M Train - Patti Smith (2015)

M Train is Patti Smith's follow-up to Just Kids and I misunderstood it to be a kind of sequel or continuation of that critically-acclaimed volume.  I understood M Train to be about Patti Smith's life in the late 70's through the mid 90's, or at least focusing on that period.  I do not know why I labored under this delusion, and it had to be from some kind of misinformation in a review I read about a year ago or whenever it was released (not quite--October of 2015, ironically close to the release of our previous review).  Certainly one wouldn't get that impression from reading the inside jacket.

So it goes without saying that this is not the book I expected it to be, but I would have read it regardless.  And while I personally cannot rate it as highly as Just Kids, it is very close.  It's a loose, experimental book, and it mostly works.  Some moments are as brilliant and heartbreaking as anything that came before, and at other moments, there's just a lot of coffee.

M Train is about many things, but there are several major themes, and chief amongst them has to be coffee.  The #1 topic of this book is coffee.  All Patti Smith does is drink coffee. She is like Balzac, though I believe her reflection on that literary subject and his caffeine addiction is in Just Kids.  Much of the book consists of Smith waking up and crossing the street to Cafe Ino which is somewhere near 6th Ave and Bedford Ave. in the Village.  (Note: Smith also recalls getting falafel at Mamoun's the night before Hurricane Sandy struck.)  She sits at the same corner table and orders brown toast and olive oil and drinks coffee and writes in her notepad, or on napkins.  She develops a possessiveness about the table that is humorous.  One scene where she confronts another woman trying to take it from her is pretty hilarious:

"The cafe was empty, but the cook was unscrewing the outlet plate above my seat.  I took my book into the bathroom and read while he finished.  When I emerged, the cook was gone and a woman was ready to sit in my seat.
-Excuse me, this is my table.
-Did you reserve it?
-Well, no, but it's my table.
-Did you actually sit here?  There's nothing on the table and you have your coat on.
I stood there mutely.  If this were an episode of Midsomer Murders she would surely be found strangled in a wild ravine behind an abandoned vicarage.  I shrugged and sat at another table, hoping to wait her out.  She spoke loudly, asking for eggs Benedict and iced coffee with skim milk, neither offered on the menu.
She'll leave, I thought.  But she didn't.  She plopped her oversized red lizard bag on my table and made numerous calls on her cell phone.  There was no way to escape her odious conversation, fixed on a tracking number for some missing FedEx package.  I sat and stared at the heavy white coffee mug.  If this were an episode of Luther, she would be found faceup in the snow with objects from her purse arranged about her: a bodily corona like Our Lady of Guadalupe." (74-75)

For a second I thought Smith was being a little too crazy, but then I realized that she must have a different sort of life.  I'm not saying she deserves to be entitled, but she deserves to feel entitled with everything she has done over the past forty years.  If you don't know who she is, and you don't give her the deference she should command, you kind of deserve it.

The book is not a memoir of 1978 - 2015, but more like a series of snapshots in a life, roughly centered around the 2012-2013 year in Greenwich Village and Far Rockaway.

There are several dream sequences in this book--a certain "cowpoke" bedevils Smith throughout the book--and some of them are heartbreaking and beautiful:

[Smith describes dreaming of a winding path up a mountain with a guide who then abandons her in a very steep open area and then is suddenly safe on the ground approached by a youth and told that they called to Fred, then seeing two men who give her tea and feed her cake and tell her they intervened and called to Fred and he carried her there, but there was the matter of a fee, one hundred thousand dirhams]
"I reached into my pocket and it was filled with money, exactly what he asked for, but the scene had shifted.  I was alone on a stony path surrounded by chalky hills.  I paused to reflect on what had happened.  Fred had rescued me in a dream.  And then suddenly I was back on the highway and I saw him in the distance trailing after the wheel with the face of a clock with no hands.
-Get it, Fred! I cried.
And the wheel collided with a massive cornucopia of lost things.  It fell on its side, and Fred knelt and placed his hand on it.  He flashed a huge smile, one of absolute joy, from a place with no beginning or end." (244-245)

Fred of course is her late husband and the book opens up with a description of their trip to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, "a border town in northwest French Guiana, on the North Atlantic coast of South America," the site of a former French penal colony, where hardcore criminals would be kept before going onto Devil's Island.  Jean Genet had supposedly wanted to go there (to ascend the ladder of criminality), and he was about 70 at the time, and Patti wanted to bring back some stones from the jail to give him, with William S. Burroughs promising to help deliver the stones to him.  This is easily one of the best parts of the book.  It reads like an adventure thriller.  A movie could probably be made about it.

The ending finds Smith at Genet's grave in a town outside Tangier in the late 90's, on assignment interviewing Paul Bowles, taking a side trip to deliver the stones she never got to him in person.  It's a beautiful opening and closing motif.

From here the book goes to Cafe Ino, already described above, and she fantasizes for a moment about opening up a cafe in New York, even going so far as to procure a space with a down payment, before Fred "Sonic" Smith asks her to marry him and move to Detroit with him.  She laid out her inspiration, and I was pleasantly surprised to find an establishment just a few blocks from my present abode:

"An unwinding spool of obscure angles, a glass of tea, an opened journal, and a round metal table balanced with an empty matchbook.  Cafes.  Le Rouquet in Paris, Cafe Josephinum in Vienna, Bluebird Coffeeshop in Amsterdam, Ice Cafe in Sydney, Cafe Aqui in Tucson, Wow Cafe at Point Loma, Caffe Trieste in North Beach, Caffe del Professore in Naples, Cafe Uroxen in Uppsala, Lula Cafe in Logan Square, Lion Cafe in Shibuya, and Cafe Zoo in the Berlin train station.

So Patti must have come back fairly recently to her place of birth.  Actually, she was here just a few days ago, hosting an event at the Old Town School of Folk Music with her family.  It was $25 and I thought it was too much, but really I should have looked more closely into it because I thought it was just a speaking gig.

From there she remarks upon Zak, the owner of Cafe Ino, telling her to visit him at the new coffee shop he's opening near Rockaway Beach, which opens up the whole narrative about her finding a little bungalow that she falls in love with there and ends up buying after touring and making a bunch of money over the summer of 2012.  Then, Hurricane Sandy hits.  This is another great part of the book, because its a narrative of one of the quintessential New York disasters of late.  Like the way City on Fire depicts the blackout in 1977, Smith depicts Hurricane Sandy memorably and accurately.

Smith also writes about her membership in the CDC--the Continental Drift Club, which celebrates the life of Alfred Wegener, who pioneered the idea.  I would imagine that most people would think this is another hilarious facet to her.  But she meets Bobby Fischer on a trip to Iceland with the CDC, and that is another classic scene.

She also writes about a trip to Mexico to see the coffee capital Vereacruz, followed by an engagement to photograph Frida Kahlo's home and belongings in Casa Azul.  This was the only part of the narrative that baffled me--did Smith really fly home in between the two trips?  Because it seems like she was pretty much in the same area.  She flies into Mexico City, buys a round trip train ticket to Veracruz, checks into Casa Azul, finds it closed, goes to Veracruz, has adventures there.  Then, it cuts to her packing in New York and flying out to Mexico again.  Maybe she has to go to Casa Azul twice?  I digress...

One of her favorite authors over the course of the book is Haruki Murakami.  She writes of first discovering him in St. Mark's Bookshop and reading a few books but then getting bowled over by The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  And she becomes obsessed with this image of a well on an abandoned property in Japan.

Smith later does go to Japan, and visit several graves of artists she admires,  I think I've done a pretty good job of spoiling almost every little thing this book is about, but it won't matter (oh right--also detective shows, especially The Killing) because the pleasure of it lies in Smith's voice on the page and the poetic flourishes she sometimes employs.

