The 3 best books by Haruki Murakami

Japanese literature will always owe to Haruki Murakami su irruption in current western literature, beyond manga for entertainment or autochthonous historical-themed monogatari. Because the arrival of this writer meant a break with the trend of literature for domestic consumption, opening the Japanese narrative with good novels with a very distinguished personal stamp.

It's not that authors like kawabata or the singular kobo abe (in whom Murakami could be inspired) do not achieve that transcendence between cultures, but it is Murakami who has known how to tune the most and best from his marked Japanese cultural ancestry to the rest of the world.

A mixture of surrealism and existentialism (undeniable touch of Kafka) to address life in general, current affairs, society or whatever corresponds, always with a point of fatalism where love and hope shine brighter thanks to the contrast with the general darkness.

Interesting proposals to see a world that falls apart into the absurd, perhaps only decipherable from the dream. Reality is a sum of subjective perspectives that, in Murakami's work, generate a thousand-fold mosaic, where the authentic amidst the noise becomes the only hope.

He is not a simple author but he is not about deep philosophy either. Murakami teaches us to see with different eyes, those of someone who strives to overcome reality through fiction, a transformative and disturbing fiction. The Nobel Prize for Literature flies over his figure and his work. Meanwhile, the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature It's not turkey booger either.

3 Recommended Books By Haruki Murakami

Tokyo Blues

If we talk about what the Japanese literature meant for Murakami phenomenon, it is fair to raise this work to the first position. Thanks to her, this author conquered millions of readers in the West who were suspicious of the innovative intention of any Japanese author.

While landing at a European airport, Toru Watanabe, a 37-year-old executive, hears an old Beatles song that takes him back to his youth, to the turbulent Tokyo of the XNUMXs. With a mixture of melancholy and restlessness, Toru then remembers the unstable and mysterious Naoko, the girlfriend of his best and only friend from adolescence, Kizuki.

His suicide separated Toru and Naoko for a year, until they met again and began an intimate relationship. However, the appearance of another woman in Toru's life leads him to experience dazzle and disappointment where everything should make sense: sex, love and death. And none of the characters seem able to strike the fragile balance between youthful hopes and the need to find a place in the world.

Tokyo blues

Sputnik my love

Satellites without orbit looking for something to communicate and, more importantly, to find someone to communicate it to. A big city like a dark cosmos of neon stars. In the same way that, in the journey of the Russian satellite Sputnik, the dog Laika revolved around the Earth and directed her astonished gaze towards infinite space, in Tokyo three characters desperately seek each other trying to break the eternal circular journey of solitude.

The narrator, a young elementary school teacher, is in love with Sumire; but she, who considers herself the last rebel, has a single obsession: being a novelist. Sumire will meet Miû, a middle-aged married woman as beautiful as it is enigmatic, and together they will embark on a journey through Europe after which nothing will be the same again.

An interesting parallel, a great metaphor to meet some unforgettable characters that we make very much our own in that feeling of the city as a space conducive to estrangement where we can navigate at the controls of the ship of our life.

Sputnik my love

Chronicle of the bird that winds the world

The first idea when reading this title is that of a cuckoo bird that comes out of the meccano to mobilize a contemplative world; a world that had been staring at the second hand of a wall clock.

Young Tooru Okada, who has just quit his job at a law firm, receives an anonymous call from a woman one day. From that moment on, Tooru's existence undergoes a strange transformation. His wife disappears, mysterious characters begin to appear around him, and the real is degraded until it takes on ghostly overtones.

As dreams increasingly invade reality, Tooru Okada must resolve conflicts that he has dragged throughout his life.

Chronicle of the bird that winds the world

Other recommended books by Murakami…

First person of singular

Much of any mastery resides in the absolute mastery of all dimensions of an art or craft. In short, Murakami moves his scenes and characters with dizzying agility, as if looking for the stellar moments that move everything. Even more so when the matter takes on melancholy tints on what has been lived, from the sum of lives given to the passage of time, with its inexorable leadership at the first opportunity, to the dilemma without turning back ...

Adolescent loves evoked with serene nostalgia, barely glimpsed young people, jazz reviews about impossible records, a poet who loves baseball, a talking ape who works as a masseur and an old man who talks about the circle with several centers ... The characters and scenes of this The long-awaited volume of stories blows up the boundaries between the imagination and the real world.

And they return to us, intact, lost loves, truncated relationships and loneliness, adolescence, reunions and, above all, the memory of love, because «no one will be able to take away the memory of having loved or of having ever been in love in life, "says the narrator. A first-person narrator who, at times, could be Murakami himself. So is it a memoir, some stories with autobiographical overtones or an exclusively fictional volume? The reader will have to decide.

First person of singular

The death of the commander

The followers of the great Japanese writer Haruki Murakami We approach each new publication by this author with the singular desire of a new reading therapy, a session of narrative hypnosis practically necessary in our days.

The arrival of the long novel The death of the commander it becomes a reading balm to accompany the leisure of reading and transform it into an approach to characters stripped from the inside out, voyeurism of the soul for readers in need of discovering each sensual concept of life.

Murakami confronts us with the worldly abysses, with the small voids of the self, with an icy solitude among the immensity of a world that refuses to stop for nothing. And only Murakami immediately offers his placebo of hope, ending up balancing the scale of life made literature.

