The Times I've Read Haruki Murakami

writing this in my cubicle but pretending i'm at the bottom of a well

When in your life you read a book shapes your perception of it. Evaluating books is about evaluating your subjective experience, and that subjective experience should be affected by where you are in your life. Murakami makes me feel that even more, because he's an author so heavily bound up in seasons, in weather, in the banal movement of his character’s lives as they spend years resolving simple emotional arcs.

The first time I read Murakami was September 2018, shortly after I returned to college for my senior year. I read Kafka on the Shore in my third floor apartment that only had air conditioning in the living room. I would turn the AC on full blast on hot days and lay on the couch while I read it, fall asleep after a few chapters, and feel cool and clean. I remember being really compelled by the cleanness of Kafka on the Shore, of the library and surrounding town the protagonist had fled to, the circular stone that had to be flipped over to enter the portal world. On October 14th 2018 I tweeted “murakami is the The 1975 of contemporary lit”, and now I only kind of know what I meant by that.

The second time I read Murakami was late spring 2019, now ending my senior year and graduating from college. I started reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in my same third-floor apartment, and finished it back at my parents’ house living in their sunroom. This is the Murakami book into which I was most carried away, even though it took me a while to read. I really identified with the particular hot aimlessness of the protagonist. In the story, it’s summer, he quits his office job with no plan for the future. His wife mysteriously leaves him, and he spends time wandering around the alleyway behind his house into an abandoned house nearby and sits at the bottom of its well. Murakami is full of love for bottom of a well and alleyway places, places in the middle of everything but simultaneously the periphery. While I was reading this book, I was also sitting around in the hot aimless present waiting for my post-college future to crystalize in whatever form it would take. And it did crystallize, I had only two weeks of post-college wait before I locked myself into the four-hour life, but The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is always there in my mind to remind me what I can leave it for. On November 17th 2021, I tweeted “i want to be in my quit my job with no plan and spend my days sitting at the bottom of a well era” and I know exactly what I meant by that even though I have no recollection to what was happening in the office that day. 

The third time I read Murakami was mid-winter early 2020, now a young professional, in the workforce for six months. I read Norwegian Wood in the cold, in my bedroom in my parents’ house, in my free four hours after work. Norwegian Wood is Murakami’s book that most reflects back on his college days and it made me sadder than his other books did. Sad because I had missed some parts of college, sad because I hadn’t missed others and that the experience I had had was all there was to have. The plot is about the protagonist coming to terms with the suicide of his friend, with a girl who also knew his friend, who at the end of the book also commits suicide. Norwegian Wood is one of Murakami’s only novels without fantastical elements which also makes it sad, there’s no mysterious secrets of the world that save the characters. It’s often recommended as “where to start with Murakami” which I don’t really get. I think that’s a backwardly prescriptive take from people who think non-Murakami readers will find Murakami “too weird”, when he's not that weird, and this book has its own weirdness and is missing many crucial elements that help you determine if you’ll actually like Murakami. It is shorter than other Murakami, but if you're brave I think you should start with Wind-Up or Kafka like I did.

The fourth time I read Murakami was in early spring 2020, at the beginning of the coronavirus quarantine. I read A Wild Sheep Chase. It feels like there was a much larger gap between me reading Norwegian Wood and this but it was only a few months. I remember this Murakami book the least. The main character takes a strange job to track down a particular missing sheep in a remote village, and this job opens up mysterious sinister paths. It’s short, and one of Murakami’s earliest novels, and I don’t think he had fully found his voice at this time. I had read Delillo’s first novel Americana shortly before this and it reminded me of that, in that the short early novels by authors with very distinctive styles so openly reveal the authors, their vulnerabilities and passions, but simultaneously don’t push as far as their later books when they become more confident in their power. A Wild Sheep Chase has mysteries, aimless time in a village by the sea, cults, cigarettes, things I had already found elsewhere in Murakami. Really what I remember most about this book was leaving my house to read it. I was spending all day inside working on a huge project that had been derailed by covid-induced financial problems, and I was paranoid about the outside world because the world was telling me to be and I was spending a lot of time inside with my family. My moments of freedom were walking to periphery places. I’d walk to the primary school swingset, with the flowers blooming on the way, and read Murakami. I went on some really long hikes, walking ten plus miles from my house, learned some of the spring flora unique to my area, compelled by the vibes of the spring. This book isn't about that, but Murakami is about that.