While there is so much to admire in this book, its reach is more limited than her previous volume (she would not sell a Showtime series based upon it).  It is much more of a "journal" type book.  It's labeled as a biography, which just seems blatantly wrong.  It actually says "biography" on the back near the bar code.  In any case it's beautiful writing, but it sometimes dissolves into basically what amounts to a diary.  I never wrote this well in a diary or journal so there's a difference.

Some sequences in the book are better than others, and it tends to ebb and flow with momentum.  I'm not sure what Smith expects us to think about her life, but basically, she is human.  Her talk of detective shows makes her seem like less of an otherworldly artist who would shun television.  She even writes what amounts to fan fiction at one point.

Fans of Smith will love this, and those still unacquainted probably will too.  And others may not get it, or find parts boring, but on the whole this will likely be a pleasurable and educational experience for most.  It seems like a good book to read while you're traveling to an exotic city.  Or holed up in a storm.      
   

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami (2014)

          

          My husband Dickson belongs to a book club, and last week we hosted his group’s bi-monthly meeting, when six or eight or sometimes ten literary men gather to drink beer, discuss books and eat whatever snacks the host has kindly provided. For this meeting they had read, at my suggestion, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, because the club is mostly made up of runners and Rabbit Angstrom’s story has a decidedly athletic feel. Even though I didn’t attend the meeting (it’s a boys’ club, so I stayed upstairs), when I came down after they were done, the conversation had turned to the newest Murakami – a far cry from Rabbit and his troubled relationship with Janice – and the excitement many club members had about reading his new work.

            I had already finished Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage three days after I bought the book, and the members of Dickson’s club asked me what I thought. Was it as much of a slog as 1Q84? Was it as otherworldly as A Wild Sheep Chase or Kafka on the Shore? Or was it quieter, like Norwegian Wood, or Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running? I wasn’t entirely sure how to answer. So much of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is like much of Murakami’s other writing, thick with descriptions of simple meals and lonely men and strange, often very strange, sex – yet other parts of it also felt fresh and new. In sum, it was a decent new book from a man who has perfected his own subtle style. Colorless won’t make anyone turn away from Murakami, even if they’ve never read him before, and it’s engaging enough for his diehard fans. I don’t consider the three days I read it misspent.

As we sat in my living room discussing Murakami, we realized that, between us, we had read almost all of his work, and there were things we could all recite as commonalities between his books. In an interview from 2011, Murakami told a Spanish audience that he was a lonely child, and the three things that filled his quiet hours were “cats, books and music.” You can see the vapor trails of each of these things in the work Murakami has since produced, as each is filled with those reoccurring themes playing distinct roles in his characters’ lives.

In this sense, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is no different. There are mentions of cats and their tiny, silent feet, and music, particularly the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s piano solo “Le mal du pays.” Books, whether the characters are active readers or not, also merit mention time and time again, whether in descriptions of people’s bookshelves or as ways to pass the time. And, as usual, there are descriptions of the other things that constantly fill Murakami’s world: of simple meals stirfried with whatever is in the fridge, of physical deformities (six fingers on each hand, like in Wind Up Bird), and of physical activity, this time spent in the pool. There are the now-customary discussions of sexual proclivities that border on the phantasmagoric, but are always told in Murakami’s simple, matter-of-fact voice. And, like Tengo in 1Q84, Tsukuru’s sexual dreams merge frighteningly into reality, blurring the lines (and the effects) between what happens in bed, awake or asleep.

It is, like much of his work, the story of a single man, one searching for something he doesn’t understand, and who may find love or may screw it up. (My bet is usually that he’ll screw it up.) But Tsukuru Tazaki is more lonely than most, and that’s what makes Colorless a remarkable book.

Tsukuru Tazaki lives alone in Tokyo, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, but you’d hardly know it from Murakami’s descriptions of the place. Except for the train stations where Tsukuru spends most of his time (he’s an engineer working to make stations more streamlined and accessible), Tsukuru rarely participates in social life and other people rarely infiltrate his world.

