What Makes Haruki Murakami Special

I recently stated reading, intermittently, Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, mainly based on an article I read in The Writer's Chronicle about narrative paralellism and how the idea of two intersecting novels, one of which serves as an allegory for the workings of the other's protagonist's brain, sounded totally awesome. And I'm enjoying it so far.

I read Murakami's Kafka on the Shore very shortly after it came out, in one blast over a few summer days, spending hours in bed engrossed in it. And, when I've tried to explain why I love his works, it's difficult. It's not like Faulkner, where I can point to his intricate eloquence and complex moral subjects, or Vollmann, where I can point to his...intricate eloquence and complex moral subjects (I have a type, I know. I also like Dostoevsky). There's a charming simplicity to Murakami's langage (I assume, at least, having only read translations), but not a noticeable simplicity, a la Cormac McCarthy or Hemmingway. Murakami writes as though he does not think about writing, having only a story to lay out and ome interesting ideas, not all of which need to connect or make sense. He writes as though writing is a simple pleasure rather than a passion, but with a skill, tightness, and sense of construction that can only come from years of refinement.

Linguistically, in fact, his closest cousin seems to be the ever-wonderful Philip K. Dick, who is also the first writer whose work ever excited me on a literary level. Dick never concerned himself too much with the beauties of language, in part because Dick never considered himself more than a pulp writer. But the sparsity of Dick's prose has a complexity all of its own, freeing the ideas of the work to stand as the driving force, allowing the language to drape over them effortlessly so that the story moves at the pace it decides. And, like with Dick, this straightforwardness removes the illusion of a filter, making you feel, not like an audience, but like a guest in someone else's world. Good in both cases, because Dick was a schizophrenic and Murakami, divorced though he may be from the traditional demographic, impedes heavily into the territoy of magical realism; a plot involving Colonel Sanders as a Shinto pimp, an unidentified giant white slug, Johnny Walker killing cats to make a flute from their souls, a double-Oedipal curse, and Beethoven is hard enough to connect in outline form.

But what sets Murakami apart from the writers above, and from many of the modern Japanese canon (the genius, but perpetually dour Kenzuburo Oe comes to mind, as does the doomed fascist Mishima) is his incredible sense of whimsy and fun. Kafka is a charming novel, it that few of its riddles have solutions and never pretends to offer up a definite, great truth. It suggests at them-- the characters' conversations about Eichmann, Haydn, and eel all stand as wonderful examinations of ideas-- but it's a book whose rambling, tangled story and symbols are more fun than profound. I think that the village towards the end of the book represents a partial afterlife where the permanently damaged parts of people go to die, I think that recovery and redemption are major plot points, but, unlike Faulkner, I don't have to know. Murakami is a writer who, like Vonnegut, manages to be incredibly affecting and stirring without the need for grandiosity, whose works are both incredibly smart and incredibly fun. He creates worlds that obey their own logic, and it is clear that, while there are rules and laws, we will never know all of them. And, as a tourist in his world, maybe we'll have more fun if we don't.

Read: Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning