISBN: 9781846554070.

Book Review: 1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) by Haruki Murakami

Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin

When 1Q84 was published in Japan in 2009, bookshops all but sold out within a day. More than 1 million copies were sold in that first month alone. Ever since, English language readers have eagerly awaited its release. In an effort to expedite publication, Murakami’s US publishers Knopf took the unusual step of commissioning his two regular translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, to simultaneously work on different parts of the book. Rubin translated Book One and Book Two, published together here, Gabriel, Book Three which is published next week.

The tactic appears to have worked. Expectation has built steadily over the past two years, pre-orders have gone through the roof, and bookshops even opened at midnight to satisfy the demand of Murakami’s dedicated fans. Like the Harry Potter phenomenon, this hype has inspired people to have fun with books which is never a bad thing in my book. But away from all this Murakami-mania to which I and the entire media has whole-heartedly subscribed, the question of whether it is any good remains largely unanswered. Quite honestly, the answer is no. And yes. I cannot decide. Is 1Q84 the Magnum Opus that sums up Murakami’s worldview? Or an experiment with narrative that badly backfires? Very possibly it is both at the same time.

It is a long book – some 600 pages in Book One and Book Two alone, a further 350 in Book Three. The story is a familiar one: twenty-something drifters have their lives thrown into question by a series of unusual events over which they have little control. All the familiar Murakami tropes are there: Jazz, classical music, and 1960s rock provides the soundtrack to a novel essentially about disaffection, free will, love, and loneliness. Along the way, alternative worlds, cats, and cult religion ensnare the characters, forcing them to reappraise themselves and the world around them.

One departure from the familiar comes with the choice of a female protagonist. We meet Aomame as she sits in the back of a taxi that is stuck in stationary traffic on the Tokyo expressway. She is on her way to an important engagement that she cannot miss. So when her driver tells her of a hidden emergency staircase that she can use to get back to the city below, she grabs the opportunity with both hands. But beware, the driver warns, “things might look different to you down there.” They certainly do. Aomame finds herself in a subtly different world to the 1984 Tokyo she left behind. She names it 1Q84, the Q being a big question mark over what is going on, and continues on to her appointment.

Meanwhile, Tengo is an aspiring writer who agrees to rework a remarkable though poorly written novel to help it scoop a literary prize. The book, Air Chrysalis, is the work of a seventeen-year-old girl named Eriko Fukada, and seems to be based on her own experiences. With Tengo’s help it not only takes the prize but rapidly becomes a bestseller. But as the publishers work to prevent the truth about who wrote Air Chrysalis from getting out, Tengo finds Eriko’s world permeating every part of him and is drawn into the dangerous reality of Air Chrysalis, where two moons hang next to each other in the night sky, and the Little People emerge from the carcass of dead goat.

Amidst all that Aoomame and Tengo begin to realise how much they mean to each other, even though their last contact was a brief clutch of hands between two lonely outcasts in a school classroom when they were ten-years-old. Yet as each of their stories influence the other it comes to feel as though they are matryoshka dolls stacked inside each other. What is real? What is story? Chekhov’s gun hangs on the wall, but whether it is used or not depends, ultimately, on whether this is a story or real life.

Like most of Murakami’s novels, 1Q84 is, at its heart, a love story. Only a love story in which other things keep getting in the way.  “It’s like the Tibetan Wheel of Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn’t move.”

Nearly everything that I love about Murakami is present here. The plot carried me along. At times it was almost un-put-downable. The smoky urban landscape simmers along with an after-hours feel. However, the biggest problem comes in the way in which it is narrated. In 1Q84, Murakami has switched for the first time from his reliable first person style to a moving third person viewpoint. It turns out that his familiar conversational style does not translate will to this new voice. Where in the first person he successfully elucidates the quirky lives of his various protagonists, drawing the reader into their small everyday lives, in the third person his prose becomes inelegant and cliché ridden.

The result is a stylistically ugly experience that prevents the reader ever fully engaging with the characters. Through them, Murakami presents thoughtful insights, not least the subjugation of women in Japanese society, but because neither Tengo nor Aomame really work as characters in their own right, they feel like merely vehicles for the plot to move around, and through which to explore these issues, rather than people to engage with. For an author whose reputation has been built on character driven works, this is a major disappointment. For me, 1Q84 cannot recover from this narrative weakness. It seeps into everything. There are long flabby passages of italicised first person rumination that only make everything worse, and in the end, quite honestly I was glad to finish it.

And yet.

There is one area in which 1Q84 succeeds. Critics have so far been rather scathing of the Orwellian metaphor that the title conjures, but to me it works spectacularly well. Although the dialogue around Nineteen Eighty-Four is somewhat dull, the metaphor Murakami creates serves as a comment not only on his entire body of work, but half a century of social change as well. Where Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book about the dreaded future as the 1940s feared it, with homogenising political forces using ideology to cement their power, 1Q84 is that same time period as it would be written now. Politics is almost entirely absent from the lives of the characters. Even a formerly ideologically driven commune has morphed into a pseudo religious cult, and citizens couldn’t care less whether Big Brother – in the form of the State, or God, or a mysterious group known only as the Little People – is watching them. Like Winston Smith, Aomame and Tengo are drawn into a dangerous game of cat and mouse with forces more powerful than they, but unlike Winston, they care only about emerging unscathed, and finding each other while the rest of the world gets on with life as it chooses.

By placing these two competing visions of 1984 alongside each other, Murakami demonstrates the changing social and political climates of the past fifty years effectively. He has spent his career writing about urban alienation and the world as it has become. His entire opus has been a statement about the importance of the micro over the macro. The importance of love, and music, and literature, and food, and all those sort of things, over and above politics. His work captures the spirit of the age, the sense that politics has failed, but nothing other than empty technology has stepped into replace it. In this globalised world, Murakami speaks to an audience about loneliness, boredom and powerlessness just as effectively as Orwell spoke about the tendencies of communism and fascism. And like Orwell did more than sixty years ago, it perhaps says more about the world we live in that we really want to accept.