Tsukuru seems to prefer it that way. Save for a friend named Haida and a slowly-blossoming romance with a woman named Sara (who may or may not also be dating an older, mustachioed gentleman), Tsukuru lives, sleeps, eats and exercises alone. And, alone, his life is no big party either. He spent the bulk of his time in college contemplating death, not eating, barely drinking, attending classes to pass the time. Now, at age 36, he’s thin and stark. He eats like a bird and never finishes an entire beer. He knows what he is but can’t seem to change it: the man is boring even to himself.

What could have caused such a sad, desolate life? Herein lies this book’s charm: no one becomes a Tsukuru Tazaki unless something truly traumatic has happened, and Tsukuru’s trauma is dramatic indeed. After his first year of college in Tokyo, Tsukuru is abandoned by his high school friends, all four of whom remained in Tsukuru’s hometown Nagoya after graduation. This group, which had originally numbered five, was once so close they saw themselves as fingers on a single hand. So it came as an abrupt shock when they summarily dismissed Tsukuru with a single phone call, telling him that they never wanted to see or hear from him again, with no explanation as to how or why. And Tsukuru being Tsukuru, he didn’t feel the need to ask.

The title’s reference to Tsukuru being “colorless” comes from the nicknames of these four friends. The two men in the group were nicknamed Red and Blue (or Aka and Ao in Japanese), while the two women were nicknamed White and Black (Shiro and Kuro), with all of the colors culled from their family names. Tsukuru, whose name is a homophone for the Japanese word meaning “to build or make,” has no color; he is colorless, though his engineering degree makes a kind of onomastic sense.

The “pilgrimage” of the title is also apt, since Tsukuru goes on one of these as well. It’s Sara who pushes Tsukuru to contact his old friends (would a guy like Tsukuru ever do that on his own?) when she realizes that there’s something stuck in him that cannot be undone until Tsukuru has learned why he was dismissed. So on this pilgrimage he goes, first back to Nagoya, and then on, surprisingly, to Finland. He contacts each of his old friends in turn to learn why and how, years ago, they could so quickly and completely abandon one of their own.

I won’t reveal the outcomes of Tsukuru’s pilgrimage since that would defeat the purpose of reading Murakami’s book, but I will suggest that, as Murakami ages, we see him treading on familiar ground while, at the same time, invoking something relatively new. Reading Colorless will feel familiar, like reading Wind Up Bird or 1Q84 or Kafka or Norwegian Wood. But parts of it will also feel thrillingly unique, fresh in the increasing span of his decades-long oeuvre. For example, Murakami has never written so movingly about friendship, especially since so many of his protagonists are often alone, and, despite her possible ongoing affair with another man, Sara is one of Murakami’s most competent and least-batshit-crazy female characters yet. It would be lovely to see more of this real emotion explored, especially for the women who are still a minority in Murakami’s world.

But Colorless may also be a sign of the times, or at least a sign of Murakami’s ever-increasing age (he turned 65 earlier this year). In Running, Murakami described the “wells” in his mind, and how a new one must be tapped for each book to emerge. He feared, in his 2008 memoir, that his reserves would eventually run dry, and that at some desperate point the drilling would cease and his career as a writer would dry up as well. The good news is that this clearly hasn’t happened yet. The bad news, however, is that many of the same wells are being used, often at the expense of his writing anything completely exciting or new.

