“Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami (translated by Jay Rubin)

This is one of Murakami’s most straight forward novels. There are no strange dream sequences and no talking cats. His translator makes the claim that it is also Murakami’s most autobiographical work. After all, the protagonist is a small-town boy who is making his way through college in late 1960s Tokyo. He even has a part-time job at a record store. Music, both classical, jazz, and, of course, the Beatles, punctuates much of the plot. It is also a dark work. There are more than a handful of gruesome deaths referenced, most by suicide. In fact, the narrator’s working motto became, “Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.”

Although a more or less straight bildungsroman, the book is still told with Murakami’s dead-pan flare built into his simple lines, “Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.” In fact, the suicide of his high school best friend would be the defining event of Toru Watanabe’s existence, “Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I’ve chosen to live—and to live the best I know how. Sure, it was hard for you. What the hell, it’s hard for me. Really hard. And all because you killed yourself and left Naoko behind. But that’s something I will never do. I will never, ever turn my back on her. First of all, because I love her, and because I’m stronger than she is. And I’m just going to keep on getting stronger. I’m going to mature. I’m going to be an adult.”

“Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” by Haruki Murakami (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)

This is a philosophical fantasy novel about the nature of human consciousness. “In time your mind will not matter. It will go, and with it goes all sense of loss, all sorrow. Nor will love matter. Only living will remain. Undisturbed, peaceful living.” Of course, there are the classic Murakami pop references sprinkled throughout. The music of Bob Dylan and the fiction of Ivan Turgenev play reoccurring roles. “I almost never identify with anybody in Dostoyevsky, but the characters in Turgenev’s old-fashioned novels are such victims of circumstance, I jump right in. I have a thing about losers.” The structure of the novel is also classic Murakami, with chapters that alternate between two different plot lines, until the mystery unravels and the two stories merge into one. The characters are also as quirky as usual. The hero has a thing for whiskey, jazz records, and cooking. There is an absent-minded professor, a dwarf and giant gangster duo, a chubby, sex-starved teen, dressed only in pink, and a brainy librarian with gastric abnormalities. “Chubby girls in pink tend to conjure up images of big strawberry shortcakes waltzing on a dance floor, but in her case the color suited her.” There is also a fair share of scientific speculation thrown into the mix. “Don’t blame me. That’s evolution. Evolution’s always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution…. Evolution is mighty gruelin’. What do you think the most gruelin’ thing about evolution is?… It’s being unable to pick and choose. Nobody chooses to evolve.” And as usual for Murakami, the plot has plenty of fantastical elements too- glowing unicorn skulls, talking shadows, dream-reading, underground monsters, herds of beasts, and mind-altering brain surgery. “Shuffling was a door to a new world. He said that although he’d developed it as a method for scrambling computer data, with a little doing a person might scramble the world.” The plot is almost besides the point. It does the work of carrying the book’s digressions into philosophy—on the nature of life, what is truly important in this world, how memory works, and what it is that makes a mind human. “Many things will become clear for you over the course of the winter. Whether or not you like what you learn, it will come to pass. The snow will fall, the beasts will die. No one can stop this.”

“Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel)

Murakami mixes detailed realism with the wildly fantastic so fluidly that one hardly notices (at first) that cats are talking to humans. ““Not to boast or anything, but I can’t write either,” the cat said, licking the pads of his right paw. “I’d say my mind is average, though, so I’ve never found it inconvenient.”” Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker also make appearances, in the flesh. ““In everything there’s a proper order,” Johnny Walker said. “You can’t look too far ahead. Do that and you’ll lose sight of what you are doing and stumble.”” But, at the heart of Murakami’s novel is a coming of age story- one filled with loss, regret, and redemption. “Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.” The plot patiently unfolds as connected mysteries resolve. It is not in a hurry. “Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world.”

Books, history, dreams, love, and memory all play integral roles in the novel. “When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages—a special odor of the knowledge  and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers.” Societal norms and familial bonds also are recurring themes. “As individuals each of us is extremely isolated, while at the same time we are all linked by a prototypical memory.” There are plenty of tangents and asides- digressions on Schubert, Sophocles, Beethoven, haiku, surfing, and, of course, Franz Kafka. “Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason—or at least they appeal to certain types of people…. all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert.” There is also plenty of philosophy packed within the story. Murakami makes you think about metaphysical issues. “Necessity is an independent concept. It has a different structure from logic, morals, or meaning. Its function lies entirely in the role it plays. What doesn’t play a role shouldn’t exist. What necessity requires does need to exist.” The narration rotates between the first and third person as the plot follows a pair of protagonists. As their stories intertwine things get even weirder and truths reveal themselves. “As long as there’s such a thing as time, everybody’s damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.”