Haruki Murakami

This was originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 4/10/01, and I'll repost it here, unaltered. It was in response to someone (name now forgotten) who'd asked what Murakami's writing was like. I think you folks can figure out why I'm resurrecting it now...

I'm quite fond of his books (there's a new one coming out at the end of the month! yay!), but my sense is that I'm liking them with the half of my brain that likes Don DeLillo and Kazuo Ishiguro rather than the half that likes George R.R. Martin and Iain M. Banks.

That probably wasn't helpful...

A Wild Sheep Chase is generally considered to be his best book (and those who don't agree mostly like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World is, as I recall, an interesting but very odd novel, something like Kafka filtered through Mishima. I read it when it was published, about ten years ago (reading Wild Sheep Chase, his first novel to be translated into English, made me a huge fan), but haven't re-read it since, so my recollection of it is fuzzy.

Murakami writes in a quite readable style, but he tends to focus on little details and thoughts in a way that may seem slow or boring to someone who is reading looking for something else. I recall reading an interview with Murakami in which he said that he deliberately followed Raymond Chandler's style. It isn't a clear line by any means (Chandler to his Japanese translator to Murakami through his English translator), but there are glimpses of a Chandleresque tone. He doesn't do the quirky metaphors that Chandler's best known for,
though.

In general, I'd say it's well worth reading, and you might possibly have found a new author to love. I hope you'll report back once you've read it.

Book-A-Day #113 (11/6): Un Lun Dun by China Mieville

I think I've been talking too much about not-yet-published books here -- usually after starting off with "I shouldn't say anything about this book" and then running on at the mouth for a thousand words or so.

I really will be brief this time: Un Lun Dun is Mieville's next book (publishing March 2007 in the US); it's a YA novel, of all things; and it starts a bit slowly but is very enjoyable once it gets going. I really wonder what the reviews are going to be like with this one -- on the one hand, it's very much a Mieville novel, but having been written for the younger audience it's also in many ways not a typical Mieville novel. (Far fewer bodily fluids, for one thing.)

And, y'know, I read it. Mostly on the planes to and from World Fantasy.

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Book-A-Day #112 (11/5): Dropsie Avenue by Will Eisner

The third of the books included in The Contract With God Trilogy is a century-spanning look at Dropsie Avenue (site of the events of the first two books). The story starts in 1870 and runs through what seems to be the present day (1995, when it was published) -- and it's mostly a tale of misery, woe, human nastiness, and unreasoning prejudice.

I didn't think it was quite as successful as the first two books -- it covers a very long time-period, with lots of characters, and the stereotyping is even more obvious here than in the first two books -- but I have to admit I read it very late at night, in spurts in between packing things. So it may not have gotten as much of my attention as it deserved.

It's something like a non-fantastic, North-American, comics version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, if you can imagine that. Except less focused on one family. And with a lot more dialect.

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World Fantasy Award Winners

I posted this at the SFBC Blog yesterday, but there may be folks who don't read both, so...here they are:

• Novel: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
• Novella: Voluntary Committal by Joe Hill
• Short Fiction: "CommComm" by George Saunders
• Anthology: The Fair Folk edited by Marvin Kaye
• Collection: The Keyhole Opera by Bruce Holland Rogers
• Artist: James Jean
• Special Award: Professional: Sean Wallace (for Prime Books)
• Special Award: Non-Professional: David Howe and Stephen Walker (for Telos Books
• Lifetime Achievement: Stephen Fabian
• Lifetime Achievement: John Crowley

As you may recall, I was one of the judges this year, so please leave any questions, rants, statements of pure befuddlement, or requests to know what drugs we were taking as comments...and I'll explain exactly why all of those things were the best f-ing fantasy of 2005.

Book-A-Day #111 (11/4): A Life Force by Will Eisner

This is the second of the three books included in the massive compendium The Contract With God Trilogy, which I read early yesterday morning, because I was sure the day was going to get hectic later (as it did).

