The 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced later this week and Haruki Murakami is by far the favorite. The Japanese author published an extraordinary new novel in August, and just recently dropped a new short story, just for the heck of it; that only adds to his already impressive oeuvre, including the blockbuster IQ84, one of the most talked-about novels in recent years.
My experience with his writing goes back quite a bit further to Norwegian Wood, his first novel that skyrocketed him to literary fame in Japan, so much so that he left the country in order to work in peace. When a friend started dating a girl from Japan, I interrogated her immediately on its popularity, and she confirmed that just about everyone reads it as a teen, maybe comparable to The Catcher in the Rye in America. Although she admitted, it's not exactly age-appropriate because of all the sex and suicide and whatnot. I saw the trailer for the film adaptation via Hollister Hovey and was struck by the incredible aesthetics of it, along with the Johnny Greenwood score (of Radiohead fame, and the composer/musician responsible for the scores of 'The Master' and 'There Will Be Blood,' two of my favorite movies). So I read the novel, with the primary objective of seeing the movie afterward, but also because Murakami was very much "on my list" and this seemed as good a reason as any to check it out.
It makes for a quick but emotionally intense read; I'm reading Alice Munro these days and her stories remind me of the Norwegian Wood experience of diving head first into a very intense but short-lived narrative. It is considered to be Murakami's most straight-forward narrative, so it is not necessarily indicative of what to expect from his more recent novels. I should mention also that he is very involved in the translation of his work from Japanese to English, so this is not one of those instances when your college friends tell you that it simply isn't the same if you can't read it in Japanese (Gabriel Garcia Marquez read French and Russian literature translated into Spanish and it didn't hurt him any, just sayin').
If melancholy and teenage suicide and manic pixie dream girls aren't really your cup of tea, this might not be for you, but it is really beautiful and sad and gorgeous, and if you're like me, it will make you crave good noodles constantly.
