The Disgusting Disaster of Murakami

or, you can never go back

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I was an adult in love with a country I’d never been to when first I opened The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami. I remember working fulltime on a campus where most people’s parents paid them more money than I still make in a year to just be a student and student around while I slipped pages of Murakami in between making burgers or wraps or swiping their student IDs that worked like credit cards that their parents had dumped money into. I could see the balance on their accounts. I saw all the money floating in there for them to spend on deep fried monstrosities or almost healthy sandwiches covered in chipotle mayo or gas station quality sushi marked suspiciously FRESH that the foreign exchange students and I made for them while we stole bread and meat and vegetables from the back, pretending that our boss didn’t know what we were doing.

I can still feel my own skin peeled back from my flesh while Lieutenant Mamiya watched while I sat on a dirty public toilet, waiting out the clock on my shift. I stank of oil and meat and condiments, which is more or less identical to reeking of someone else’s vomit, but it was the arid steppes that filled my nostrils and led me to die in a deep well before being dragged out, alive, blinded by light, somehow ashamed of what I’d witnessed Mamiya witnessing, my own flayed flesh.

I loved Murakami. I dove into After Dark, but found it slightly off or empty, and so I picked up Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which delighted me, brought me far away, to an ethereal Deathly place where I held skulls and remembered their memories. Then onto Kafka on the Shore where even cats couldn’t keep me from being slightly disappointed in the whole endeavor. I trusted, though, and, eventually, over halfway into the novel, that trust paid off as the world slid round and reality bent around the words and me. I sat in my sister’s bed at my parents’ house, depressed and lonely, shattered by whatever feelings and thoughts so mercilessly and casually destroy nineteen year olds who believed their life would be more than completing orders for tomorrow’s CEOs.

I believed in Murakami’s words, his stories, the worlds he created out of a Japan that was both familiar and completely other to my own experiences. Driving to the Korean embassy, I stopped at a library somewhere in northern Illinois to read Norwegian Wood and cry because of those final few pages where I chased my own ghosts and named them Naoko, if only for a day.

1Q84 was the first book I ever pre-ordered. Ten years later and I still haven’t opened it. This was a book I had been looking forward to. A book that seemed like a significant literary event, but I had stumbled across a Joshua Cohen review of a book I’d never heard of by a Hungarian author I’d never heard of and, instead of reading the newest book by one of my favorite authors, I picked up this gargantuan novel Cohen described as an unfinished cathedral and found new depths and heights to love. But this isn’t about Peter Nadas’ Parallel Stories, though maybe it should be.

A few years ago, after spending so many years defending Murakami from criticism, after so many years of considering him one of the greatest novelists alive, I decided to finally read all of his books and reread the ones I had read again. It seemed simple enough. Enjoyable enough. The previous year, I had made Louise Erdrich one of my reading projects, consuming ten of her novels over the course of a few months. The year before that was Kazuo Ishiguro. Knowing that I loved Murakami but had not read him in nearly a decade, I thought it’d be the perfect reading project for a year that welcomed my first child, a year before anyone had ever considered uttering a portmanteau like PLANDEMIC.

Reading Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 was a bit jarring but not unexpected. They were, after all, the first novels he’d written. By his own admission, he’d never considered being a novelist before then and so I thought of them more as my own early attempts at novel writing and gave him the benefit of the doubt. Yes, they were a bit boring and stank of masculine wish fulfillment, but these were written a long time ago. Not great but also not terrible. Something really only of interest to the hardcore Murakami fans, which I was, yeah?

But reading A Wild Sheep Chase really struck me with its horniness. The first two had been a bit horny, but not this bad, yeah? It wasn’t something I remembered from his later, more well-regarded novels. I mean, sex, sure, but not this constant objectification of young women by the most boring man in the world. Like, this was uniquely bad, yes? Not at all indicative of his writing more broadly. I mean, I had defended him, for years, of these kinds of charges. I defended him when people said his books were all the same, because they weren’t, right? These first three—I mean, it’s the same narrator. Of course they feel similar!

I pushed on, knowing Hard-Boiled Wonderland was next and that was my favorite of his books. It would be the point where he transformed from this mediocre pervert into a world class novelist.

Fortunately, or disastrously, the book mostly held up for me. I mean, the horniness was there, more obvious now that I’d been inundated with it for three novels in a row, but it was a slight thing here. More of an accent than anything else. A peculiarity of the narrator, no doubt. Because when the novel began to twist, the way I knew it would, the twisting worked for me. I loved it, even if the noirish storyline felt much weaker this time. But the End of the World—it still haunted me. Haunted me again. It filled me with nostalgia for the person I’d been a decade before when I first encountered those skulls, that dark End of the World, and the person I was now. Even so, the book fell a bit in my estimation. It wasn’t a favorite any longer. Still quite good, but not as bright and bold as I remembered.

For that reason, I decided to skip Norwegian Wood on my Murakami journey. I’d loved it once, yes, but it always seemed like a distinct and separate novel. It lacked the surreal boldness, the twisting reality of his other novels.

Dear Reader, this is when I came to Dance Dance Dance and South of the Border, West of the Sun.

