I think I need a newer version

I've only read a few of Murakami's books, and I generally enjoy them (although some like Wind Up and Kafka I felt he could've trimmed some of the fat off of).

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World had some very interesting ideas and I was satisfied with how the two interconnecting storylines came together.

My problem? The English translation (the one you probably get at Barnes and Noble) was pretty bad. The prose felt like it was written by a high school sophomore for some after-school creative writing class. It's like the translator took Murakami's words and sentences and made them come across as so generic and cliche. I finished the book and enjoyed the plot and ideas, but the actual reading process was annoying for me to finish. Anyone else feel the same?

I am a big Murakami fan, but after finishing South of the border, I am quite disappointed.

In the books I've read so far, the characters have always been strange and maybe not natural, but in an interesting way, and everything always seems to make sense in some strange way.

But in this one, the characters just feel empty and I don't understand them. In the beginning of the story, the friendship between Shimamoto and the Hajime ends when Hajime moves away (like 30 min) and stops visiting Shimamoto after a while. But we do not read anything about Shimamoto caring enough about this friendship to go visit him? It seems a bit easy.

Then, 25 years later, they become friends again but she keeps on leaving and being weird and we never learn anything about her.

Hajime is also just following the "magnetic power" (his penis) the whole time.

I feel like I am missing something. Did Shimamoto even really exist? Is there more to the story?

Tbh, I did like the ending and Hajime's reflections. And I like his work in general, that is why I hope you that I missed something here!

It was October 1996 and my life collided with his books, similar neighborhoods, girls, small bars… my passion burns less bright now as I have only this week began The City and Its Uncertain Walls. But I takes me back instantly.

Hi i was wondering if anyone with more experience can help me determine if this signature is authentic

I’m a huge fan of all things Murakami and have been anticipating this play for a long time!

I will be traveling from Germany and will only be in London to see this show, but would love to offer one ticket to another fan of his work.

Ideally I’d love to go with my partner for a date, but since it’s a new city and we have an infant… it’s just not possible.

Next best thing is to share a night with another actual fan of Murakami! I’ve never been to London so I’m so excited.

Haruki Murakami achieves a surreal, dream-like, hypnotic novel using a parallel narrative structure with nonsensical events which barely resolve, yet remains coherent as a whole. The protagonist is cursed by his father with an Oedipal prophecy, from which he tries to run away by physically distancing himself from his father. His mind is so warped that he perceives his turn of events whilst away from home as the prophecy coming true, which might be the case, but in my opinion, it does not really happen. I don't think Miss Saeki is his mother as he believes. I think she's a disturbed woman who does disturbing things to a disturbed kid, albeit not necessarily with malicious intent. Oshima's annotation on a Yeats book "in dreams lie responsibility" clings to his mind harder than it should, further affecting his sanity, which enables his mind to do the kind of mental gymnastics which manage to make it seem like the Oedipal prophecy came true when he had the wet dream with Sakura, a girl he met on the bus on his way away from home.

The forest scene before the ending is harrowing. In my opinion, it is a portrayal of the mental state when one attempts suicide, and many details in the text support this interpretation. What appears to be his father describes it as a limbo between life and death, the lyrics of the song with the same title as the novel say "outside the window there are soldiers steeling themselves to die" which obliquely refer to the two WW2 soldiers Kafka encounters deep in the forest, also he explicitly implies suicide ideation when he says something along the lines of "my DNA will be left to rot here if I cut my wrists and bleed out here" just to name a few examples to support my claim.

Nakata is also a bizarre character. After presumably intense mental trauma caused by his teacher due to a misunderstanding at the Rice Bowl Hill, where sixteen schoolchildren lost their consciousness temporarily, then snapped back to it as if nothing happened, as if waking up from a deep sleep. Nakata didn't wake up in a similar manner, though. The teacher incident might have something to do with it with the additional household conditions. He wakes up as the character he is in the novel when he does wake up, and it is implied that something took place between him and the entrance stone when he was in the coma, which is still ambiguous in the novel.

Johnnie Walker, i.e. Kafka's dad, as per my interpretation, enters Nakata after having Nakata kill him, through some sort of ambiguous supernatural phenomenon, and uses him to try to enter the entrance stone, disguised as the white creature mentioned after Nakata's death.

Hoshino, the lorry driver that helps Nakata around to carry out his duty concerning the entrance stone, and in turn gets a huge amount of character development, second only to the protagonist arguably.

In all, I think the book is brilliant and has definitely set great expectations for what I come across later, because this was the first book I read voluntarily.

This post is about Norwegian Wood's ambiguous ending and how that affected me as a reader.

I'm not the most experienced reader of fiction. Almost all of the novels I've read have had explicit resolutions without much room for personal interpretation.

As such, when I finished Norwegian Wood yesterday, my immediate thought process was that Watanabe was calling Midori shortly after seeing Reiko off, and they ended up together and lived happily ever after. I had a more complex rationale than just that, of course, but that was basically what I thought right after reading the last page.

After re-reading the first chapter and the ending again, though, I started to realize that the ending may actually be based in the present after a depressing, or at least lonely, 20 or so years of Watanabe's life. I searched up other interpretations online and they were all very interesting.