This one has twelve related stories, all set in the same tenement as A Contract With God, with recurring characters, also set in the mid-30s (and so is roughly simultaneous with Contract). The stories in Life Force are much darker, though, with a repeated metaphor of a cockroach standing for a life without purpose. This time, we also have Italian gangsters and a WASP (who recently lost his fortune) to go with the usual Jewish cast -- they are individuals, and characterized pretty well, but parts of it felt a little bit like Stereotype Theater. (Especially the Jewish Mother stuff, of which a little goes a very long way.)

It's more ambitious than Contract, and I think more successful -- it all adds up to one over-arching story (in the way people like the Hernandez brothers structure their stories these days), but each individual story also works on its own. And, again, Eisner may seem to lose points because he pioneered styles that others did better later -- but, still, he did do it first.

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Remember, Remember

Today is Guy Fawkes Day, which honestly means nothing to Americans. But some of us do try to remember it because we think it makes us seem cool and "with-it."

So, anyway, today is the day set aside for trying to assassinate royalty. I don't think we have any particularly oppressive kings in the western world right now, but there's probably some third-world "emperor" who could use hoisting on someone else's petard.

If you're feeling less energetic, it would be a good day to read or watch V for Vendetta. Whatever you do, though: don't blame me.

Book-A-Day #110 (11/3): A Contract With God by Will Eisner

As I did at Worldcon, I cheated a bit for this convention -- I brought along an omnibus with several graphic novels originally published separately, on the grounds that each of them really counts as a "book."

(The equivalent book at Worldcon contained the three "Treehorn" books by Florence Parry Heide, illustrated by Edward Gorey.)

I've mentioned a couple of times that I've never read Will Eisner (aside from a short Spirit story here and there over the years), so the recent W.W. Norton omnibus The Contract With God Trilogy was perfect for my purposes: I could keep book-a-day going, and finally read some of Eisner's most famous books. And so, on Friday night before I went to sleep, I read Eisner's most famous single graphic novel (the book that either created that term or made it famous), A Contract With God.

A Contract With God is actually a collection of four medium-length comics stories, all about life in the middle of the Depression and centering on a tenement at 55 Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx. They're all a bit broad, but decent stories, though the kind of Jewishness of most of the characters seems to be straight out of vaudeville (that's the broadness, again -- the names seemed particularly weird to my ear, but they may be authentic, for all I know).

Eisner is good with characters, and I generally like his dialogue (though it does get dialect-heavy now and then, and some of his people are themselves overdramatic). I suspect the reason this originally made such a big splash, though, is because there's a fair bit of sex and nudity (tastefully shown) in the last story, "Cookalein." This was probably the first time a major comics figure had drawn naked breasts for legitimate publication, which possibly helped its acceptance. (I'm not suggesting the comics readers of 1978 were all prurient porn-hounds, but that seeing that comics -- "kid stuff" -- could tell stories about mundane, adult life relatively naturalistically, like a prose novel, must have been thrilling in the late '70s.)

I did enjoy A Contract With God, but I also got that feeling you sometimes get with great progenitors of genres (when you come to them, for the first time, many years later) -- a sense of "is that it?" I won't say that this is of purely historical interest -- it can certainly be read for entertainment, and I suspect readers with a more direct knowledge of Judaism than my own will get more out of it, anyway -- but it has been at least equaled, and I would say surpassed, since it was first published.

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Book-A-Day #109 (11/2): Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt by Nick Hornby

One of my inspirations for this blog was The Polysyllabic Spree, the first collection of Hornby's columns for The Believer magazine -- the column being a record of his reading for a particular month, with lists of books coming in (being bought) and going out (having been read), and his thoughts on those books (subject to The Believer's niceness police). I mentioned this in passing in one of my early posts -- possibly the first of my many lists.

So I was happy and surprised to find this book recently, since I didn't know it had been published and hadn't realized it was time for another collection of those columns.

This book covers February of 2005 through June/July of 2006, and features many, many lists of books, and a similarly generous number of short, review-like bits of writing about those books. I find lists of other people's reading interesting (the more it overlaps my own, the more interesting, I think -- or, at least, the more it overlaps books I know about and have at least a vague interest in), and Hornby is a pleasant, breezy writer, so this was a great book to knock off on the plane before starting my biggish book for work of the trip. (To be named later, once I finish it.)