Like Kurt Vonnegut (blessings upon his name), Murakami is getting repetitive with age. (Did A Man Without a Country contain anything we hadn’t read before?) The direct lines between Murakami’s life and fiction are clearer now than they used to be, and themes forming between books (cats, books, music, sex, stir fry, physical deformities, dreams-with-real-consequences, men stuck in wells) are getting easier to track. Aomame, the assassin-protagonist of 1Q84, is clearly based off of Murakami’s own physical therapist, whom he described at length in Running. (A tiny woman who stretches stiff gym-going men? Who uses surprising levels of force to bend and pull stubborn muscles into submission? Who toils and works until both the masseuse and the massaged are drenched in sweat from exertion? Wait a second, we’ve seen this before!) We can see Running’s real gym masseuse in Tokyo transform into Aomame in 1Q84 in the same way we can see a woman with six fingers pop up in Wind-Up Bird and again in Colorless, or in the same way Tengo’s orgasm with Fuka-Eri in 1Q84 results in Aomame getting pregnant while Tsukuru’s dream of sex with Shiro may have resulted in something strangely tragic happening to her in real life (it’s a spoiler alert if I say what this is). In Murakami’s world, the same weird story often gets told, but each time it’s revealed in a markedly different way.

Like the bulk of his characters, Murakami feels most comfortable when treading regular ground, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like reading it every time. Ultimately, what I liked the most about Colorless was how it showed Murakami evolving as a person. Colorless was clearly written by a middle-aged man who has his own struggles with aging and death, and who understands that the past, no matter how painful, can never be completely changed. His characters are getting deeper too: Tsukuru is a thoughtful guy, whose pilgrimage (even if it wasn’t initially his idea) is done with a sense of purpose and commitment. He’s less swept along by the winds of fate, as so many of Murakami’s characters have been before, than he is actively trying to understand his own past, and his confrontations with his former friends are deliberate and calm.

Perhaps this is suggestive of Murakami’s own more purposeful track in life, or at least of the maturity that comes with advancing age. Would a younger Murakami have written a character like Tsukuru, who willingly confronts those who unceremoniously dismissed him years before? Would anyone under the age of 65 be comfortable doing such a thing? For me, at less than half of Murakami’s age, the idea of confronting those who hurt me in the past is terrifying, but perhaps I’m still too young to be judicious about such things. I’d rather lick my wounds than have the cojones to understand why people were once dicks, and this could be the difference between a novel from a 31-year-old versus an aging baby boomer like Murakami. Despite the book returning to his ever-present themes, a younger Murakami could never have written Tsukuru. He could only appear from a more mature, evolved voice.

Ultimately, despite treading this familiar ground, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage will hardly disappoint any Murakami devotee. You can’t separate a writer from his or her themes, and why would you want to? After all, there are probably a dozen literature Ph.D.s whose degrees wouldn’t exist if Murakami didn’t write the way he does. And the world Murakami has created is a good one, a place that millions of readers regularly like to call home. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the things we see can expect to see, Murakami has created a pleasant, often exciting and certainly always perplexing place, where readers can walk on cat-like feet, alone in moments of quiet contemplation, while cooking a simple meal out of whatever they can find in the fridge.

-Emily Dufton

            

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami

What I Talk About When I Talk About Murakami: Mystery and Memory in 1Q84 

by Emily Dufton

My notebook states that I finished reading Haruki Murakami’s 925-page opus 1Q84, first published in the United States in October of 2011, on March 2, 2012. Almost exactly a month earlier, on February 1, I scribbled in my book that I had finished rereading, for the third time, Murakami’s 2008 memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is perhaps my favorite of his works. In the four weeks and one day that spanned the completion of Running and 1Q84, I left behind the stark and direct world of Murakami’s nonfiction and reentered the familiar fictional world this author has so consistently reproduced over the course of a dozen novels and thirty years. Which is to say that I left behind his essays – so clean and concise, about early morning training runs in Hawaii and traversing the route of the original marathon in Greece – and reentered that other, stranger place that I can only associate with this particular writer’s fiction. Here is a man who writes books the same way he runs marathons: methodically and purposefully, creating a world of chaos out of the mundane.

