Haruki Murakami

pps. somewhere, apparently, written in japanese, is a list of every song/album mentioned in all of his written works. has anyone ever seen that in translated into english? a murakami mixtape would probably be awesome, but going through each novel looking for the music he mentions by name and writing it down is way too much work (i tried)

― messiahwannabe, Monday, November 14, 2011 7:01 AM (3 minutes ago)

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/printable2.php?file=xml/music/classical.xml
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/printable2.php?file=xml/music/jazz.xml
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/printable2.php?file=xml/music/pop.xml

i finally got a(n unsigned) copy of 1q84 so I can finally start reading this.

humanity the internet dunno

cool contad I love those things as well Im glad we have something in common

this might have already been mentioned in some other thread, or even this one, but for those with spotify, some folks have already made playlists with the songs mentioned in various murakami books:

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/spotify-playlists-for-writers-haruki-murakami_b34843

taking a break from 1Q84 at about halfway through to read other stuff for a while, not sure if i'll come back to it or not.

q looks more like a 9 than Q

this book is actually v bad

it's almost as bad as I imagine dan brown or something

One thing that does annoy me is the constant restating of what is currently occuring

yeah that get's annoying. like a weekly serial or something, endless recaps. but no way is it in dan brown territory. i'd put it more with stephen king but w/ aspergers/blank jazz loving protagonists rather than king's hairshirt everymen.
having read all the others but one, i think the translation & editing in this one is pretty flippin shoddy, tho. yesmen proofreaders. still enjoying it 500 pages in.

get's? gets

I finished the first book and a half or so. Really enjoying it - but then, it's the first of his that I have read.

finished the first book last night. it's compelling despite its crepeness, i guess. did he always describe female characters in terms of their breasts? have i only just noticed this?

anyway i started wondering whether he'd read steig larsson; this book and his three seem to have something in common. (and the phrase 'men who hate women' showed up just as i was wondering this, so now i'm convinced of it.) like they're both about resistance to systemic male-on-female violence, but both very much immediately compromised in their form.

(though they weren't available in english until he'd have been well on the way to finishing this. and it seems unlikely he read them in swedish.)

"she scowled immensely" NO NO NO.
intensely maybe. who let this through?
yeh i'm guessing it all hinges on something to do with boobs in the third book.

v well may be the translator's fault but it's pretty relentlessly infuriatingly distracting

5.2%

There seems to be a large Lynch influence on this novel (finished the first 2 books), especially Twin Peaks. *Spoilers?* there's a hint that birds, crows in this case (owls in TP), are agents of someone else. There are doubles, sexual abuse as portals/spiritually charged events, morally ambiguous 'little people' and the idea that the 'forest'/'woods' holds something more primitive and powerful. Okay, actually, looking at that list it isn't that strong, but towards the end of the second book I got a very strong Lynchian vibe.

wow, thanks steve - i've been looking for those lists for ages!

finished the first two books & not really in a major hurry to start the third.
don't think it's a lynch influence ( although i believe hurakami is a fan ) so much as an overlap. there's deeper wellsprings than lynch i don't think he thought of evil or forests or mystery before anyone else. common themes.

this is either getting better or I'm getting used to it still occasionally annoying if not bad like I imagine dan brown then slow and repetitive like a kids' book have been kind of reluctant to pick it up but gonna give it a good go now

8.65%

conrad do you like Japan

Why do hate japan so much?

don't know japan

any good?

Finished! By the way this is fun to read while blasting Janacek in your headphones.

conrad, dunno if you know this but japan is a country

where i am in book two i feel like i enjoy this a lot more. i don't think it's as 'deep' as his best stuff but whatever

idea that came to mind earlier: 'thriller as fugue'

probably not a v good idea

yep knew about the country thing

are you reading this book dayo?