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Movie Log: The Notorious Bettie Page

The Notorious Bettie Page was the second of the two movies Netflix sent me on Saturday, and I watched it last night. (last night, in this context, means Sunday, October 29 -- ed.)

It's mostly in grainy, faux-old-timey black-and-white, which I found incredibly distracting and a very bad artistic choice. Roger Ebert said something really insightful in his recent review of Marie Antoinette -- that movies about historical figures often portray those people as somehow knowing that they're living in the past, as distancing their stories through a fug of nostalgia, bemusement, and misunderstanding. Bettie Page falls right into that trap; it's clearly a story about "those people back then," and you can't forget that for a second.

The first mistake is the black and white; it's not terribly deep or rich (like the best '30s movies), and the '50s (when the bulk of this movie is set) was not a black and white movie era -- it was the days of Technicolor, of huge widescreen extravaganzas to fight against the incursion of TV (which was black and white).

The second mistake is not having much of a story to tell; this movie is mostly made up of disconnected vignettes (most of which exist to put the fetching and incredibly game Gretchen Mol into a series of re-creations of famous Bettie Page poses) that doesn't really add up to anything. There's a very loose frame story about a late-50s morals investigation that seems to have shut down the Klaws (who the movie presents as Bettie's main source of modeling income), but that disappears for most of the movie. When the movie starts up Bettie's life, it's with a couple of quick scenes about how horrible men were to her -- it's strongly implied she was molested by her father, she's essentially gang-raped, and so on. But the movie doesn't do anything with this material; it's just thrown out (looking old-timey and pseudo-nostalgic, which doesn't help) and then the movie gets on with Bettie's modeling career in New York, which is the core of the movie.

Bettie comes off as a bit of an enigma, and I wonder if the filmmakers had much of an idea of what kind of person she is. The Notorious Bettie Page is a real disappointment; it's more interesting for the titillation factor (Gretchen Mol! Nude!) than for the story the movie tells.

Book-A-Day #108 (11/1): Cross Country by Robert Sullivan

I've mentioned to a couple of people lately that I haven't felt like reading fiction all that much lately -- I think it's a reaction to the concentrated dose of fantasy earlier in the year during my WFA reading -- and that I keep picking up perfectly good novels and saying "I don't want to read about pretend people" and putting them back down. And so I've been reading a number of books like this -- either reportage or less-categorizable narrative nonfiction. (Though I am hoping the World Fantasy Con will jump-start my enthusiasm for fantasy -- especially if I can find a copy of Charlie Stross's The Jennifer Morgue, which should have been published by now, and which I'll probably want to give its publisher real cash money for if I ever manage to see it.)

I came to Cross Country from Sullivan's bestseller Rats, which I read last year and really enjoyed. This one isn't bestseller-bound, I think: it's the story of a cross-country trip with his family (wife, two kids) home from a family wedding, interspersed with various digressions about past similar trips (his own and others) and The American Road in general. It's the kind of thing that could easily become pretentious, but Sullivan has a nice naturalistic voice, and is quite willing to make himself the butt of most of his jokes.

The other notable thing about this book is its subtitle: Fifteen Years and Ninety Thousand Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a Lot of Bad Motels, a Moving Van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, My Wife, My Mother-in-Law, Two Kids, and Enough Coffee to Kill an Elephant. Long, quirky lists within the text of a book often annoy me, but, confined to a subtitle, I love them.

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Quote of the Week

"The future is much like the present, only longer."
- Don Quisenberry

Movie Log: Thank You for Smoking

The wife and I watched this last night ("last night" being Saturday -- ed.); I'd fallen off of the movie-watching horse while playing Lego Star Wars II (as I expected I would), but -- having gotten to 100% complete in the game after about 65 hours of playing -- I'm back now.

Netflix sent us two movies in yesterday's mail; I hope to watch the other one tonight so I can send them both back in one envelope tomorrow morning. (Again, "tonight" refers to Sunday -- ed.)