Subjective ramblings aside, in book 1 of The death of the commander We found a novel that needs a continuation scheduled for next year, finishing composing in book 2 a puzzle only at the height of Murakami and that, now, will end up disturbing to madness while waiting for its final resolution .

On this occasion, art becomes a necessary argument to address the atavistic need for expression of the human being from the artistic point of view. It is clear that the circumstances of the novel are limited to a current time in a labyrinthine plot with evocations of Dorian Gray and that painting forgotten in an attic ...

Because it is precisely that, the discovery of canvas titled The death of the commander, which marks a starting point towards the mutation of the protagonist, in whose world symbols associated with that work are perceived that ends up providing a magical succession of reality, perhaps in a simple subjective impression or perhaps as a new destiny traced since the chance discovery.

The most interesting thing about the novel is how the world of a protagonist that is decomposing after the sum of failures, is adopting a more surreal air in a strange connection between a painter of the painting that will never be there, the protagonist and a neighbor of the house in which protagonist has withdrawn from the world. A captivating triangle of characters who claim and manage to focus all our attention.

In a plot open to the varied interpretations and the double and triple readings, we end up facing the meaning of art. The necessary double and polarized intention of all artistic interpretation: from the prospect of a reality not only limited to the senses, to the introspection of the reasons that can lead our senses to reflect the created world "in our image and likeness." Yes, pure megalomania, as gods of our loneliness and our decisions.

The Commander's Death, by Haruki Murakami

The Commander's Death (Book 2)

Murakami's intention with this serial publication for such a solid block work, and that as a result of its publication dates could have closed in a single volume, cannot be other than to differentiate something that escapes us.

The truth is that the story suffers a fragmentation due to an increase in rhythm, but it is always read as an absolute continuation that, for whatever reason, was understood by the author as something necessarily presented separately, as a second course or as a second orgasm. ...

Be that as it may, the point is that from a first part devoted to that reflective reading and despite it full of an existential tension, typical of Murakami, we now move on to a more dynamic development in the background. The plot excuse of the mysterious painting that moves and haunts the protagonist in the first part now turns towards a disturbing destabilization of the triangle composed between the painter of the canvas, Menshiki, the protagonist's retirement neighbor and the protagonist himself.

Because Menshiki invites the protagonist and narrator to paint a girl who passes in front of their houses every school day. The young woman, called Marie Akikawa, begins to take her particular alternative life in the outline of her features stolen every day. Until Marie disappears and her fading is suddenly linked to the memory of a fantasy related by Menshiki to the narrator, about a new Alice capable of reaching another dimension.

Marie's search provides a point of suspense between the real and the unreal, between reason, madness and subjective impressions that go from one extreme of human understanding to the other and that reach the most natural explanations in the artistic.

The denouement of the story, which erupts after a reading experience of dreamlike ecstasy, seems to bring us closer to one of those enigmas always sought by the writers of great mysteries.

Only this time it's more about the searing sensation of a wisp. A final effect that caresses all the great answers sought by a nameless narrator. A narrator in whose anonymity we finally understand the intention of total mimicry.

The Commander's Death (Book 2) by Haruki Murakami

Music, just music

Maybe to Murakami the rice of the Literature Nobel. So the great Japanese author may be thinking of writing about whatever it is, about what he most wants, as is the case with this book. Without thinking about academics who always seem to forget about him at the last moment, like the group of friends that is left for a dinner ...

Because what is clear is that beyond the aftertaste of Stockholm, Murakami readers idolize it wherever it is shipped. Because his books always sound like an avant-garde presentation balanced with those virtuous gleams of the existentialist narrator. Today we have to talk about music, nothing more and nothing less.

Everyone knows that Haruki Murakami is passionate about modern music and jazz as well as classical music. This passion not only led him to run a jazz club in his youth, but also to infuse most of his novels and works with musical references and experiences. On this occasion, the most famous Japanese writer in the world shares with his readers his wishes, his opinions and, above all, his desire to know about an art, the musical, that unites millions of human beings around the world.

To this end, over the course of two years, Murakami and his friend Seiji Ozawa, former conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, had these delightful conversations about well-known pieces by Brahms and Beethoven, by Bartok and Mahler, about conductors such as Leonard Bernstein and exceptional soloists like Glenn Gould, on chamber pieces and on opera.

Thus, while listening to records and commenting on different interpretations, the reader attends juicy confidences and curiosities that will infect them with the endless enthusiasm and pleasure of enjoying music with new ears.

murakami music
5/5 - (14 votes)

6 comments on “The 3 best books by Haruki Murakami”

  1. I love Murakami! Tokio Blues is also among my favorites (the others I have not read but they will fall, for sure). Also “Kafka on the shore”, which I recommend if you haven't read it
    regards

    Reply
    • Thanks, Marian. From the outset the title did not sound good to me. I have my reluctance with Kafka. But come on, my manias lol. It will surely fall in the end.

      Reply
  2. I read several books, not all, by this hypnotic author. So far Chronicle of the Bird and Tokios Blues are my favorites. Since we agree on tastes, the next one I will read will be Sputnik my love. Thanks for the recommendation!!

    Reply

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