The fifth time I read Murakami was early spring 2021, 1Q84. I chose to read it in spring because my best experiences with Murakami had been in spring. This book feels like a crowning moment for Murakami; maybe not his masterpiece but the moment he brings it all together. It’s twice as long as anything else he’s written. Unlike the other Murakami books reading it wasn't influenced by my own life as much. I was still living with my parents, in the same house, at the same job, nothing had changed since the last Murakami book. I was a little too eager for spring so many days it was too cold for me to read it outside. I had some days where I went back to the same periphery places where I read Wild Sheep Chase, to recreate the vibes, but I couldn't do it quite as often. 

1Q84 has many elements of almost all of Murakami’s other books: the mysterious fascist leader of A Wild Sheep Chase, the powerful villain that dies upon first confrontation of Kafka on the Shore, the alternate portal world that opens and closes of Kafka on the Shore, the places in the middle of everything but are societally peripheral from Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the young but sexualized teen female sidekick of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

In my description of these other Murakami books, I always say “the protagonist” since Murakami books are usually channeled through a single character, and that single character feels very similar from book-to-book. IQ84 is the one exception to that. It has two main characters, 30 year old female gym instructor Aomame and 30 year old male math teacher Tengo. They were elementary school classmates who held hands at age 10 and now are inexorably pulled towards each other. The bond between the two protagonists is what makes IQ84 unique for Murakami. Usually his characters never find anything besides peace, but here, with the promise of a bond, there is so much more at stake. It’s sort of three Murakami novels: one for Tengo’s story, one for Aomame’s story, and then one for them finding each other, overcoming the loneliness that defines every other Murakami novel.

However, in this story of true love conquering loneliness, Tengo and Aomame still spend over 1000 pages of the 1100 pages alone. They learn of the existence of each other, and are driven by a single memory from their elementary school years to locate each other. The novel, after starting out with two separate plots, gradually converges into a story solely about these two 30 year olds in their loneliness waiting for each other. And like how a Jane Austen novel focuses on all the small class conflicts and awkwardness and turns the camera off when her protagonist finds her husband, when they finally meet we only get about twenty pages of Tengo and Aomame together, most of that being a recap of the novel’s central images. The story ends and we don’t see what happens anymore. Murakami wasn’t interested in Tengo and Aomame together, he was interested in them alone, the same way he’s always been interested in characters that are alone. The epitome of their romance without interaction is that the two protagonists have a child together halfway through the book, neither of them knowing that was the moment the child was conceived. Tengo’s 17 year old girl sidekick has sex with him and serves as a conduit for the child to go through her to Aomame. They are alone even when they conceive together. I think Murakami knows this and is okay with this. The way Murakami manages to tell a love story without the two characters meeting more than a few times is impressive, but it’s hard to call it love in anything other than a mythical sense, but maybe that's all real love is.

1Q84 is my favorite Murakami book, if that isn't clear. I love the images, the tunnel off a downtown highway that leads to a slightly different world, the smaller green moon nestled up against the true moon, the relentless NHK subscription fee collectors, and the slide in the public park surrounded by apartment complexes on which Tengo sits sensing Aomame nearby. Murakami repeats these images frequently throughout the book so you can’t miss them, but they do feel genuinely inspired. I revisit the songs Janacek’s Sinfonietta and Ella Fitzgerald's “It’s Only A Paper Moon” frequently, because they're central songs to this book and they bring it back for me.

Murakami is a strange author. Mechanically, he’s divorced from literary tradition, a Japanese author obsessed with American culture, more popular translated into English than in his native language. He writes very close to the same book over and over again, but he seems to really feel that book. I admire how much he really feels it, and a lot of the time I can feel what he was going for too. I like Murakami, his world where aimless 30 year olds can have small magical experiences that affirm the dignity in their life. I’m glad he wrote these books and glad that I read them.

I haven't read any Murakami since 1Q84. That book felt like the triumph of his catalog, and none of the others call to me as strongly afterwards. But also I get weaker as I get farther from college, weaker at pursuing new things. It’s not all negative, I get stronger in other ways, but it still is sad. I’m reading Knausgaard My Struggle book 1 now, and in it he talks about his first time experiencing spring, how the very first spring you have you perceive it all so deeply and for the rest of your life you're chasing that first spring, with diminishing returns each year. My Murakami springs were the first time I really began to love the season. Maybe this piece is more about that than it is Murakami. I don’t know. You can decide what it's about. As The 1975 says, “why would you believe you could control how you're perceived when at the best you're intermediately versed in your own feelings”?