In what can only be credited to the construction of a coherent oeuvre, there exists in the fictional world of Murakami a very specific, if often troubling, place: a Japan that lives on the border of reality and imagination, a world of mystery, confusion, disorientation and delight, where men – and his protagonists are almost always men – are confronted by the fantastic and often surreal as they struggle within the context of quotidian Japanese life. I think of Toru Okada in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, whose story begins when his cat runs away. This small event seems to trigger (or release) a series of events, some of which border on the completely phantasmagoric, even as Toru remains chained to his everyday routines. Throughout the book there are these wonderful, quiet moments, far outside the scope of missing cats and missing wives and psychic prostitutes and newly acquired abilities to heal, that reveal the majesty of Murakami’s craft: it is within descriptions of Toru making small meals, drinking a beer at the kitchen table alone at night, or the thoughts Toru has as he looks up at the sky where the real beauty of Murakami’s writing lies. These moments, far more than the mysteries, seductions, and action that also suffuse the text, interested me most during my initial reading of the book and they’re the ones that I carry with me now, years after I put the book back on the shelf.

Other examples of the Murakami Man are myriad: the unnamed protagonist in A Wild Sheep Chase who follows a sheep (and a ghost) to the mountains of Hokkaido while he revels in the stark silence of the cold northern territory. There is young Kafka, in Kafka on the Shore, who runs away from home and hides in a library near the ocean, reading books as rain quietly falls and a man who kills cats wanders the streets. And there is Tengo, one of the protagonists of 1Q84, a young writer and math tutor in Tokyo whose introduction to a remarkable young woman named Fuka-Eri and his induction into a parallel world do little to stem his interest in listening to records at home or wandering through a nearby park. And these are just a few of the many Murakami men who sit idly by as the strangest and most remarkable situations draw them into their grasp, these men-boys who so often live alone and exist in that strange, liminal, crepuscular world between no-longer-adolescence and slack-jawed-adulthood, looking through the fridge for another beer or something to eat while, outside of their apartments, two moons are rising in the sky.

It’s as though Murakami himself doesn’t quite know what to focus on, probably because he loves both stories – the magical and the mundane – so dearly and so deeply, as they both so profoundly influence his work. There is mystery, challenge, tension and thrill hovering around the nucleus of all this writer’s work, but there, at the dead-center of the story’s very core, is thick description so anthropological in shape that its attention to the minute details of quotidian Japanese life could allow aliens to mistake Murakami’s books for lessons in the post-World War II, late-twentieth century Japanese experience. And this is the purposeful (or concomitant) result of a man who writes his books on the fly. In a 1997 New York Times review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Jamie James noted that Murakami “does not plot his novels beforehand but lets the story reveal itself to him as he writes.” This makes sense. In some sense, a reader could get the feeling that if a character busies himself with stir-frying leftovers for an entire scene, it was most likely written on a day when that was all that Murakami wanted to do too.

But this is not a retrospective on Murakami’s collected works; it is a review specifically of 1Q84, which I intend to write in a specific way. March 2, 2012, is eleven months ago now, and 1Q84 still sits on my shelf. I’ve hardly opened the cover since I finished the last page and noted the date of its completion in my little book. But I’ve decided to keep 1Q84 there, shelved and unopened, while I write this review. I don’t want any new experience to influence what I want to say. Instead, this review is going to be written blind, based entirely on the memories and feelings I’ve retained after finishing the book. Why? Because it is only in Murakami’s work where I find myself paying such close attention to the quiet moments that lie so far outside of the story’s main action: to food, to drink, to a character sitting on the floor, to the moments late at night when the wind blows or there is quietly falling rain. 1Q84 is full of such moments – one might argue that these moments make up too much of the text – moments of solitude and loneliness, of characters trapped in place, of people trying to work through issues of magnificent scope (religious cults! Parallel worlds! Mysterious pregnancies! Missing children! Unanswered questions about a mother’s marital fidelity!) in a manner more befitting of trying to figure out what to have for lunch.