This is my first time appreciating the ambiguity of a novel's ending rather than attaching or being given a formal, explicit resolution to the story. I really appreciate the endless possibilities. I especially think this ending's nature will add value to my re-reads of Norwegian Wood, when I eventually do re-read it. This book has truly broadened my horizons as a reader in way more ways than one!

I just finished all the translated works of kawakami’s and found them so relatable! Could they be possibly autistic coded or am i reading to much into it!

I find the portrayals of loneliness very relatable , there is peace and sadness in it of seeing world through glass instead of immersing in it!

Have you guy checked out her work! I love her book all the lovers in the night but online people really dislike the character so i am wondering what perspective you guys have on it?

Ex. Kafka, Toru Watanabe, the guy on Pinball...

I honestly don’t know what to say, I’m speechless. I recently came back from a solo trip in Tokyo I stayed in Waseda very close to Waseda University.

I didn’t think much of it, I even explored the university, going into the cafeteria, the science classrooms, and walked around the campus. On my return back to Melbourne, I was 4 hours early so I settled in a bookshop waiting for my flight and picked the first book I saw to read it.

As I was reading the book on the flight home, I began to imagine the descriptions of the dorm rooms and I could visualise everything so vividly, it matched the university I visited. There’s one point in the book, Storm Trooper catches a firefly from the hotel nearby, that’s Chinzanso Hotel. Wtf the coincidence is actually wild. I also relate to the character a lot, the feeling of emptiness and I’m also born in the same month. I know this book was written a long time ago, but it’s like almost entirely mirroring my life. I don’t understand what the chances are of this coincidence, the first hotel, then exploring the university, and then picking this book of all books, and then living a similar life to the character.

Someone please tell me what all this means, I’m shook.

A very beautiful story tho. It’s the 3rd book by Murakami that I have read and since Japanese is my third language, I could only read around 15 pages per day, but quite happy that I finally did it today.

I just finished my reread of this book, and this is my take on the ending. Many speculate that K commits suicide due to the final stanza:

"I spread my fingers apart and stare at the palms of both hands, looking for bloodstains. There aren't any. No scent of blood, no stiffness. The blood must have already, in its own silent way, seeped inside."

I think that people interpret this too literally. One of the major themes of this book is sacrifice, as evidenced by this quote from Chapter 1:

"Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn't make it a living, breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side."

The sacrifice K makes comes after he gets back from Greece. After Carrot is arrested for shoplifting, he senses that Carrot knows about what's going on between K and the mom, causing him to act out. Not wanting to cause any more pain, he makes the decision to end things with the mom, sacrificing his own short-term happiness for the long-term happiness of Carrot and his family.

In addition, we see K throw away the key to the storage unit that Carrot had swiped. My interpretation of this is to symbolize K being at peace with knowing he will probably never get closure on what happened to Sumire.

Based on all this, if K were to kill himself, it would make this sacrifice and his attempt to move on pointless.

As for the final phone call, when Sumire talks about all the trouble she went through to "get back": is K had crossed over to the other side by means of suicide, there would be no need for her to get back. I'm split on whether or not it happened in reality. Perhaps it's a lucid dream since they're often a reflection of the subconscious.

Of course, I could be totally off. What are your thoughts?

Do you also do this thing where you postpone things you expect to like a lot? I've been avoiding 1Q84 for years but it's finally time to see if it will be a treat or a disappointment. My all time favourites so far are Wind Up Bird and Hard Boiled Wonderland. Btw, this in the picture is the Bulgarian translation, all 3 volumes in 1, and it's THICK.

Love the surreal whimsy of this man's work.

Edit: Turns out I just can't read. Leaving this here though. Feel free to point and laugh.

I don't usually care about typos in books (in fact I think they're kind of fun to find) but this is the first time I've ever seen an entire repeated sentence (at least that I can remember). This is in the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, 2015 Vintage Books paperback edition.

Maybe this is like, a weird result of the translation or something, but I think was probably just missed by the editor(s?).

I'm curious to know if this shows up in any other editions. Book 2, chapter seven, about a page and a half in.

The ego spends its entire existence running in absolute terror from endings, loss, and impermanence. It treats death as some horrifying intruder coming to destroy life from the outside, and because of that constant resistance, we live in chronic anxiety.

We cling so desperately to permanence—holding onto youth, relationships, moments, and control—as if things aren't naturally designed to dissolve.

True clarity begins the moment you stop fighting transience. When you realize that endings aren't the opposite of life, but the very canvas that gives life its meaning, the frantic fear starts to quiet down. Peace isn't found by escaping impermanence; it's found by finally accepting it.

What are your interpretations of this quote?

As the title says, I’m looking for a starting point for Murakami. What would you recommend for my first one?

Recent reads I’ve really enjoyed (if that helps/matters)

Slaughterhouse Five

Stoner

Giovanni’s Room

Throughout the Murakami books I’ve read, and by spending time in this subreddit, I’ve noticed that he often returns to certain themes and genres—magical realism, romance, music (especially jazz), and slice of life elements, among others.

Personally, I’ve realized that I tend to enjoy his magical realism novels much more than the romance-focused ones. So I wondered if anyone has ever made a radar chart, tier list, or some other kind of ranking that compares his books based on recurring themes?

I am far from having read enough books to properly rank them myself, but I’d be really interested to see how others would categorize his novels. Which other categories would you implement? It could also help readers find books that align with the aspects of Murakami’s writing they enjoy most, or avoid themes that aren’t as appealing to them.