For all the narrative doesn’t work, this makes 1Q84 a thought-provoking read. There are successful, even fascinating aspects, but the overall reading experience is a convoluted one. By the end I was exhausted.

But beware, with Book Three still to come, it is unclear how things may evolve. There are questions that remain unanswered: a crow keeps appearing, just what happened to the NKH subscription collector who stabbed a client, and will Aomame and Tengo ever manage to find each other. In typical Murakami fashion, he places a warning about judging the book before the end on the very first page where Aomame ruminates on Janicek’s Sinfonietta, considers its relationship to the following years in Czech history, and ultimately comes to the conclusion that the most important proposition that history teaches us is this: “At the time, no one knew what was coming.”

1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) was first published in the UK by Harvill Secker on 18th October 2011. 624pp, ISBN: 9781846554070
1Q84 (Book Three) is published by Harvill Secker on 25th October 2011. 368pp, ISBN: 9781846554056

Sunday Supplement: On Reading and Writing

I don't think I could ever be a novelist. Not a good one, not the sort I'd want to be, at least. For all my fandom makes me dream of vaulting the divide and becoming a creator, as well as consumer, of stories, I grow increasingly aware that I lack what I consider the most important in a novelist. Literature may have moved away somewhat from the notion that a novel is first and foremost about stories and characters, but if I had to chose (and thankfully I don't!), I'd take a solid character driven story from a Bronte (any of them, really!), or Daphne du Maurier, or Salman Rushdie or Haruki Murakami or Jeffrey Eugenides etc over clever post-modern narrative or lyrical prose or fabulous dreamscape description any day.They are my heroes of literature, the writers who take me out of my skin and place me in another, who let me see the world through another pair of eyes, or show me worlds I'm never likely to see. Yes, that's right, when I read I value escapism over all else. And that shouldn't be a dirty word.

Why couldn't I write that sort of fiction? I consider myself a capable wordsmith, and sometimes I even come up with ideas that I think could make good plots. (Sometimes, I even start to write them down - shhhh.)
But where I come up short is in basic human empathy. The simple truth is that I seem to lack empathy and self awareness and social awareness. That doesn't mean I don't have huge amounts of caring and sympathy for myself and others, simply that I don't know myself very well, and even more so I don't know other people. I find it impossible to put myself in another person's shoes. In writing, this results in weak, two dimensional characters that I fail to engage with. Ironically - is this ironic? I've never quite got to grips with the concept of irony and still misuse it regularly - I think I could possibly write the sort of idea heavy fiction, or even biography disguised loosely as fiction. Not very well, mind you! But I don't want to. I don't want to write something I wouldn't particularly want to read.

So, that is a long rambling overly confessional way of saying that I love reading fiction because it gives me something I don't have in my everyday life. I've been reading The Great Night by Chris Adrian this week and above all else I'm hugely impressed with his compassion, his understanding without judgement of human nature, his basic goodness. For a re-writing of A Midsummer Nights Dream - and therefore a book full of fairies - it is amazingly down to earth, a veritable feast of the mundane. Its not so much magical realism, as realist magic, using the mundane to explain our need for a sense of magic, rather than magic as a way of comprehending the everyday. It is a tour de force that every bit lives up to the praise that has been heaped upon it, one of those books I turned page after page after page compulsively, to find out what would happen to our portfolio of characters, and through them to learn more about myself and the world around me. For that is the great thing about escapism - like immigration - : we take with us some of our experiences and knowledge and discover new things that become part of us, expanding our horizons in ways we could not otherwise have dreamed. To be a bit hyperbolic (something I'm often guilty of!), I think fiction both entertains and makes me a better human being. Why would I chose to add mediocre work to the mounds already written, when I can wallow for years in the great work that others have slaved over? It is a lot better for me, that is for sure.

Sunday Supplement 1: New books and immanent trips

I've never quite got the hang of this blogging business. Too retiring, perhaps, to share much of myself here. But I'd like to try. Having watched Julie and Julia a couple of week's ago, I'm inspired by - and a little enraptured with - the idea of emotional honesty in blogs, of using them as a journal of experience. Schmaltzy movies always get to me; they tend to feature characters that I want to be more like.

There's so much more to reading than simply reviewing, and that is what I wish to capture here. The joy of discovery, random thoughts that drift through one's mind while reading, how where and when one reads a book impacts on the response to it.

It was my Birthday a couple of weeks ago and I got a few books I'd been hoping for. From Megan, I got The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, which I discovered through reading Jonathan Safran Foer's die-cut Tree of Codes, and because it was then recommended in The Book Hive, the premier independent bookshop in Norwich, by acclaimed poet George Szirtes. I haven't yet read it, but I will get there soon. Also unwrapped was a signed copy of A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, that I borrowed from the library and read earlier this year but wanted a copy of my own to keep . It is a beautifully produced book, one I could flick through for hours just looking at the illustrations. Like the art of Shaun Tan, it would be suited to enlarging and framing and hanging from the wall. Well, if it weren't so dark and foreboding, anyway.

From my parents I also received the latest Andrey Kurkov novel to be translated into English, The Milkman in the Night, and a work of sociology that my mum mentioned reading when she was a student and which had an impact on her thinking. Written in the 1970s, it is called The Gift Relationship and looks at the value altruism plays in a healthy society, considering specifically blood donation. With David Cameron's supposedly radical Big Society in the news at the moment, I was interested in looking back at what altruism can offer and how it can be harnessed for the good of society, rather than coerced for small government ideological reasons. I don't read many academic studies, so I don't know whether I'll get around to reading this or not, but much of book buying, for me at least, is aspirational, reflecting the person I want to be rather than the person I am.

As if that wasn't enough books to keep me busy, on returning to work I found a mound of books that I had requested from publishers. Forthcoming and recently published books by the likes of Joe Dunthorne, Dalgit Nagra, Hari Kunzru, Anna Funder, Esi Edugyan, Erin Morgenstern, and more. It was like having my birthday all over again, and when I came to the last pile I couldn't believe my luck. There, on the bottom of the pile, were proofs of Murakami's forthcoming 1Q84. I hadn't expected there to be proofs, much less that I would be sent one!