So, that being said, I don’t want to provide a synopsis of the tale, which is too convoluted to be adequately explained, nor do I want to focus exclusively on what I liked or didn’t like. Instead, I’m going to focus less on 1Q84 itself than on two other, very specific things: first, on how the book made me feel when reading it, and second, on what I can continue to recall about the text nearly a year after completing it. Less a traditional investigation of style and form, this will be an analysis of the reading experience and an examination of the metaphysics of memory as they concern Murakami and 1Q84.

What I remember most from 1Q84 are people stuck, trapped if you will, in places they cannot leave for reasons they do not entirely understand. Everyone seems trapped in 1Q84: Aomame and Tengo trapped in a parallel world, Fuka-Eri and young Tsubasa trapped in a cult, the Leader of the cult trapped in a painful body, and nearly all of the characters trapped somewhere in the past. Then there are the physical, constructed restrictions as well. This book features more people trapped in apartments than any of Murakami’s works I’ve ever read before, and this is an author notoriously fond of placing his characters in constrictive locales.

First there is the long period where Aomame, Murakami’s female protagonist (a trainer at a Tokyo gym when she’s not a hired assassin), is stuck in a new apartment in a new complex in an underdeveloped section of Tokyo for – what is it, days, weeks, months? She is kept there by the Dowager, her employer, for her own safety and is sent groceries, a stationary exercise bike, and weights to lift to keep her fit. Her only access to the outside world is through the deliveryman who comes weekly to bring supplies from the Dowager, a window and balcony that look out onto a park, and the NHK man/ghost who knocks on her door from time to time. She is kept there for chapters, maniacally exercising in the apartment to stay in shape, chopping and stir-frying vegetables for meals, and waiting through the time by reading or staring outside. She is caught between the interior and exterior worlds in the apartment in the same way she is caught between 1984 and 1Q84.

(Is it strange that, after reading those chapters, I wanted the same solitude? A blindingly white apartment in a place where I knew no one and no one knew me, where people brought me what I needed and I had no responsibilities other than riding a stationary bike and preparing simple meals?)

Then there is Ushikawa, the private detective hired by the religious cult Sakigake to investigate Tengo and Aomame. Usikawa, whose constant descriptions of being ugly made me pity him (surely he can’t be that bad; no one is), camps out on the ground floor of Tengo’s apartment building to keep an eye out for Tengo’s comings and goings. He has nothing in the apartment but a sleeping bag and a hot plate. He wraps himself in the sleeping bag to avoid the cold and stares out the window with binoculars and a camera, eating cans of beans that he’s heated up for dinner. Is there a more pitiful existence, even for a private eye? Staring between the slats of a Venetian blind, hoping the person that you’re looking for walks past? Not only does Ushikawa spend multiple chapters waiting in this empty apartment, but if I recall correctly, it’s also the site of his death. Poor Ushikawa – Murakami never gave you a break.

Fuka-Eri also remains housebound. As public interest in her novel "Air Chrysalis" reaches fever pitch, she is forced to remain inside Tengo’s apartment, sleeping in his nightshirt and listening to his records while he’s at work. Here is, as Murakami describes her, a preternaturally beautiful 17-year-old girl who lives with Tengo for days and weeks, forced into house arrest because of the strangeness of her visions. When she and Tengo finally have sex (in the weirdest sex scene I’ve ever read, even for Murakami), it is, of course, Aomame who gets pregnant. How? Why? Do these questions even matter? And when Fuka-Eri disappears – a clean break if I ever read one – we don’t need to know where she goes, in the same way that we, the readers, don’t seem to have to know the answers to any of the questions Murakami brings up.