11.36%

conrad, what things do you like about japan

I think that it's a country

conrad, are these kindle percentages or are they like numeric ratings of how you feel about this novel at the moment of posting

conrad, have you ever been to nuneaton?

conrad, do you like percentages

percentages are fine

I've been to derby leicester coventry and birmingham

I don't have a kindle but they represent progress I've only been able to read in odd moments this week

13.19%

current feeling 68.61%

66.7% thro books 1+2. currently feeling it ~ 78%.

my percentage of the whole lot btw

when were you last kicked in the balls?

this managed the neat trick of being overly expository while still leaving you in the dark about a lot of stuff, in the usual style. i liked it a lot tho, firmly in the middle of the pack murakami. i'm looking forward to re-reading it. not any time soon.

what did you think of the ending, if anything

spoilers here of course...

the last part was probably the weakest in general. in terms of where tengo and aomame end up, that was obviously where things were heading and it was drawn out getting there, to no real value. the possible tension just dribbled away: ushikawa was the last wildcard and he left the story so tamely; likewise, the long arm of sakigake proved to be somewhat less long and potent than repeatedly advertized. i don't know about the tiger facing the wrong way thing - if they haven't just gone back to the 'real' world then the idea of her retracing her path to exit loses all meaning.

the real potential twists in the ending of course are the roles of the little people and whatever power the 'voice' represents. it wasn't clear to me what the last appearance of the little people signified. they were making another air chrysalis, but were they anticipating aomame coming to sakigake, or were they planning something with the foreknowledge that she and tengo were going back to 1984? what was the reason for incorporating ushikawa's hair? i prefer to think that i have just missed some nuance than the alternative.

as for the 'voice' and whatever power was directing things, the impression i got was that there was an undercurrent of the old god-beings using humans as chess pieces thing. the taxi driver at the start and the woman in the silver car seem to be significant around this. i like this aspect though, there is a lot to think about, although some more substantial hints would have been appreciated.

part of me thinks that there is a lot more there that i won't really appreciate until i reread, and part of me worries that when i go back through there won't be any layers to peel back.

feel like for the book to be interesting tengo and aomame's happy ending has to be beside the point, and what happens to ushikawa important

feel like we're meant to try and work out to what extent tengo's writing is productive of iq84 as they experience it / we read it

possibly trying to make an 'interesting reading' on a text that doesn't support it, i don't know; i think it might also be possible that we're meant to believe in the power of eyes-meeting-across-a-crowded-room romantic love &/or reincarnation to bridge the most difficult material to a happy ending

finding that ushikawa was the new focus was my favourite aspect of pt iii; anticipating and enjoying the moment he was going to look up and see the two moons

enjoyed that five minutes where everyone was in the same park but everyone failed to notice who they were actually looking for was something it came back to three times

i couldn't make anything much of what logic actually operates w/r/t the little people, the voice, the dohtas & mazas. re the last i think it's interesting that we're given so strongly suggestive names against the background of a plot where every single parent/child bond is broken or ineffective.

i figured the idea was that tengo was writing 1q84 (i.e. the murakami book, in a cute spin on the ghostwriting/authorship theme) but then why was he surprised by everything at the end, in particular the pregnancy? again, i am torn between i didn't get it vs HM didn't really doing anything with it

for ushikawa's entire presence in the book to be anything more than a wanky paul auster tribute, i wanted what happened to him to be important. i can't even begin to come up with even a vague idea of the significance of him and the little people tho.

i got the idea that the dohta/maza thing was representative of a person who is lost or somehow damaged, e.g. before and after trauma. like, fuka-eri as met by tengo was clearly supposed to be a dohta, but she seems to have become that (after being fucked by her dad, reasonably enough), rather than to actually have been split in 2, as there is no suggestion that another eriko was actaully left behind when she fled. and tengo gets the premonition of aomame becoming a dohta but she fights the transition. it is not the tidiest symbolism, and the whole little people business confuses shit even further.

the whole 1q84/cat town world is the state of depression or 'impotence' and dohta is an anthropomorphization of that

ppl in the book actually talk about the idea of another eriko being around somewhere, i think?

mad love for ushikawa

xp yeah that's how it is explained, but i got the impression that the events didn't actually bear it out. there was nothing else in the story to support that part of the explanation. i wouldn't swear i'm right but that was how it seemed to me.

but i got the impression that the events didn't actually bear it out

its definitely stated explicitly that there is another eriko but i thought they have meant in the 'other world', rather than in the one they were in? like many parts of the book he suggested at a lot of interesting things that he never delivered on, i guess

for ushikawa's entire presence in the book to be anything more than a wanky paul auster tribute, i wanted what happened to him to be important.

i think his death was important for the little people? the details are getting foggy but i think that he was an acceptable substitute in some way and they could use his dead body as a gate?

when i was reading this and shortly after i had a whole thing about how this book was just about the 'creative process' that seemed to reconcile all the inconsistencies and difficulties i had w/it but ive kinda lost the thread on that