Expecting to get something I've put on my birthday list, lets me anticipate it, get used to the idea of wanting it, and plan when to read it. I love it. But presents are best of all when they anticipate what you most want, and give you a complete surprise. Nothing could have beaten the excitement I felt on finding the Murakami proofs. 

I'm off to Edinburgh this week, to check out some authors at the International Book Festival, and play an ingenious place specific poetry game at the Fringe Festival. Run by Cambridge poet Ross Sutherland and social games entrepreneurs Hide and Seek, Hinterland is, according to their website, "about the space that appears when we speak languages that aren’t our mother tongue. And maybe also a bit about how rubbish so many of us tend to be at speaking languages other than English." I don't fully understand it, as yet, but it sounds intriguing, and the collage poem Ross created as a result of their last collaboration recreated the atmosphere or walking alone through an urban night, and is well worth a listen.

I'll let you know what it's like, and which authors caught my eye, next week. In the meantime I have twelve hours or train journey's ahead of me in which to read some of the books I haven't had a chance to yet this year. I'm definitely taking Naomi Wood's The Godless Boys, and probably The Echo Chamber by Luke Williams. But what else I haven't yet decided. Could go for highly rated The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, or possibly The Street of Crocodiles. I'm saving 1Q84 for a luxuriant treat when I get back home.

Happy reading!

Book Review: Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami

To read a shorter version of this review, click here.

Read: January 2006 (and again in January 2010)

Sputnik Sweetheart in one Tweet-sized chunk:

Sputnik Sweetheart is a novel of almosts, where liminal spaces overlap and longing can never quite be divorced from true love.

“In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains – flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits…In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a women. This was where it all began, and where it all ended. Almost.”

Sputnik Sweetheart is a novel of almosts, where liminal spaces overlap and longing can never quite be divorced from true love. It is beautifully evocative yet difficult to define, a tale of unrequited love, unrealised ambition, and yearning, always yearning, for more. Perhaps because it is about anticipation of, and longing for, love rather than love itself, it is also one of the most romantic books I have ever read.

The plot revolves around a love triangle between three people who, like Othello, love not wisely but too well. Their fatal flaws are not violent jealousy though, but a sort of insidious loneliness destined to prevent them ever really finding what they most crave. There is K., your typical easy-going and pensive Murakami narrator; Sumire, a bohemian and obsessive writer who dresses in an oversized coat and heavy boots, dreams of emulating Jack Kerouac, and whom K. is helplessly in love with; and Miu, the women Sumire has fallen for. Miu is a successful wine importer, independent, stylish, and confident – everything Sumire wants to be. She is drawn to Miu like a little Sputnik orbiting a vast planet.

If ever love has transformed a person it does Sumire. She becomes Miu’s assistant, exchanging a life of compulsive all night writing and chain smoking for a regular nine-to-five job. She buys nice clothes and changes her hairstyle, begins to appreciate wine and learn Italian, and soon moves into a bigger apartment. She spends hours on the phone with K., discussing the big questions in life: love, sexual desire, existentialism, the process of writing, whether she should confess her feelings to Miu.

Miu and Sumire set off on a business trip to Europe, leaving K. behind to console himself in a series of meaningless affairs. But when a distraught Miu calls K. out of the blue from a small Greek island to say that Sumire has disappeared without a trace, he drops everything and travels halfway around the world to help find her.

What started out as a love story morphs into a sort of otherworldly detective novel. K. finds a document on a floppy disc hidden in Sumire’s luggage and it holds a clue. But can it be that the key to Sumire’s fate lies in the strange events which afflicted Miu on a Ferris wheel almost 14 years before, turning her prematurely and completely white?

Transformation – both voluntary and involuntary – is one of the central themes of Sputnik Sweetheart. The loneliness is not only borne of not being around others, but of being apart from one’s self. Each ruminates on loneliness in their own way: “Who can really distinguish between the sea and what’s reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?” meditates K. at one point. This detached passion runs throughout his narration: you get the feeling that in recounting Sumire’s love for Miu he is really giving voice to the love he has fantasised Sumire showing him. Typically for Murakami characters they prefer this sort of sexually enigmatic fantasy to actual love. Each of the protagonists lives out their own longing in their own unreciprocated – and therefore unsullied – way. Sputnik literally translates into English as ‘travelling companion,’ and that is what they are each looking for: a human connection, someone to talk to, fall asleep next to, and yearn for. Someone to free them from themselves, from loneliness. And in a way that is what they each find, though not in the way any of them had hoped.

Part detective novel without detective or resolution, part love story without reciprocated love, pinning Sputnik Sweetheart down is far from easy. Everything seems to be “one step out of line, a cardigan with the buttons done up wrong.” Writing in The Guardian when it was first published, Julie Myerson professed to not really knowing what it was all about. “But”, she continued, “it has touched me deeper and pushed me further than anything I’ve read in a long time.”

Such is the mysterious power of Murakami novels.

Given the characters obsessive longing, it is perhaps unsurprising that the imagery sometimes borders on the overblown. Murakami treads a fine line, pushing the longing as far as possible, without quite tipping over into the histrionic. Near the beginning Sumire expresses her desire to one day compose “a massive 19th century-style Total Novel, a kind of portmanteau packed with every possible phenomenon in order to capture the soul and human destiny.” Sputnik Sweetheart achieves this in barely 230 pages. With a similarly spacious style to Hemingway, Murakami lets events speak for themselves; he is a master of anticipating his readers’ reactions, manipulating without appearing to do so. “A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.” All the brilliance of Murakami’s novels lies in an understanding of this. And it is precisely because this magical otherworldliness is juxtaposed with a routine, everyday recounting of events that he is able to move one so.

There are those who find the ambiguity of Murakami’s fiction baffling and infuriating in equal measure. Certainly it is unwise to pick up any of his books expecting rational explanations or perfectly tied up plots. Yet the quality of Sputnik Sweetheart is in its representation of an emotion, a sense, a deep held belief that can be neither proved nor disproved. It captures longing – for love, for artistic realisation, for life, for beauty – at its most elemental.

