3 ms·
When I started reading Murakami, I couldn't stop. He weaves a world which seems so surreal without feeling absurd. Eventually, I read 4 of his books back to bac
by mayayo3 12y ago
When I started reading Murakami, I couldn't stop. He weaves a world which seems so surreal without feeling absurd. Eventually, I read 4 of his books back to back and then bought the rest.
But, then I read the 5th one. And for some reason it felt like I've read it before. The protagonist in his novels has some very common characteristics - they like being alone, they cook and like to run. More often than not, a cat is involved (probably owing to the crazy high ratio of cats/people in Japan).
The last thing I read by him was actually a short story in New Yorker called 'Town of Cats'. I am now reading 1Q84. After a few pages, I felt like I had read some of it before. Even the character's jobs were the same. Peculiar details were common. And then I realised that I had read this in the short story.
- puzzlingcaptcha 12y agoI agree, it's very easy to wolf his books down, but in the end you don't feel like you gained much from it. After a while it gets a bit same-y. Hard-Boiled Wonderland had some nice ideas though.
- caractacus 12y agoIQ84 turned me off Murakami for a long time. Count how many times he recounts the same incident in almost the same words (narrator, mother). Count how many times he mentions breasts and the shapes of them (it's likely the same number of times he mentions any female). I read book one and two and realised at the end of it that I couldn't bear to buy the third book just to discover what happens to the protagonists.