Ultimately, what remains with me almost a year after finishing 1Q84 is how unsatisfying the storyline really is. More than any other feeling, and more than any other of his books, Murakami’s latest opus left me feeling sad. It was a half-finished, half-baked, coitus interruptus of a text, one that brought forth all of my favorite Murakami ideas only to leave them, half-assembled, in the nearly-1,000-page book on my shelf. There is a startling number of questions unanswered at its end. I remember being two-thirds of the way finished, then three-quarters through, then four-fifths complete, wondering when Aomame was going to get out of the white apartment, when the questions about Tengo’s mother’s relationship with that strange man were going to be resolved, how Murakami was going to explain all of these things, while the number of pages dwindled and the storyline seemed stuck. It was frustrating, watching the remaining pages on the right side of the book diminish while so much remained to be explained and understood.

There is so much beauty in Murakami’s work. The descriptions of the hothouse where the Dowager would meet Aomame for tea, where exotic flowers grew and butterflies fluttered and landed lightly on the Dowager’s shoulder, are such lovely visions of Japan (or anywhere) that I can’t get them out of my head. The meal that Aomame shares with her policewoman friend Ayumi at the Italian restaurant, with thick description of their entrees and choices of wine, seemed as comforting as eating a rich Italian meal myself. Tengo standing on top of a children’s playground slide, staring up at the moon (two moons? One moon? How many did Tengo see?) at night, is a stunning scene in its powerful simplicity.

So why then does Murakami’s book have to ultimately feel co-opted? Lost? Half-finished and unsatisfying and DOA? There was so much discussion of him receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years back, with various reviewers calling 1Q84 genius, his chef d’oeuvre. But I couldn’t help feeling a little gypped at the end, as though I bought into a promise someone made but couldn’t fulfill.

For all the reasons I love Murakami – his creativity and vigor, his intelligence and prolificacy, the quietness of his writing that centers on moments of such stunningly peacefulness even in the midst of so much surreality – I enjoyed 1Q84. But for all the reasons Murakami pisses me off – his lackadaisical style, his hanging questions, his unplanned endings and his liminal characters – 1Q84 also deeply pissed me off. Maybe it’s impossible to answer all the questions Murakami brings up. Secret religious cults, tiny creatures that emerge from dead goats’ mouths to spin an ethereal chrysalis, mysterious pregnancies, a world with two moons – I mean, it’s all a lot to deal with, a lot to convey. And I’m not suggesting that every question an author brings up demands an answer within that same book; certainly, I’d assume, neither is Murakami. Instead, what he notes, and what is necessary to understand, is that there is mystery in the world – deep and trenchant mystery – especially in a place as otherworldly as Japan, which deserves to be looked at and examined, if not understood.

And the grace of Murakami’s books is not only that he brings up such luscious mysteries, but that he cloaks them in the quotidian ubiquity of daily life: there might be a woman who covertly kills abusive men for her job, but her days are still filled with the quiet rising of the sun and the silent nights when she stays up long after everyone else is asleep. There’s still the daily question of searching the fridge to see what could be stir-fried into dinner, and that is comforting, even if it makes me upset.

But still – still – I wanted more. I didn’t want 1Q84 to end like the television series "Lost," with a quick and ill-conceived wrap-up that was superficially satisfying while doing nothing to illuminate the larger story. But it did. Both "Lost" and 1Q84 started big, making enormous promises that ultimately neither could fulfill. Did they take storytelling too far? Bite off far more than they could chew? Perhaps, and maybe that’s why Murakami didn’t win the Nobel Prize and "Lost" became a laughingstock rather than a television series that earned a rightful place in the pop culture canon.

Even so, I’ll probably never get rid of my copy of 1Q84. Like when I finished Infinite Jest, there’s always an element of pride to completing a large and monumental work. And that, I guess, is the strange relationship we have with texts: we keep our books long after we’ve completed them because, in the process of reading, they become our friends. 1Q84 will stay on my shelf even as it remains one of my most frustrating friends, a book I’ll look at again from time to time just to remind me to keep away from starting things I know I can’t complete. Still, it’s a friend I won’t abandon any time soon. Friends like these are important – or at least some of them are – because they remain meaningful long after we’ve finished reading what they contain.