Norwegian Wood

I’m reading the latest Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. It’s a choice by someone in my book club. It’s irritatingly beautiful. I say irritatingly for two reasons: one is I want to shout at the main character to move it along, but that’s my smart phone addled brain talking. Second, he stops receiving letters from his girlfriend and it takes him two years to stop by her house to see where she is? That’s the first thing I’d try. It’s not like he didn’t know where she lived because they’ve been writing each other letters, you know? With an address on the envelopes, destined to go where the person lives.

My third irritation (I said there were two, but there’s more) is that it’s so slow, and poignant, but why does Murakami get to write slow, self involved prose? He not only breaks all the “rules” of novel writing but isn’t even doing it in a particularly intriguing or interesting way. I’m going to get through it because it’s a book club choice, but I usually give up after fifty pages if I’m not turned on. I’m only starting to get involved a hundred pages in.

I’ve been a fan of Murakami for a while, ever since Wild Sheep Chase and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. One of my favorite short stories ever is “Sleep”, with “The Second Bakery Attack a close runner up. I’ve read other novels of his: Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore and IQ84. The other novels intrigued me, or started off with something happening, or just the oddness of them connected. This one? Meh.

However, accidentally today I heard the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood” on the radio, and I started to feel the strings of memory and shared culture drawing me to this Japanese writer again. There are points that touch between my life and Murakami’s writing. We share something that is shared with everyone else who’s ever connected with his writing, and I feel better about the world knowing that. We, as humans, don’t have to only see our differences. This is what the world used to be: finding our commonalities. We can get there again. It’s just a muscle we haven’t used in a while.