Modern novels of the first class don't come a reviewer's way every day, but this is undoubtedly one of them.
The story concerns a young man, Hajime. He's a schoolboy in provincial Japan when the novel opens, and his early experiences with girls fill the opening chapters. In elementary school he meets his first love, Shimamoto. She has a bad leg that causes her to limp, and, like Hajime, is an only child. They sit together on the sofa holding hands and listen to Nat King Cole singing "South of the Border."
When the two move to different schools, Hajime embarks on a slightly more physical relationship with a girl called Izumi, and then a wild, secret fling with her cousin. Before long he becomes a practiced and knowing lover.
But after he goes away to college in Tokyo, he falls into a kind of melancholy. He disdains all sexual relationships, and only thinks about Shimamoto, his friend from elementary school.
Eventually he gets married, to another girl with a limp called Yukiko. Her father is a rich industrialist who sets Hajime up as a nightclub-owner. It's in one of these clubs that he runs into Shimamoto again.
Haruki Murakami has the enviable ability to hook just about any reader who picks this book up by giving the impression that it's a sexy and easily digestible story of a young man's erotic adventures. And so, in a way, it is. But the feelings become more complex, though the sex no less intense, as Hajime matures. And the novel quietly moves into its own adulthood, mysterious, problematic, and deeply felt.
By the last few pages, you're immersed in thoughts on life's darkness, and in tears at the sadness and beauty of the story's conclusion.
Two major themes are discernible. The first is that men move from one relationship to another as if they are looking for something they can never find. They find something that is 99 percent perfect, then give it up, with terrible consequences in terms of personal suffering for the person they abandon, in the hope of finding something they have lost in early childhood, and can in reality never recapture.
The implication is that there's some sort of flaw in male sexuality, which leads men to all kinds of devastating depredations, every time to no effect. Hajime, for instance, rediscovers Izume, who he earlier abandoned, only to find her a sterile wraith damaged beyond repair, a grim-faced recluse living alone, of whose face children are terrified.
There's even the hint that Shimamoto might occupy the role of an unwilling but half-malign enchantress. Hajime knows nothing about her adult existence, but she seems to be under the control of dark forces that manipulate her every move. As a result, it's only her as she was as a child that has any reality for Hajime, which of course entirely suits Murakami's purposes.
The second theme, which is related to the first, is that all human effort runs into the sand. As children Hajime and his friends had watched a television documentary about the desert that portrayed life forms destructively competing for existence, and then dying out, leaving only emptiness, the sun, and the wind. The image never leaves him, and it enters the heart of his emotional life. When his marriage is disrupted by the renewal of his acquaintance with Shimamoto, it comes back to haunt him.
From a literary point of view, it is worth noting that these two themes were at the heart of the movement in the arts known as Romanticism -- hopeless love, leading to a sense of nihilism, a feeling that life is bound to be appallingly sad, and is finally pointless. Human beings dream of things that are quite beyond their capacity to achieve.
Despite this final desolation, this is a marvelous book. Its great power comes from Murakami's ability to treat such profound themes in a style that is entirely popular, indeed compulsive.
Some people think that if a critic says a book is a literary masterpiece it's bound to be too difficult for them to understand. Nothing could be less true in this case. This is an intense and moving read, and entirely accessible.
A vital ingredient in the book's success in English is the superb translation of Philip Gabriel. It's modest, self-effacing, and where necessary eloquent. Gabriel knows exactly what kind of writing this novel contains, a combination of the easily colloquial and what is in places almost the philosophical. Yet the feeling you have is that there isn't a word out of place anywhere. Gabriel's skill pervades the whole book.
Consider this. "Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star ... It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything."
When you think of a translator staring at Japanese text and then producing English as utterly relaxed and natural as this, you have to be impressed. Yet shortly afterwards he comes up with the concentrated and poetic phrase "a silence bereft of any resonance."
The edition I read does, however, have a smart but inappropriate cover that suggests some sort of surreal comedy. The truth is that as a tale of overwhelming but hopeless love it's got more in common with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.
Haruki Murakami now lives in the US, and he successfully combines an American feeling with a Japanese one. The early high school chapters feel American, but the later meditation on the ultimate emptiness of existence is intensely Japanese.
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