Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. The reader will enjoy watching Murakami play with color symbolism down to the very last line of the story, even as Tsukuru sinks deeper into a dangerous enigma.Īnother tour de force from Japan’s greatest living novelist.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Murakami writes with the same murky sense of time that characterized 1Q84, but this book, short and haunting, is really of a piece with older work such as Norwegian Wood and, yes, Kafka on the Shore. Or is it? It’s left to the reader to judge. He finds that his friends' lives aren’t so golden (the most promising of them now hawks Lexuses and knowingly owns up to it: “I bet I sound like a car salesman?”) his life by comparison isn't so bad. Change its shade, and it can easily melt into various gradations of darkness.” That old saying about not asking questions if you don’t want to know the answers-well, there’s the rub, and there’s Tsukuru’s problem. Naturally, this being a Murakami story, the possibilities are hallucinogenic, Kafkaesque, and otherwise unsettling and ominous: “Gray is a mixture of white and black.
Helpfully, his girlfriend suggests that he make contact with the foursome to find out what he’d done and why he’d deserved their silence. He’s still wounded by the banishment, still mystified at his friends’ behavior. Fast-forward two decades, and Tsukuru, true to both his name and his one great passion in life, designs train stations. Alas for Tsukuru, he “lacked a striking personality, or any qualities that made him stand out”-though, for all that, he’s different. Perhaps, he reckons between thoughts of suicide, it’s because they can pair off more easily without a fifth wheel perhaps it’s because his name means “builder,” while all theirs have to do with colors: red pine, blue sea, white root, black field.
For some inexplicable reason, his four best friends, two males, two females, have cut him off without a word.
Murakami ( IQ84, 2011, etc.) turns in a trademark story that blends the commonplace with the nightmarish in a Japan full of hollow men.
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