Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic
His sentences can be awful, his plots are formulaic—yet his novels mesmerize. Seasoned fans of Haruki Murakami, having patiently waited three years since the gamma-ray blast of 1Q84, will have a few pressing questions about the master’s newest book, even though they may be able to anticipate the answers:
- Is the novel’s hero an adrift, feckless man in his mid-30s? (Yep.)
- Does he have a shrewd girl Friday who doubles as his romantic interest? (Of course; conveniently, she is a travel agent, adept at booking sudden international trips.)
- Does the story begin with the inexplicable disappearance of a person close to the narrator? (Not one person—four, and they vanish simultaneously.)
- Is there a metaphysical journey to an alternate plane of reality? (Sort of: the alternate reality is Finland.)
- Are there gratuitous references to Western novels, films, and popular culture? (Let’s see, Barry Manilow, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Pet Shop Boys, Aldous Huxley, Elvis Presley … affirmative.)
- Which eastern-European composer provides the soundtrack, and will enjoy skyrocketing CD sales in the months ahead—Bartók, Prokofiev, Smetana? (Liszt.)
- Are there ominous omens, signifying nothing; dreams that resist interpretation; cryptic mysteries that will never be resolved? (Check, check, and check.)
- Will this be the novel that finally delivers Murakami the Nobel Prize? (Time will tell.)
Murakami, who learned to speak English by reading American crime novels, begins with an opening paragraph that would make David Goodis proud. Tsukuru Tazaki, recently turned 20, is planning his suicide:
From July of his sophomore year in college until the following January, all Tsukuru Tazaki could think about was dying.
But where Goodis would write something like “All right, he told himself firmly, let’s do it and get it over with,” Murakami is balletic, evoking metaphysical realms and a fine sense of the grotesque. “Crossing that threshold between life and death,” he writes, “would have been easier than swallowing down a slick, raw egg.”
Read the full review by Nathaniel Rich at The Atlantic …