Anyway, my obsessive tendencies aside, what about Thank You for Smoking? It's a solidly entertaining movie, and a good adaptation of the (very cynical, and very funny) Christopher Buckley novel. Aaron Eckhart's chin-dimple is a bit distracting, but I bet I'd be used to it if I'd ever seen him in a movie before. (For whatever odd reason, I hadn't seen him act before, so every time his face came into close-up I kept thinking that someone had just poked him with a letter opener.)

Eckhart plays a tobacco-industry lobbyist, and the good news is that this is not the story of how he learns to be a better person, and appreciate the birds and the flowers. He doesn't really change the kind of person he is over the course of the movie, which I suppose makes it a failure according to some screenwriter's template. But, using my "was-it-a-good-movie" template, it's very successful. It's cynical and funny, and uses a voiceover intermittently to good effect (something I like to see; it's apparently a hard thing to do well, so I like to see movies attempting it).

There's a bit less going on in the movie than there was in the book, as you'd expect, but I don't recall the book being hugely plotty to begin with; it was just a series of events (more-or-less linked) about this guy, and the movie follows that pattern, with somewhat fewer events to fit into a zippy ninety minutes.

If you're at all cynical about politics, advertising, or the corporate world, you'll probably like this movie. As an added bonus, it features Katie Holmes as a slutty reporter (who, it must be said, appears to be on a work-study program from American University -- she looks way too young for what her character is doing).

Off to World Fantasy

As soon as I post this, I'll be jumping into the car (well, battered minivan, but I call it a car) to drive to scenic Newark Airport for my flight to World Fantasy.

If you'll be there, I hope to see you. If you're not, I probably won't. (My eyes aren't all that great, even with the glasses.)

I do have a company loaner laptop again (like Worldcon), but I'm planning to spend less time in my room pecking away at the little keys than last time, so posts here may be few and short. (Or maybe not; I'm not always that good at doing what I mean to do.)

What I've Been Up To

Vacations are fun while they last, but getting back to work can be a bitch.

Case in point: me trying to catch back up on the SFBC Blog.

I posted eight times there last night, and eight more this morning (and some of those were dog-choking, every-damn-review-I-can-find-and-way-too-many-links posts), and my Bloglines "unread articles" number is still just barely under a thousand.

Luckily, the back half of that list usually goes fast -- and it had better, this time -- I'm off to World Fantasy tomorrow, and hope to spend less time in my hotel room blogging than I did at Worldcon.

Book-A-Day #107 (10/31): The Rejection Collection edited by Matthew Diffee

A collection of cartoons (mostly five apiece) from about thirty New Yorker cartoonists -- but these are all cartoons rejected by The New Yorker. Each cartoonist also filled out a two-page form about him- or herself, which is also entertaining (I didn't know so many cartoonists were afraid of bears).

I laughed out loud more at this book than at any collection of cartoons I can remember, so, by that metric, it's possibly the strongest book of cartoons I've ever seen. (Maybe that's the problem, since I've always suspected New Yorker cartoons aren't meant to make you laugh out loud -- just to give a wry smile, or marvel at the cartoonist's sophistication and wordplay.)

The cartoon on the cover, by the way, is one of the worst ones in the book (for my taste).

The list of cartoonists included is nearly a New Yorker "who's who" -- Roz Chast isn't here, nor is Bruce Eric Kaplan, but pretty much all of the other big names still alive are. All in all, I liked it -- and it was the rare case of a book I didn't know about in advance, but just saw on a shelf, picked it up, and bought it. (I have lists like you wouldn't believe, and I usually know what's going to be published.)

Previously on Book-A-Day:
Chicken With Plums
(My recent massive lists of links to previous Book-A-Day posts has led Blogger to suspect me of being a "spam blog." While I have protested my innocence -- and will continue to do so! -- I also figured that the massive list was probably not all that useful. So I'll trim it down to just linking the previous book, and anyone who cares can follow the trail backwards.)

Edit, 11/2/06 at 10:02 AM EST: I've taken the suggestion of the person below whose name has a character that I can't find on my keyboard, and so here is...
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