Read: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
This was a little less assured than Kafka on the Shore; part of that may be thanks to the (bizarre) decision to cut around 25,000 words from the English translation. In particular, I felt like the symbolic weight of certain characters was confusingly off. All that said, this was beguiling, and weird, and at points taps into the intersection of technology and emotion in a way that is even more impressive when you consider that this was first published in the mid-nineties.
I still can’t decide how I feel about the way that Murakami writes women; in fact, I think there’s an argument to be made that he doesn’t write women, instead using them as ciphers and objects that allow his (so far, male) characters to arrive at certain surreal conclusions. In this, the women bleed into each other, and often Toru is indiscriminate in the way he approaches them; eventually, his goal of rescuing his wife seems more like a journey of self-realisation than a concrete display of love for another human being.
And that’s fine as a concept - the only issue comes when I realise that, three novels in, I still haven’t read a female character of Murakami’s that feels as fleshed out as his male leads. Perhaps this will change - so much of his style depends on internal monologue, of which the supporting characters are deprived as a rule. If someone can enlighten me as to whether or not he’s written women as protagonists before, I might attempt that.
I’m not sure. There’s an undercurrent in Murakami’s protagonists that suggests a difficulty in relating to other people, and I don’t think that’s accidental - the mental tapestries he weaves are so hallucinatory as to render the idea of other subjects meaningless, sometimes, and there’s something seductive in that. I still enjoyed this, but can’t help but wonder when - if ever - the author might start getting to grips with the real mental interplay between men and women.