The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Blimey, that does sound good.

Katie, try PA again,please!Has anyone already read that volume of real-life short-stories he compiled through his experience in the radio?Any good?

Paul Auster = a FULE!

Haruki Murakami = beautiful and poignant and original.

Funnily enough, the American authors HM has translated include the abysmal John Irving, and Fitzgerald, neither of whom he has much in common with, either. I think the best parallel for HM is probably early Jonathan Lethem (compare and contrast JL's Gun with Occasional Music and HM's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World).

Don't really have time to mount much of a defense, but let it be known that I would defend WUBC or Murakami as a whole; an equally good way of digging into his work would be to read A Wild Sheep Chase and then Dance Dance Dance (its sequel), which would offer a slightly less ponderous entry. (This is not a knock on WUBC, which I probably like better -- it just happens to be weighty and funereal, whereas AWSC and DDD are breezy and rather more humorous.)

I'm not saying works are better in translation -- I'm just admitting that I have a massive aesthetic hardon for the sort of tone that translation gives a book, and I'm guessing that there are plenty of translated works that I wouldn't like as much in their original tongues. Does that maybe make some sense? That "tone of translation" is quite possibly my biggest influence in writing -- the first novella I wrote was quite intentionally about a Japanese translator of Italian fiction, just so I could go into this idea. (This novella was also far-too-heavily influenced by Murakami, but there you have it.)

First time I have ever heard an American use 'European' to mean 'non-British European'. Cool!

Nitsuh, where are these novellas of yours? I think they might give me an aesthetic hard-on.

[Disclaimer]: I don't know why I'm shooting my mouth off about this; I don't read enough proper literature or attend enough to translation to be competent about it concrete terms.

*I mean as opposed to 'top-down' pulls out of naturalism that work at the level of staging or frame, or by self-conscious asides to the audience/reader.

Nick: Yeah, I did, even though I've never been particularly fond of that non-European distinction. The novella ... hmmm. A copy in my drawer, a copy in my living room, a copy in Iowa City, and a copy with my last workshop professor. There's actually a short portion of it that is about exactly what we're discussing here, but I'd feel weird throwing it out into the open. It's probably the best page of prose I've ever written, and I frequently fear that I'll never do that well again.

But anyway I didn't want to interrupt this interesting conversation. Just wanted to say that Murakami is boss and right now I'm reading Wind-Up Bird for the second time. Gareth, Murkami is recommended sometimes to people with your tastes, I guess, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to his inherent Murakaminess and how much is due to the fact that he wrote Wind-Up Bird, which is supposed to appeal somehow to fans of doorstop novels and postmodern weirdness. If I were recommending Murakami to friends I'd try to target the friends who like Murakami's English language influences, or existentialist novelists, that kind of thing. If Murakami is difficult, it's not in his style or the complexity of his novels' plots or structures. (I think Nitsuh is onto something.)

Question to those here who have read it. Part of my love of Murakami comes from the odd internal logic of his stories. In WUBC, this logic almost reminds me of a role-playing video game, at two points in particular: (a) he picks up an "item" which later has a specific use, (b) he finds a person in a particular place, and only later realizes how he's meant to interact with that person. (Trying not to spoil.) Did anyone else get that puzzle-solving feel from these moments?

I've found Murakami emotionally affecting but in a weird, glancing way that I've always thought well-suited to what he seems to be trying to get at. Well, er, maybe it's not that glancing. But they're the kinds of emotions that tend to, er. Uh. Yeah. Anyway the Paul Auster comparison is far better than say Pynchon, I think, for just that reason (the one I just didn't express clearly back there).

Wow. What a mindfuck of a book. What an utter beautiful amazing, confusing, gorgeous mindfuck of a book.

I really like it but if anyone reveals any plot twists after the zoo section I will kill them with guns.

Well, to a certain extent (that's a great qualifier isn't it - I just read an interview with Chuck Klosterman where he said that "to a certain extent" is his favorite phrase, because you can add it just about any statement and the statement becomes truthful), all fiction stands or falls on its ability to cast a spell. I mean it's not like a mathematical proof - at bottom there is an unavoidable layer of subjectivity in the appreciation of literature. However, I guess that one thing that sets WUBC apart is that it's unusually hard for those who like it to describe what they like about it. The conventional ideals of character and plot are largely foregone. There are many strangely faceless characters who make brief appearances, and the plot is full of bizarre and credulity-stretching twists. These are conventional fictional no-nos. But in Murakami (as in, e.g., Pynchon) this trangression of conventional literary ideals becomes part of the charm.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/story.jsp?story=482796

It's called Kafka on the Beach.

http://basic1.easily.co.uk/03E054/05F01F/kafka.htm

-- youn (yno...), December 11th, 2001.

this is correct, you people are nuts. i agree with tracer, his books are enjoyable but have no emotional or intellectual effect on me. i forgot WUBC as soon as i put it down but i did read 2 more of his books with much the same effect.

Why not? I always end with the sleeves.