shortireads

[Expect a bit of me and a bit of book]

I’ll start a new job soon, feel free to imagine the details. Something with shirts and company dinners. Some nonsense role, with a made up name like associate to or head of. Somewhere in a big city, you can fill in the rest, but make sure it has tall buildings, the kind that make you dizzy when you try and grasp where the roof ends and the sky starts. Somewhere on earth unfortunately.

Instead of sitting at this desk, I’d really like to be in a Murakami novel, where time, for a change, seems to relax and abandon its worldly duties of ticking and flowing relentlessly. Where banal, routine actions like stealing glances at people on the train or even just picking up a cup of tea, shine with a glistening layer of wonder. Often even too shiny, the descriptions seem to roll from page to page, endlessly. Every thought, laugh, gesture, tweak in expression, is accounted for. Surprisingly, after a few chapters it becomes second nature to crave the descriptiveness of his words, to desire an uninterrupted world building, to long for an explanation of even the simplest images.

My descent into this book was slow, lazy and bothered. Partially because the reason why I own it in the first place, is as frustrating as a flashy sticker that said:”MUST READ: Murakami’s new sensational novel”. I like to think that my choices of books are solely dictated by my intellectual curiosity, hence upon discovering that the Waterstones’ marketing team is the puppeteer of my consciousness, the first pages of this book were permanently stained with utter and profound annoyance. I so desperately wanted to prove them wrong. I whispered words of reassurance to myself: “He wrote enough good books already, there’s simply no way this will be anything but a mere replica of that Japanese life he loves to portray, probably something along the lines of ordinary men intricately involved with extraordinary women, that happen to go through seemingly impossible and often mystical experiences”.

And as I often am, I was right. The unfortunate thing about being a world renowned author with a distinct style and clear subject matter, is that it’s pretty hard to shock, surprise and amaze. If you’re looking for something shockingly new or simply different than his previous books, this is not a read for you. Don’t let the marketing people tell you otherwise. However, if you’re a Murakami fan like me, finding yourself in need of some distraction from being banally normal and crave a reassuring, comfortable novel that feels like the perfect blend of dream and reality, go ahead and pick it up, it won’t disappoint.

It starts, unsurprisingly, with love. Like a persistent flue that humankind can’t seem to shake, love has been, if anything, quite the goldmine for literary inspiration. However, Murakami’s love always feels purer, even in the depths of betrayal, affairs and whatnot, it maintains a certain separation from our worldly understanding of the feeling, as if too godly to meddle with us. Particularly in this novel, the words are soaked in that Japanese culture of unspoken attention. An untouched teen love, a virgin feeling expressed through letters between two students that grow closer in the hope of understanding each other. The girl is as mysterious as any Murakami female character. I gluttonously sped through the pages, hoping to unveil the thick curtain of unknown that unfortunately kept her hidden till the end. She tells our protagonist that the real her is not the one that lives in this world, but actually another version of herself that lives in a city behind thick, tall walls. Their relationships unravels around their awkward attempt to investigate her dreams and knowledge about the secret city.