Everything is ethereal, nothing quite as it should be. Whatever you think you perceive vanishes when looked at too closely. Like most great romances, Sputnik Sweetheart has the feel of a dream. There is something of Wuthering Heights here, in the way that not even physical separation can overcome the connections the characters share, and not even emotional closeness can fill the void each others absence leaves in themselves. As with Cathy and Heathcliff, what takes place defies explanation, and doesn’t really need one either.

“All over again I understood how important, how irreplaceable, Sumire was to me. In her own special way she’d kept me tethered to the world. As I talked to her and read her stories, my mind quietly expanded, and I could see things I’d never seen before. Without even trying, we grew close. Like a pair of young lovers undressing in front of each other, Sumire and I had exposed our hearts to one another, an experience I’d never have with anyone else, anywhere. We cherished what we had together, though we never put into words how very precious it was.”

Like much of Murakami’s oeuvre Sputnik Sweetheart is best understood as a sort of ellipsis, a gap in everyday life that is simultaneously mundane and fantastical and into which all the things we sort of know about ourselves and sort of suspect about the world around us are given composite reality. He is an author who never fails to reaffirm my love of reading. His fiction, never more so than in this slim novella, creates worlds where dreams – in all their bizarre and often troubling unpredictability – come true.


9 out of 10


Edition shown: The Harvill Press, ISBN: 9781860468254, 229pp
Currently available edition: Vintage, ISBN: 9780099448471 ,  240pp

Vulpes Libris is one of ten blogs invited by The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, London, to take part in their new Bloggers’ Book of the Month promotion. Sputnik Sweetheart will be our choice for March.

Pinball, 1973 - Haruki Murakami

Books, Time, and Silence 10 Days of Christmas: Day 5

Read: September 2009

Pinball, 1973 in one Tweet-sized chunk:
Like Hear the Wind Sing before it, Pinball, 1973 is for those interested in the development of Murakami as a writer more than those looking for a great book.

Pinball, 1973 is Murakami's second novel, the middle volume in what was to become known as The Trilogy of the Rat which culminated in A Wild Sheep Chase. Like its predecessor Hear the Wind Sing, it was never published outside Japan and as such has become a bit of a collectors item. However, unlike Hear The Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973 quickly went out of print, meaning that it now fetches anything from £150- many thousands around the world. And with speculation of a Nobel Prize for Literature refusing to die away, these prices are only likely to increase.

I have spent much of the last year searching the internet in the hope of finding a cheap copy, but to no avail. On at least two occasions I've even started saving up the £200 needed for a copy on Amazon marketplace. It turns out that I'm not cut out for specific saving projects. I just don't possess the discipline needed to quarantine a couple of quid each week when there are other things to buy. It seemed that it would be a long time before I was able to read what has become the Holy Grail for Murakami fans.

So imagine my delight when I came home one day to find that my wonderful wife Megan had discovered a pdf of the book on-line. (http://www.betz.lu/media/users/charel/pinball1973.pdf) It may not be the most pleasurable way to read a book, but reading in such a form creates a completely different reading experience. Psychologically, it is little different to reading an unpublished manuscript, or proof reading my own work, which is fitting given its nature and reputation. Murakami has made it clear that he will never let either of these books be published in the west, considering them “weak” compared to his later efforts.

It is difficult to dispute this. Yet that does not make Pinball, 1973 any the less fascinating. Like Hear the Wind Sing it is a short work, more novella than novel, following an unnamed narrator (that long time Murakami translator and scholar Jay Rubin has nicknamed 'Boku') as he goes about life in a typically introspective, and surreal manner. The most noticeable evolution from the first book is the presence of a plot. It seems that above all, what Murakami learned from Hear the Wind Sing is the importance of keeping the reader turning the page. What Murakami’s later novels do so well is integrate philosophical speculation and plot so each supports the other and the reader is as fascinated in the existential musings of the characters as they are in finding out what is going to happen next. Whereas Hear the Wind Sing was more a collection of vignettes and musings, Pinball, 1973, while still not the finished article, contains a cohesive plot which adds the element of an end goal to dive Boku's adventure.

The narration is complicated, however, by two narrative voices, one following Boku, and the other the Rat. Although the two friends never meet within the book, nor mention each other for that matter, the depth of their friendship is reflected in the loneliness of each other. They are together in spirit. The Rat is not in a good place, and as his brooding alcoholic depression deepens, he leaves Hokkaido, on his way to the bizarre situation we find him in during A Wild Sheep Chase.

On the surface of it, Boku is doing better. Having graduated college, he has started a small translation company with a friend, where he spends his days translating obscure product manuals. Then, one day, seemingly out of nowhere, a pair of twin girls appear in Boku's apartment and decide to stay indefinitely. Boku, being the typical Murakami protagonist, barely bats an eyelid, accepting them as a way of easing the loneliness in his heart. This loneliness stems from the death of his deceased girlfriend Naoko, who we learned in Hear the Wind Sing had hung herself. However it was not evident in that book to what extent her suicide had affected Boku. Now we learn that after her death he spent all his time in an arcade playing a Spaceship pinball machine, becoming addicted and substituting the emotional attachment he sought with Naoko for emotional attachment with a machine. Eventually he moved on and forgot about the machine, but when one day it pops back into his head he decides to try and track it down.

This is all familiar Murakami territory, particularly since wells, cats and the archetypal bar all make appearances. But where it differs from later work is in tone. There is a lack of warmth to Boku's adventure, he is a little too distant to identify with, and the happenings are often just the other side of the magical realist tight-rope. The nameless twins here seem largely superfluous, save as a clunky representation of the extent of Boku's atomisation.

Essentially, Pinball, 1973, like Hear the Wind Sing before it, is a work in progress. It represents the gradual development of Murakami's style, and a point of learning for his storytelling craft. For fans it makes a fascinating and yet familiar addition to the canon. Nonetheless, it is easy to see why Murakami is unwilling to let it be published outside of Japan, for it is nowhere near the standard of his later novels.


