Tag: Japan

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Chronicle and personal epic. A major work by this leading Japanese contemporary writer. 607 pages of an individuals journey in detail, vaguely chronological, as this is a work of imagination, emotion, violence, philosophy and surreal/dream/ghostly journeying through crisis.

Toro Okada is the first person narrator and protagonist. He lives a very normal life in suburban Tokyo, with his wife Kumiko, sister of the powerful and strange Noboru Wataya. They are introduced by her family to Mr Honda deaf psychic and war veteran, in a comic first meeting. Then their cat disappears…

Another disappearance and a festering dislike are the starting points for an increasingly disparate narrative. An abandoned neighbouring house and a young neighbour, May Kasahara, haunt and challenge Toro. His life becomes a lonely search to solve a puzzle which becomes larger and more complex and irrational. His journey becomes unreal.

That’s enough narrative! The reader like Toru becomes surrounded by separate stories which Murakami keeps developing, switching from one to the other, keeping the tension and mystery drawing you on. There is much to take in, a lot of risks are being taken, thankfully the story telling and descriptions are more than equal to it.

I think it would be inadequate to call this book just a mystery, or fantasy. The novel deals with big themes of loneliness, loss and desire, individuality versus conformity. Duality and pairs feature, especially in Matla and Creta Kano and Nutmeg and Cinnamon Alaska. Power and control personal, political and criminal loom. History, in the very powerful memoirs from Japanese involvement in Manchuria, is faced. Big questions about identity, self, others, fate and prediction are explored. Reality versus the power of imagination and the role of unreality and dream are extensively explored. How do our minds work, where do we go in there, how do we get there?

A normal, passive even, main character engages in feats of free thought, fights for an escape from conformity is challenged by the forms of life in his own odyssey. Read this for a roller coaster ride not of fantasy, but of life!

She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai

A short book of 153 pages translated from the Japanese in 2022 by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

The story follows a cast living normal lives in urban Japan. The (excuse me) twist in the tale is the presence of the cats and one dog, who have the lions share of the parts.

The theme is the title times four with four human/cat pairs, beginning with Miyu and Chobi, providing the interrelated stories and contrasts between the individual people, cats and the pairings of each. The melding of human and cat lives and life cycles is clever, aided by a sinuous writing style, in which the mutual incomprehension of animal and human translates via dependency and affection into something else in shared domestic space.

Plot development moves from a sequence of to parallel stories in which the humans make life choices in a micro society determined by the cats territorial geography. The writing reflects a simple style that projects the determinist and uncluttered thinking of the animals. This has interesting results in the view they take of humans and the use of language and communication between the characters. The people, meanwhile, are often pre-occupied and have an emotional need answered by the cats, who they partly know and partly imagine, or suspect.

It is a gentle and considerate story, which does not shy away from issues and challenges, but is essentially on the side of the characters. Not one for those who dismiss talking cats, or talking to cats. Some of the incidents might be the product of imagination, but they are grounded in everyday events happening naturally. This just shows that the book is a well formed creative piece, worth reading.