Murakami Three Books In

Thoughts on Murakami three books in:

He is like a literary Steven King, but I think I mean that more as a compliment to Steven King than Murakami, in this way: Steven King still wrestles with story. He still wrestles with plot details and plausibility and suspension of disbelief and even, for the most part, a coherent narrative. In that way King is a traditional storyteller, whereas Murakami doesn't seem to be bothered with any of these basic constraints of Story. Murakami is perfectly content to hint at a hundred things and not deliver. He is perfectly content to leave out whole chunks of the traditional story arc (motive, conflict, resolution) where and when it suits him, as long as he gets close to some psychological or philosophical point. And he doesn't seem to need even to nail down these points; getting close is good enough. Having said all that I have no doubt that the translation from Japanese has a profound effect on my experience of the work and I'm certain that it reads better in the original.

He is not a stylist: Again this could have plenty to do with the translation and the cultural differences, but Murakami is still nobody's stylist. There's nothing wrong with simple, of course, but the similes and metaphors one finds in Murakami's fiction are rarely illuminative and too often the descriptive passages are either truncated or overstay their welcome. The dialog is effective but often prefaced on a kind of absurd dialectic model in which the characters immediately disagree with one another about something and then work to resolve it over the course of several long conversations. The tension at work in the dialog certainly does hook the reader and make for the easy turning of pages, but after a while this device, employed with alarming consistency, becomes tiresome.

His knows how to fill a page. There are long descriptions of simple actions or sequences of action. Same for the food. Lots of eating, plenty of descriptive passages regarding the interiors of refrigerators and pantries, the preparations of omelettes and other meals. This contributes to an unhurried pace, but also makes the books seem twice as long as they should be.

He's an enjoyable read: Having said all the above, I find him interesting enough to keep on reading. He does something quite interesting with his characters: he unites their fate, quite explicitly, with the resolution of some inner conflict, some psychological lesson which they must learn. And he states the terms of this psychological lesson more or less explicitly, which induces the reader into a suspense that we've all experienced at some time or another, even if we haven't later remembered it or admitted it to ourselves: the struggle to remember and resolve some long-lost injury.