5.5 out of 10 (as a stand alone novel)
7 out of 10 (for those interested in the development of Murakami as a writer)

53 Books You'll Want to Read in 2010

This post is inspired by the excellent list produced on Bookmunch. I have always been frustrated by how difficult it can be to cobble together a list of books released in the future so am delighted that someone has already done the hard work and saved me the hassle! I have simply added three additional titles, and some comment to the ones I am particularly excited about. 

1. The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall
2. The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner
3. Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor
   
   
   
   
   Sounds like classic McGregor territory: the search for truth about the past in the objects and people of today. His first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things was a beautiful snapshot image of life on one street, and although the Booker longlisted follow-up wasn't quite as good, he remains an incredibly talented and powerful writer. One to look out for.
   
   
   
4. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman
   Philip Pullman does my head in at times, with his endless hatred of C.S. Lewis and his militant hit-you-over-the-head-with-it atheism. But he remains a wonderful storyteller and any new book from him promises a wonderful adventure. Billed as being particularly aimed at those who know their gospels (which I don't!), I'm nonetheless looking forward to learning something more about a subject (theology) which I find endlessly fascinating but can easily become dense and dull. Basically, Pullman is doing what I wish everyone would do: putting non-fiction into fiction, so that my impatient brain can take it in and enjoy the process at the same time.
   Bring on April!
   
   
5. Naming the Bones by Louise Walsh
6. Known to Evil by Walter Mosley
7. Monster 1959 by David Maine
8. Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
9. It Feels So Good When I Stop by Joe Pernice
10. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
11. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
12. Nemesis by Philip Roth
13. Wild Child by TC Boyle 
14. Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison
15. Solar by Ian McEwan
    I was lucky enough to hear Ian McEwan reading from this in June of this year, and it is genuinely very funny. I was in a horrible mood going into the talk, but somewhere in the almost campus-novel comedy of his reading, my perception of Ian McEewan as a 'serious' writer was blown completely out of the water. An early tip for Booker success next year, I think.
    
    
16. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
17. Point Omega by Don DeLillo
18. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
19. The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
20. Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
21. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
    
    
    
    
    When 1Q84 was published in Japan earlier this year it led to a rush of interest akin to that which greeted the release of Dan Brown's new book. The print run was raised from  100,000 to 480,000 and with the plot kept completly secret bookstores were inundated with pre-orders and queues on the day of release. The first of a two volume novel, 1Q84 is described as 'classic Murakami - a "complex and surreal narrative" that "shifts back and forth between tales of two characters, a man and a woman, who are searching for each other".
    No author reminds me why I love reading quite as well as Murakami.
    
    
    
    
22. The Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell
23. This Party’s Got to Stop by Rupert Thomson
24. Beatrice & Virgil by Yann Martel
    Well, it's Martel's first novel since the 2002 Booker winning phenomenon that was Life of Pi. Promising another mix of fable, fantasy, and theology this is a book that will attract huge public attention whenever it is released in 2010
    
    
25. All That Follows by Jim Crace
26. The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle
27. Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes
28. Lean On Pete by Willy Vlautin
29. The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
30. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
31. Castle J Robert Lennon
32. Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis
33. The Canal by Lee Rourke
34. Canada by Richard Ford
35. The Leaping by Tom Fletcher
36. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
    
    
    
    
    Already published in the U.S. where it has attracted a massive controversy and no little praise, Eating Animals sees Jonathan Safran Foer's on the verge of fatherhood and facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf. His investigations into the meet industry ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.
    Not published here until Spring 2010, I am hoping that one of the many lovely people I know in the states might see fit to send it to me for Christmas this year (hint hint, wink wink!)
    
    
    
37. King Death by Toby Litt
38. Light Boxes by Shane Jones
39. The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
40. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Simm by Jonathan Coe
41. The News Where You Are by Catherine O’Flynn
42. The Greek Affair by Simon Van Booy
43. Nazi Literature in the Americas – Roberto Bolano
44. Rupture by Simon Lelic
45. The Art of Pho by Julian Hanshaw
46. George Sprott by Seth
47. Taurus by Joseph Smith (author of The Wolf)
48. The Widow’s Tale by Mick Jackson
    
    
    
    
    Mick Jackson is an author who never ceases to surprise. From the charming madness of Underground Man, to the fabricated beastiary in Bears of England he never quite gives you what you expect and his work is all the better because of it. What you can be sure is that The Widow's Tale will be an enjoyable read, full of humanity, warmth, and a little dollop of the unexpected to boot.
    
    
    
49. The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan
50. In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
51. Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie
    The Sequal to Haround and the Sea of Stories, Luka promises another fable on the power of stories, and a life-affirming quest for life and passion. Published in October 2010 by Jonathan Cape, CCV publisher Dan Franklin has described it as “brilliant... as good as [Philip Pullman’s] Northern Lights”. I'm a huge Rushdie fan, next October can't come soon enough for me now.
    
    
52. Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness
    
    
    
    
    
    The final part of Patrick Ness's excuisite Chaos Walking trilogy, Monsters of Men promises another morally nuanced and occasionally disturbing tale of Todd and Viola, not to mention the very fate of New World itself.
    The Knife of Never Letting Go is the most exciting and thrilling young adult novel I have read in many years and The Ask and the Answer was a worthy sequal. Told in a gritty acerbic voice, and shot through with moments of utter beauty, Chaos Walking will be a classic trilogy read for many many years to come.
    
    
    
53. Ellipsis by Nikki Dudley
    
    
    
    
    Last but by no means least is this thrilling debut from London poet and novelist Nikki Dudley. Exciting, phsychologically complex, and disconcerting, it is a powerful tale of two misfits trying to uncover long hidden secrets about themselves and their pasts'. Dudley has an often startling eye for description and her simple poetic prose will delight readers looking for something slilghtly different in the crime thriller genre.
    
