[ST (Aug 2, 2005)]
I finished reading Tokio Blues, by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, yesterday. The title of the Spanish edition is a free and sloppy translation of the original, which is actually non-translational, as it is itself the title of a Beatles' song, Norwegian Wood. I read in the newspaper about the major success of Murakami's book in Japan, where it has been compared to Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, also becoming a kind of a cult book itself. The comparison may not be misled as they both share the first-person account of the life events of a late teenager, the gloomy aspects of those and the wistful personality of the main character of the plot, his brooding on the psychological havoc that surrounds him, the sad and partly depressing tone of the story, the barely ornamented prose, but they do differ in many aspects, the suicide theme to name but one. The story of the book shares a major bit with the story of the song. The song is within the book, it must have given Murakami the seminal idea, but the latter's scope is much wider than a mere love story which quite did not work out. The basic line of the plot is that of the song, however, a ruined love, an unaccomplished relationship, but then it departs to browse through insecurity and the sharp and painful changes that growing up brings along, narrated from the perspective of a thirty-odd character, with the bittersweet ways memory has gradually drawn along the elapsed years, capriciously, but selectively as well. There is, it seems, a moment in time in everyone when we suddenly become adults, and perhaps it can be traced back, pin-pointed to an isolated event, a one-off of far-reaching consequences.
I finished reading Tokio Blues, by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, yesterday. The title of the Spanish edition is a free and sloppy translation of the original, which is actually non-translational, as it is itself the title of a Beatles' song, Norwegian Wood. I read in the newspaper about the major success of Murakami's book in Japan, where it has been compared to Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, also becoming a kind of a cult book itself. The comparison may not be misled as they both share the first-person account of the life events of a late teenager, the gloomy aspects of those and the wistful personality of the main character of the plot, his brooding on the psychological havoc that surrounds him, the sad and partly depressing tone of the story, the barely ornamented prose, but they do differ in many aspects, the suicide theme to name but one. The story of the book shares a major bit with the story of the song. The song is within the book, it must have given Murakami the seminal idea, but the latter's scope is much wider than a mere love story which quite did not work out. The basic line of the plot is that of the song, however, a ruined love, an unaccomplished relationship, but then it departs to browse through insecurity and the sharp and painful changes that growing up brings along, narrated from the perspective of a thirty-odd character, with the bittersweet ways memory has gradually drawn along the elapsed years, capriciously, but selectively as well. There is, it seems, a moment in time in everyone when we suddenly become adults, and perhaps it can be traced back, pin-pointed to an isolated event, a one-off of far-reaching consequences.
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