Struggling through the first three Murakami novels hadn’t been so bad, knowing Hard-Boiled waited for me. Its quality—though less than I remembered—had energized me. Murakami’s career was on the upswing here. I was just a few books out from Wind-Up Bird and Kafka on the Shore, which were surely his masterpieces. Dance Dance Dance and South of the Border, West of the Sun may only be minor works, in comparison, but we were on that incline. We were out of the amateur perversions of a young male writer. We were onto the good stuff!

While the horniness in his first three novels grew monotonous, the sexualization of a thirteen year old in Dance Dance Dance felt almost obnoxiously perverse. Like Murakami was the type of person, who, when someone complained about a misogynistic joke, doubled down by becoming aggressively misogynistic. I loathed this narrator. Before, I found him mostly grating and boring, but here he became unbearable. There were many times I nearly gave up, determined to never read Murakami again.

But then I remembered all those days of my misspent youth, being broke and lonely, where Murakami delighted me, showed me new worlds, new ways reality could bend, and so I pushed my way through, hoping, desperately, for South of the Border, West of the Sun to shine upon me the way Kafka on the Shore once shone.

If you’ve never read South of the Border, West of the Sun consider yourself among the blessed. It’s not only the worst novel I read that year, but it may be one of the worst novels I’ve ever read, and I had looked forward to it! It felt almost cruel, to read books by a writer I admired that were so aggressively bad. Again, the intense horniness of the novel assaulted me as the narrator walked us through every time he’d ever had sex in his life. It reminded me of the worst aspects of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and in the worst ways. At least Lawrence had the good graces to write well! But Murakami—I don’t even know what to say about this novel. A man without love who hated every woman he ever interacted with ends up where he started. I mean, that’s not how the publisher describes it or even any review I’ve ever read, but I think it’s an accurate appraisal of the novel.

It was a frightening experience, the way the novel sort of just faded to black. It was an effect I remember fondly from the first time I’d read his novels. Murakami used ambiguity in ways that punched me in the heart. The only other novel I’d encountered that worked the same was The Magus by John Fowles. It’s an astoundingly powerful experience, but Murakami had a habit of accomplishing it in all of the novels I had loved so long ago.

But coming to the end of South of the Border, West of the Sun I wondered if they were actually all as empty as this. If that fading to black quality was cowardice rather than bravery. Leaving the shattered remnants of life in the hands of the reader once felt powerful, but where I stood, now, felt empty. As if I had deluded myself, creating the beauty myself and attributing it to Murakami because he created the desert for me to manufacture mirages of meaning.

Rereading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles on the heels of all his other novels demonstrated that one can never go back. You will never recover the person you once were, or even the person you once dreamt you were. Your twenties are gone, long past, and you are now you, grasping after the ghosts of your own self, the one you fabricated on heartache and hope, with shaking hands and trembling lips and blurred vision. Every body you threw yourself into, confusing bareskin for open hearts, every word you whispered to temporary lovers, to beguiled dreamers, every hand you held while traversing mountains of joy and sunshined valleys of love belongs to the past, no matter how you try to resurrect it, create it anew.

The Murakami I believed in was gone. Instead, I was left with this sprawling mess of a novel with scenes so devastatingly captivating but surrounded by so much banal middle aged musings about power and life. Then, of course, there’s the obligatory young sexualized woman. For every well I climbed into only to find immense beauty and hallucinatory wonder, there were pages and turgid pages of idle chatter.

Sputnik Sweetheart was next and even though it was only a few years ago, I honestly can’t remember a single thing about it.

I remember, once, in college, drinking until I don’t remember with friends and possible lovers, only to find myself conscious sometime later dressed in my work uniform, wearing my nametag, making sandwiches in a sort of assembly line. I had two jobs then, both of them making food for people with money to buy food. When I came into consciousness that morning, I remember looking to my left, then to my right, staring at the faces assembling sandwiches beside me, wondering how I got there, wondering if it was obvious how blasted out of my skull I still was. In many ways, this was how returning to Murakami felt. Living recklessly and gloriously on his words, on the promise they held for me, only to collapse into a void and be spit out as a different desiccated person.

Kafka on the Shore almost redeemed Murakami for me, even if it includes the stupidest and flimsiest critique of feminism ever put to print. After reading eight Murakami novels in a row, the many weaknesses of his writing were too apparent, too fresh in my mind. The way his characters spoke like aliens trapped in human bodies on a planet so similar to earth. In Kafka on the Shore and Hard-Boiled Wonderland, reality is bent and blurred enough for this oddness to work, but I was still struck by how I felt as if I was reading a book written by someone who had never actually spoken to a living human. Even with all that, though, I found joy in the novel. Not the joy or hope or beauty I once felt, but there was a comfort to finding, after so much loss and stupidity, that this one novel still held some of the light I once felt shining on me.

And then finding After Dark, which was once my least favorite of his novels, proved to be a tight, simple delight. Rather than sprawl away in a dozen directions, After Dark focuses and moves quickly. It refreshed me, gave me hope.

But here I am, still staring at 1Q84, refusing to open it, but with a thousand different reasons than whatever my initial hesitancy was a decade ago.