    

Hear the Wind Sing - Haruki Murakami

Read: December 2008

Hear the Wind Sing in one tweet sized chunk: More than almost any other author, Murakami is responsible for my absolute love of fiction. Hear the Wind Sing is his first novel: short, uncertain, fascinating. Until last November I was a pretty conventional reader, focused mostly on easily available, popular literary fiction. Then, one day, searching around on Wikipedia for any interesting facts to support a review I was writing for A Wild Sheep Chase I stumbled across the hidden secret of Haruki Murakami’s first two novels. Murakami has made it clear that he will never let either of these books be published in the west, considering them “weak.” In a 1991 interview with Publishers Weekly he described the evolution of his writing. A Wild Sheep Chase, he said, was “the first book where I could feel a kind of sensation, the joy of telling a story. When you read a good story, you just keep reading. When I write a good story, I just keep writing.” So these first two books, Hear the Wind Sing, and Pinball, 1973 are likely to remain relatively obscure for a while to come. That day, happily, I made the transition to the more rarefied (admittedly pompous) status of ‘book collector.’ How sad it is that this subtle semantic transition gives me such absurd pleasure. Hear the Wind Sing is Murakami’s first novel, a 130 page mini-book, A6 in format and only ever published in Japan, translated to help students learn to speak English. Megan gave me it last Christmas, cunningly hidden within a new pair of jeans. I have never collected anything before, certainly nothing which required careful handling or a nice plastic slipcase, and even now I catch myself staring at it with disbelief, amazed that something so precious and rare should have found its way to my house. I love it. But what of the book itself? It is the first in the 'trilogy of the rat’ which culminated in A Wild Sheep Chase, and the plot is what one might expect from a Murakami novel. It begins on August 8, 1970 (irrelevantly, that is my birthday, twelve years before I was born!) and follows the story of an unnamed twenty-one year old narrator as he spends nineteen days in his life, not doing very much. He spends much time cooking, eating and drinking, listening to western music, and reading western fiction. He drinks in a local bar where he talks with his friend, the rat, who has strong feelings about alienation and society. Around this core are ponderings on the nature of writing. This offers interesting insight into Murakami's early concerns. Hear the Wind Sing was written an hour at a time, every night, for four months, during which he must have mused, like I imagine most new novelists do, on the purpose and nature of fiction writing. Occasionally these thoughts are profound, often run-of-the-mill. But even in their amateurishness, perhaps even because of it, they are intriguing food for thought. Reading early, unpublished work provides a glimpse into the development of an author; an inspiring reminder that everyone has to learn their craft for themselves. One of the joys of this title is that reading it you see that his archetypal no-frills style of writing was something natural to him from the beginning. Indeed, in many senses, this is the most unremarkable book you could imagine reading. It seems that above all else, what Murakami learned from writing this novel is the importance of a plot to keep the reader turning the pages. What Murakami’s later novels do so well is integrating philosophical thoughts into this plot, so each supports the other and the reader is as fascinated in the existential musings of the characters as they are in finding out what is going to happen next. Here the thoughts resound with Murakami’s usual gently wafting air of uncertain discovery and otherworldly intrusion, but they do not transcend the narrative and draw the reader in. There is something special about Murakami which makes the words sparkle on the page. You only see it when you look out of the corner of your eye, late at night with a drink in your hand and a record playing on the stereo, and yet it is there. Something impossible to define. It engenders a tenderness, a sense of beauty, a love of literature. More than almost any other author, Murakami is responsible for my absolute love of fiction. Now I am saving up to buy Pinball, 1973. It is £149 on Amazon marketplace and I want it more than anything else I can think of. Perhaps this summer I will treat myself. Until then, I suspect I’ll waste more hours of life looking up at Hear the Wind Sing and smiling quietly to myself. 7 out of 10

Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami

For a longer version of this review, click here.

“In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains – flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits…In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a women. This was where it all began, and where it all ended. Almost.”

Sputnik Sweetheart is a novel of almosts, where liminal spaces overlap and longing can never quite be divorced from true love. It is beautifully evocative yet difficult to define, a tale of unrequited love, unrealised ambition, and yearning, always yearning, for more. Perhaps because it is about anticipation of and longing for love rather than love itself, it is one of the most romantic books I have ever read.

The plot revolves around a love triangle between three people who, like Othello, love not wisely but too well. Their fatal flaws are not violent jealousy but a sort of insidious loneliness destined to prevent any of them ever really finding what they most crave. There is Sumire, a compulsive writer who dresses in an oversized coat and heavy boots and dreams of emulating Jack Kerouac, her best friend K who narrates the novel and of whose romantic intentions she is utterly unaware, and Miu, the women Sumire has fallen for. Miu is a successful wine importer, independent, stylish, and confident: everything Sumire wants to be. She is drawn to Miu like a little Sputnik orbiting a vast planet.

Together, Miu and Sumire set off on a business trip to Europe, leaving K behind to console himself in a series of meaningless affairs. But when a distraught Miu calls K out of the blue from a small Greek island to say that Sumire has disappeared without a  trace, he drops everything and travels halfway around the world to help find her. The explanation he devises is at once impossible yet somehow cathartic. Can it be that the key to understanding what happened to Sumire lies in the strange events which afflicted Miu on a Ferris wheel almost 14 years ago, and turned her hair, overnight, prematurely and completely white?

Part detective novel without detective or resolution, part romance without reciprocation, Sputnik Sweetheart is difficult to pin down. Everything seems to be “one step out of line, a cardigan with the buttons done up wrong.”

Like much of Murakami’s oeuvre Sputnik Sweetheart is best understood as a sort of ellipsis, a gap in everyday life that is simultaneously mundane and fantastical and in which all the things we sort of know about ourselves and sort of suspect about the world around us are brought to composite reality. He is an author who never fails to reaffirm my love of reading. His fiction, never more so than in this slim novella, creates worlds where dreams – in all their bizarre and often troubling unpredictability – come true.

9 out of 10

After Dark - Haruki Murakami

Read: June 2007

"It's not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There's a shadowy middle ground. Recognising and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does. And to acquire a healthy intelligence takes a certain amount of time and effort."

2007 has been a good year for short novels. Ian McEwen returned to form with `On Chesil Beach,' his best work for years and I was desperately excited to get my hands on the long awaited return of Haruki Murakami with his latest novel, `After Dark'. After all, Murakami, like McEwan is one of the leading short story writers in the world and `Sputnik Sweetheart' remains his finest work to date.

