Norwegian wood kindle6/12/2023 ![]() These fellows are neutral, unassuming nonjudgmental but also relatively non-self-critical observers. Like the rest of Murakami’s heroes he reminds me of the narrator in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and of Nick Caraway in The Great Gatsby. … Just an ordinary guy – ordinary family, ordinary education, ordinary face, ordinary grades, ordinary thoughts in my head.ĭull? No, “ordinary” looks to me who spends quite a bit of time looking up to and admiring ordinary people as someone potentially to be admired. Here Taru Watanabe is our off-the-rack Murakami young man who is happy to present himself to a girlfriend as: The male protagonists in the fiction I’ve read by this author so far are quite similar. I’d be very interested to examine this one in Japanese, but have to settle with no quarrel for its accessible colloquial English translation. ![]() ![]() I always find this author charming even though somehow he’s a bit simplistic and formulaic, and remember my favourite of his, the book of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. ![]() The main characters in the story are mostly in university, but considered in retrospect. This Murakami romance set in Tokyo has a dark side full of death, evil, and nostalgic regret, and I read it while I was in Japan on a holiday that to be honest was not completely satisfying. ![]()
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