This was my first time reading Murakami, a Japanese author with a pretty big following at home and abroad. This novel straddles several genres seamlessly–merging fantasy, science fiction, and mystery with sprinkles of pop-culture and food critique without much hesitation and with great success. Murakami’s style seems effortless, but it works hard combining two separate narratives into one story. He jumps from rants on whiskey collections to escapes from caves filled with leeches to Bob Dylan to unicorns. Somehow, it all flows. His prose is truly unique and a real pleasure to read, if you are looking for something a little off beat and different to check out try this book.
Quotes after the click.
“There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate sofas in their homes. I put little trust in such people. An expensive automobile may well be worth its price, but it’s only an expensive automobile. If you have the money, you can buy it, anyone can buy it. Procuring a good sofa, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior sofa. That sofa among sofas.”
“I knew her from the midriff up. We became friendly, went out for a drink once, and ended up sleeping together. Not until we were in bed did I notice that the lower half of her body was so demographically disproportionate. It was because she played table tennis all through school, she had me know, though I didn’t quite grasp the causal relationship. I didn’t know table tennis led to below-the-belt corporeality. Still, her plumpness was charming.”
“Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress?”
“I have a thing about losers. Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws.”
“Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.”
“I craved a swig of whiskey, but it was in the knapsack on my back and the idea of twisting around to extract the bottle did not seem altogether wise. Nix on that. So I thought about having a drink instead. A quiet bar, MJQ’s Vendome playing low, a bowl of nuts, a double whiskey on the rocks. The glass is sitting on the counter, untouched for a moment, just looked at. Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it’s time to drink.”
“…to believe something, whatever it might be, is the doing of the mind. …When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind.”
“Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.”