The first thing to say is that this is a very short novel. At just 201 pages it took me barely 4 hours and I am not a fast reader. Some may say this is not value for money but does quantity really equal quality? This, like everything Murakami writes, is worth every penny you spend on it.

The story is that of Tokyo after darkness, when the sun goes down and the lights go on. It is the perfect setting for a Murakami novel: jazz records play leisurely in the background at late night bars, the streets are deserted and his usual ensemble of well meaning loaners in search of themselves have deep, revelatory conversations which unwind slowly over a cup of coffee and a cigarette. `After Dark' is like the distilled essence of everything Murakami has ever written.

Mari, a nineteen year old girl, is sitting alone in a coffee bar reading a thick novel and waiting for the night to pass. Takahashi is savouring his bands last all-night rehearsal before embarking on a career as a lawyer and has stopped in for some coffee. It is almost midnight. Back at home, Eri Asai (Mari's sister) has been asleep for two months, a sleeping beauty. As we watch the strange events of the dense night unfold it is as if the night has been personified, and the people are just encroaching on its time. Revelation and transition is in the air, it is `After Dark' and the possibilities are endless.

The atmosphere lurks somewhere between awake and asleep, we feel the neon signs lighting up the darkness and smell the hazy smoke of insomnia in the gaps between the words. Murakami is incapable of writing a dull story and `After Dark' is no different. It may not be his best work, but once you pick this book up and feel the darkness enshroud you like a blanket you will not dare put it down until the morning has arrived and there is nothing to do but wait for night to return.


7.5 out of 10

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

Read: July 2007

With The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami created a new genre; though no-one but he has been talented enough to follow it since. ‘Mundane Surrealism’ one might call it. Somehow Murakami manages to unite the bland minutia of everyday life with a fantastical and otherworldly adventure the like of which you will probably never encounter again.

Toru Okada has quit his job, just decides one day that he doesn’t want to work for a while. Then their cat goes missing causing his wife to fret that these are bad omens. Sure enough she disappears a few weeks later, simply vanishes one morning on the way to work. So Toru begins to search for them. But before long he starts receiving strange phone calls and is drawn into an otherworldly mystery from which he may never be able to escape.

This is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a series of interweaving stories narrated by an ensemble of disparate characters which only come together thanks to the sheer mind-boggling imagination of Haruki Murakami. His understanding of the characters he gives life to is almost endless, the deft shifts in plot conceived in inspiration. There are few books anywhere in the world which inspire this sort of jaw splitting amazement. It is magnificently detailed, there are enough ideas and characters here for a lifetime of writing. And indeed, in some ways it seems that every book Murakami has written since is an extension of one of the subplots hidden somewhere within these 607 pages: we have the endlessly bizarre hotel of A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance, Dance, Dance, the subconscious labyrinthine connection between computers, underground passages and the psyche of Hard Boiled Wonderland, and the wartime escapades of Kafka on the Shore.

This should not be a surprise and nor is it a criticism. All of Murakami’s writing works together, almost as though it is all part of the same wild and crazy delirious daydream. If you love his other work you will love this, it is more Murakami than anything else he has written. He has really let his mind run away with itself and the result is a resplendent journey through eighteen months in the life of Toru Okada, self confessed nobody, as he tries to rebuild the vague and blameless life he has lost. With a vast array of supporting characters who wander in and out of the plot at different times he embarks on a bizarre quest to unravel the mysteries surrounding him: his wife’s strange family, Japan’s military history, and a local house known only as ‘The Hanging House.’ It is a long and winding journey in which plot strands are ended and forgotten without any warning and the ending is typically obscure. At some times, particularly in the middle, the plot can become bogged down in seemingly irrelevant subplots and the mundane recantation of daily events. Indeed this is a far more challenging book than anything else Murakami has written, it requires patience of almost gargantuan levels equivalent to those needed to enjoy Doctor Zhirvago, but in the end is equally rewarding.

You will come away from it with a sense of dreamlike confusion, of vast arrays of average people innocently wandering through the world in search of someone they will never be, some sense of peace and stability which it seems is beyond the human species to attain.

If you have never read anything by Murakami then do not start here, there are better introductions to his work, notably Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore or Sputnik Sweetheart. Murakami is a true individual and your reading is not complete until you have sampled his work. But if you have already read something by this contemporary Japanese master then take a week off work, unplug the phone and do not stop reading until you are finished. And when you are the world will seem a slightly stranger place altogether.


7 out of 10

South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami

Read: October 2007

Having spent his 20’s drifting about lonely and in search of himself, Hajime has found love and security with his wife and two young daughters. He runs two successful jazz bars and spends his days keeping fit and taking his children to and from school. But he is haunted by the memory of the girls he first loved: Shimamoto, a fellow only child with whom he lost touch when he moved to high school, and Itsumi, a girl whose heart he broke when he was seventeen. Then, out of nowhere, Shimamoto appears in his bar, beautiful and mysterious, as if plucked straight from his memories and Hajime is forced to choose between his past and his present.

More reminiscent of Sputnik Sweetheart or Norwegian Wood than Wind-up Bird Chronicle or Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, South of the Border, West of the Sun is a simple, sweet love story set against the background of personal self discovery. As with everything Murakami there is the familiar otherworldlyness to the plot, the fantastical mixing almost invisibly with the everyday. In my opinion he is at his most poignant when this otherworldlyness is combined with the longing of a love story; when it seems that the emotions of the characters are too powerful to be contained and must explode forth in any way possible. This surrealism can thus be read both literally and metaphorically as the externalisation of emotional frailty which knows no boundaries and cannot be contained in just one place. This emotional vulnerability sums up Murakami’s well meaning loaners and individuals in search of themselves. It was most exquisitely realised in Sputnik Sweetheart and although this is not quite as good, South of the Border, West of the Sun remains a beautiful novel, well worth a few hours reading.

