When Haruki Murakami — Japan’s most successful novelist at home and abroad — was interviewed by the Paris Review in 2004, the questions weren’t always characterised by their pithiness. Many of his novels, the interviewer suggested at one point, are variations on a theme: a man has been abandoned by, or has otherwise lost, the object of his desire, and is drawn by his inability to forget her into a parallel world that seems to offer the possibility of regaining what he has lost, a possibility that life, as he (and the reader) knows it, can never offer. Would you agree with this characterisation?
Murakami’s answer, in full, was “Yes”.
Ten years on, his new novel won’t require him to revise that answer a great deal. One of the variations, though, is that the lost object of Tsukuru Tazaki’s desire is not — or not only — a single woman, but four friends (two girls and two boys) from high school. While he was a teenager, the friendship was all-consumingly close. But when he returned home after his first year at engineering college in Tokyo, the others announced that they never wanted to see or speak to him again.
Not surprisingly, the rejection plunged Tsukuru into the kind of lacerating loneliness and alienation that Murakami’s protagonists regularly suffer.
Now, 16 years later, he has a promising new girlfriend who, realising how comprehensively the experience has derailed his life, encourages him to find his old friends and ask them what on earth happened. By this time, a more important variation on the theme has become clear too: the parallel world into which Tsukuru’s yearning for a disappeared past has plunged him is internal rather than external, consisting largely of a conviction that he’s become hollow as well as colourless.
Admittedly, he is told some strange stories along the way — and does have his fair share of those Murakami dreams that sometimes bleed into waking life. Yet at no stage does he disappear down any rabbit holes, or their equivalent, into anywhere fantastical. Everything he does, and all the places he goes, fall squarely into the category of “realism”, without any need for a qualifying “magic”.
Not that this makes the book any less mysterious and haunting. In theory, its elements — among them, social comedy, metaphysics, superstition, logic, optimism, despair, moments of almost banal semi-insight, others of intractable difficulty — should make for a wild and contradictory mix. In practice, they still do, except of course they’re all recognisable from our own lives — and not just individually, but in their ability to co-exist.
Nor does the result ever seem simply a cunning literary exercise. Murakami regards his characters with a level of compassion that borders on the godlike, producing a moving and heartfelt sense of people essentially trying to do their best. Once Tsukuru’s quest for understanding gets under way, it turns out that his old friends are, for want of a better description, extremely nice. Needless to say, however, that isn’t enough either to protect them or to guarantee they do the right thing.
It’s possible, I suppose, that hard-core Murakami fans might miss some of his more extravagant, full-blown flights into magic realism. Nonetheless, this is a rich and even brilliant piece of work that pulls off the tricky feat of being genuinely resonant and satisfying, while still keeping some of its secrets hanging tantalisingly out of reach. And you could certainly argue that it’s more impressive to create something that feels so mythical out of a lonely and often baffled Tokyo engineer going about his unspectacular daily life than to create it out of a bespoke myth.
By arrangement with the Spectator
