Before I get completely off the subject of my "Japanese phase", I want to give props to Soko Gakuen, a private, non-profit Japanese language school in San Francisco, and the self-proclaimed "most comprehensive Japanese language school in California". I'm in the middle of my first class there, and I am very happy with it.
While I'm "supposing", I suppose I should just admit that my "self-imposed media blackout" has one small crack in it: I've been obsessively following the NHL playoffs, and especially my hometown Philadelphia Flyers, who haven't won Lord Stanley's cup since they were the "Broad Street Bullies" of the 1970s.
I suppose I should call this the monthly mojo... I haven't written anything in ages. I've been under a self-imposed media blackout, spending a lot of time with those old-fashioned things called books. I've been enjoying (if you could call it that) Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy: (1) Spring Snow, (2) Runaway Horses, (3) The Temple of Dawn, and (4) The Decay of the Angel. Basically in a Japanese phase, I guess. I've been devouring Murakami. Of his books, the only ones I haven't read are the novel, Dance, Dance, Dance, his two collections of short stories (The Elephant Vanishes and After the Quake) and Underground, his nonfiction account of the Tokyo subway gas attacks.
I have a strange need to share what I so love about his books, but I find it tremendously difficult to put it into words. He's a unique storyteller, but there are many of those, and unique does not necessarily connote effectiveness. Each of his books contains a central mystery -- a search for a missing person, for example -- and that's certainly part of what makes them compelling, like all good mysteries. So he clearly has a love for mystery, though he's not at all a mystery author in the genre fiction sense of the word. There's also a touch of sci-fi in his books, which in his case is more often considered surrealism and referred to as such by his critics and scholars. Nonetheless, his book, A Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is arguably straight up sci-fi. There is a kind of melancholy that pervades his plots and characters, and a familiar vulnerability. There's also an awkwardness -- mostly mechanical -- which could be a function of translation.
None of this, however, gets at the heart of why I love his books. When I finished reading 'The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" I surprised myself by suddenly bursting into tears. There was no sense of being gradually overcome by emotion, no lump in the throat. I literally burst. The ineffable thing I love about his books is what prompted this outpouring, and I'm realizing I'm not able to put it into words. His books have a kind of stunning clarity on a level that my soul seems to understand by my mind can't package. So, in the end, I'm failing once again to express what I like about his books, but in any case he's the successor to Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje and Cormac McCarthy in my literary love line.
At some point, I'll provide some lengthier thoughts/reviews of his individual works