When each and every book he writes has the same basic characters and the same atmosphere, how does he maintain the suspense and readers interest? Haruki Murakami continues to amaze me with his timeless style and beautifully subtle stories. His is a special talent and his prose remains sublime even in translation, which says much for the simple symmetry of his writing. When I am stuck for what to read next one of his books invariably jumps out at me, offering such a satisfying and tactile haven of retreat it is impossible to refuse. Murakami thinks the things you think, listens to the music you listen to and reads the books you have read. You can almost reach out and touch his fiction, it is so immediate and familiar. And he renders this all in such simple beauty that it fairly breaks your heart. If you have not discovered Murakami yet, you should make it your number one priority.


7.5 out of 10

A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami

Read: November 2008

A Wild Sheep Chase in one sentence:
Murakami’s first internationally published novel, this contains all the bizarre events, lonesome conversations, and disperate characters which make his books such a joy to read.

Over the years I have developed one hard and fast rule when it comes to selecting my next book to read. If ever I get stuck with a book and would prefer to watch any old football on TV than read a book - in short, if I ever fall out of love with reading - then I turn to Haruki Murakami to rectify the situation.

This policy has proved pretty much infallible. Within fifty pages of picking up any of Murakami's titles I am engrossed in the adventure. I can't say whether this is due to some affinity with Murakami's typical well-meaning loaner characters, his down-to-earth and familiar way of telling a story, or some other indefinable quality, but I find it an absolute joy to get lost for a while in his books.

A Wild Sheep Chase is one of the more bizarre of his works, though this is difficult to quantify. It follows the adventure of an unnamed protagonist whose nothing special life is curtailed when he is blackmailed into searching for a mysterious sheep with a star on its back which may or may not be running the world. Add into the mix a chauffeur with the phone number for God, a runaway friend known only as 'The Rat,' and a genius sheep professor with a bad temper and you have a madcap and mysterious escapade which will confound your expectations with almost every flick of the page.

This is the first of Murakami's novels to be published in English outside of Japan, and perhaps shows a little less polish than some of his later efforts, but this is in many ways a good thing. Metaphysical conversations take place, but Murakami has not yet found a way to express his ideas with complete clarity, and so these conversations take on an even greater level of spectral uncertainty. This is Murakami at his least substantial. Reading it feels like a dream that would become a nightmare if you weren't lying in a state of post-orgasmic bliss next to someone you love. I don't know if that makes sense, but it seems to capture something of the illusive and imprecise joy of reading Murakami. He is an exceptional author.

I think I may now have to begin my own wild sheep chase, in order to track down affordable copies of Hear the Wind Sing, and Pinball, 1973, his first two books which he never wants to be published outside of Japan. They are hard to come by, and very expensive. But it must be worth it. For the only problem with this rule of mine is that I have now exhausted the entire available backlist of Murakami's full length fiction, and have only a couple of collections of short stories to go before I have to find a new ‘go to’ author. Wish me luck.


8 out of 10

Influential Authors

Tough one, this.

I take the idea from Shelf Life. Which authors have influenced my thoughts on books, or writing. They are not necessarily my favourite writers, or those I most admire, but those who have influenced me in some way or another.

Over the years many authors have moulded and shaped my mind as a reader, and often radically transformed what I think about when I think about writing (haha, see what I did there?) Here are just a few of them.

1. Russell Hoban - Taught me that the only limit to writing is the extent of our imagination.
2. Haruki Murakami - Demonstrated how Magical Realism, well done, can express emotional upheaval through metaphor far more effectively than any amount of weeping realism ever has.
   He has also become my 'go-to' writer. Whenever I have become stuck with a book and struggled or not enjoyed finishing it, I go back to a Murakami novel and remember exactly why I love fiction.
3. Milan Kundera - Offered my first foray into fearsomely intelligent, intellectual writing. Enlivened my mind to the possibilities of what a novel can do.
4. Roald Dahl - Helped my fall in love with storybooks. I remember staying up late at night, huddled under the covers, when I was only about 7, desperately scrabbling through Matilda, totally unable to put it down.
5. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings was the first adult book I read to myself, when I was 10 years old. I started off reading it with my Dad but got bored of waiting for our evening reading so decided to read it on my own and from then on I never looked back.
6. J.M. Coetzee - Demonstrated that great writing does not have to be complex or fancy, that what is most important is creating an atmosphere and telling a story and that the simpler you do that the better. Also demonstrates how unappetising sex scenes can be in fiction.
7. Charles Palliser - Reminded me that for all the great ideas you have, the story will always be paramount. If a reader cannot put a book down then that is the greatest achievement you can ever hope for.
8. Don Delillo - Offers a masterclass in the simplicity of good dialogue.
9. Toni Morrison - Taught me that you cannot judge a writer by their agent! No matter how infuriating, rude, or disrespectful an agent/publicist might be bears no correlation with how charming, and amusing the writer will be.
10. Kazuo Ishiguro - Showed me that writing is best when an author has the confidence to let their characters and events speak for themselves. That authorial commentary is best left to an absolute minimum.
11. Olga Grushin - HER STYLE IS DECEPTIVELY LIKE MINE! Gave me a sense that perhaps I can be a good writer.
12. Iris Murdoch - Ah, the unreliable narrator. Showed just how much you can do in the first person even if the narrator is delusional, confused and utterly unreliable.
13. Salman Rushdie - Where to begin? Inspires with every sentence. Demonstrates how mythology can bring a novel alive and create a colour palate of vivid imagination which works in counterpoint to the main plot. His lively, jumpy, excitable prose is an absolute pleasure to read. And he ties together ancient mythology with contemporary culture in a way few authors can.
14. Stephane Audeguy - Merges biography with fiction and fiction with biography in a way I have not seen done by anyone else.
15. Michelle De Kretser, Martin Amis and many others. How unbelievably unreadable and turgid some work can be. This is a very good lesson to learn.
16. Charlotte Bronte - The power of the narrator to carry a plot on their shoulders alone. If you have a great narrative, then I will read on forever, no matter what is happening in the plot.
17. G.K. Chesterton - The king of witty thoughts on writing. Argues that the simpler the prose is, the more you can convey. Less is definitely more.