Murakami Master Shelf - Part I
#25-17
MURAKAMI BINGO
When’s the last time you read a listicle of books that actively convinced you not to read the books on the list? This is the function of Part I of the Murakami Master Shelf, a ranking of the 25 books that spans five decades of consistent work from a man who is consistently floated for the Nobel prize every year (the linked article is now 12 years old to give you an idea of how long this has been going on). ICYMI here’s a little primer on Murakami’s enduring popularity.
Some writers thrive on constant reinvention. With each novel and story they pick a new challenge, a change of scenery, characters of different backgrounds, a new point of view, or even a new genre entirely. Haruki Murakami is not that kind of writer. For a novelist who is known for an inventive magical realism and incredible feats of imagination, he is a man of remarkable consistency in terms of subject and theme. While searching for a more authoritative source than my own memory I came across Murakami bingo in The New York Times:
There’s even more motifs than this, but you get the idea. Whereas writers who constantly reinvent themselves often have high highs and big swings that miss in drastic fashion, a burrower like Murakami is like the kids in Holes digging the same size well (there are a lot of deep dark wells in Murakami novels, characters often get trapped at the bottom of them, willingly and unwillingly) on the same plot of land looking to uncover the same things.
To use a music analogy — in honor of Murakami who is obsessed with jazz, classical, and The Beatles — he is like one of those bands whose sound, songs, and even albums all blend together a bit. Murakami is like The Black Keys. Just because The Black Keys use same style and tricks every time doesn’t make them any less great, but the body of work does start to blur together even if you love the sound and listen to every release. With artists like Murakami, as you start to pick and choose through the catalog, invariably with so many overlapping works, some just start to feel a lesser in comparison, not the first you’d recommend if you wanted to convince a non-fan that the artist is worthwhile.
FOR COMPLETISTS #25-17
25. Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love
Yes, the nonfiction book about t-shirts, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, is the Murakami book you need to purchase only if you’re a completist. More merch than book, it’s a fantastic package and a few essays about t-shirts. This book best personifies Murakami as literary celebrity rather than a writer, underscored by the fact that some of the t-shirts in the book are Murakami t-shirts made by his publishers the world round as promotional items. But, as with all of Murakami’s books, this is done with a high level of design. Even so, it feels like a good coffee table book more for t-shirt enthusiasts than readers.
24. Killing Commendatore
Murakami’s last novel before the recent release of The City and its Uncertain Walls. It’s the type of novel that can happen late in an artist’s career. With full artistic license and a dozen novels under his belt, there’s no argument that Murakami doesn’t know what he’s doing. But with age often comes a more contemplative mode and a simultaneous lagging of energy for the dogged, impossible pursuit of perfection. This is a fancy way of saying that great artists late in their career aren’t often pressured to edit their work and aren’t inclined to do it themselves. Killing Commendatore is to Murakami what The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon are to Martin Scorsese—some amazing ideas that feel drawn out and over explored past the point of their effectiveness. For many, by the time they reached Killing Commendatore Murakami had earned a lot of trust, but the novel is a rarity for him in its kind of dull nature.
It is about a tortured painter and the canvas he discovers of a scene in the opera Don Giovanni in a house where he’s staying. In Murakami fashion the Commendatore in the painting eventually comes to life. But it takes such a long time for this to happen that by the point where the unexpected or uncanny is happening it is too late to recover a novel that’s mostly about the painter sitting around alone in a house listening to records (a delightful motif of Murakami novels, but certainly not meant to be the whole novel).
23. Absolutely on Music
Extremely fun conversations between Murakami and the famous Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa. An easy an interesting read, it’s a great example of Murakami’s perceptiveness and curiosity of people and what they do that he so often translates into fiction. For a guy preoccupied with loneliness in his novels, he has an uncanny ability to pull out the delightful nuggets of specific information from people, especially about their occupations. The kinds of insights on space or routine, especially in work, that you wouldn’t usually hear from someone unless they were close relation and you had many conversations with them. The acoustics of different music halls, comparisons of famous composers, and a generally new appreciation for the way an approach to a piece of music can make it an entirely different one – it definitely had me firing up more Leonard Bernstein.
22. Novelist as a Vocation
As an amateur connoisseur of books on writing, I found Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation quite the disappointment. These are some pretty decent lectures on his approach, but it’s not really a nuts-and-bolts guide nor an inspirational. And it kind of makes sense that Murakami wouldn’t make for a very good teacher of writing, as his writing is incredibly idiosyncratic as was his journey to becoming a writer. As the story goes, Murakami was watching a baseball game when the thought struck him that he needed to write a novel and then he did it. Another incredible story Murakami tells is of writing his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (really a novella) for a writing contest. The rub being that he wrote Hear the Wind Sing as a hardcopy with no duplicate, so that if he hadn’t won the contest his first work might never have seen the light of day and his career may have taken a different path entirely. And these stories of how Murakami became a writer are illustrative of how relatable and practical Murakami’s writing guide is. If anything, Novelist as a Vocation is more spiritual than anything else— you get out of it what you bring to it.
21. Strange Library
Another amazingly designed book with crazy foldouts and illustrations by Chip Kidd and Suzanne Dean (although it’s difficult to read and you feel like you’re going to break it every time you turn the page). It’s a pretty good short story with a lot of Murakami obsessions: libraries, deep dark, lonely places, and a wild, mystical sheep man. It’s a bit more horror than his typical fare. Spoilers: the boy in the story is taken down into the depths of a library and locked away in a room to read so that his brains are filled with juicy knowledge so the creepy librarian can eat them. Like most of Murakami’s works, it sounds crazier summarizing it than it actually is.
20. First Person Singular
Murakami’s weakest story collection of his many. The story told from the perspective of a lecherous monkey who wants to steal women’s names is pretty fun. Overall, though, it would be my recommendation for the last stop in terms of his stories— sans the monkey lots of them are retreads of similar stories he’s done better elsewhere.
19. South of the Border, West of the Sun
One of the many novels that’s about an unbreakable connection of young love. In this version the protagonist stumbles across his old love, a girl with polio who he used to listen to records with in their summers, who grows up to be a stunning, enigmatic figure. It’s good just not his best take on a setup he revisits again and again throughout his career.
18. Sputnik Sweetheart
Everything about South of the Border could be copy-pasted here. The difference being Sputnik Sweetheart is one of Murakami’s older women, younger men relationship novels. A quick, decent read, but not top of the Murakami canon.
17. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
This exemplifies why short story collections will always be more difficult to write than novels. Some of my favorite Murakami short stories are in this collection, including the darkly ominous “Birthday Girl”— a cornerstone of another collection of short stories by various authors Birthday Stories that Murakami himself put together. There’s also “Man-Eating Cats” which is not about the cats but a small newspaper clipping that then turns into a tale about an intimate relationship and a trip to Greece (basically a warm-up story for the novel South of the Border, West of the Sun as many of Murakami’s short stories are). Many of these are worthwhile stories (and you can find many of the really good ones in the archive of The New Yorker without reading the whole collection), but as a full-length book there are better places to start your Murakami journey.
NEXT TIME
To be continued… In Part II we’ll rank the middle of the oeuvre, always the most fascinating part of an author’s body of work, the mixed bag novels and stories with exceptional highs and uneven oddities. Next time we’ll be talking alternate universes, super frogs, running, and the best opening chapter Murakami has ever written. Until then…