Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I've finally found the writer who has convinced me to change my own writing style. His name is Haruki Murakami.
In the past, I aped other writers and always found myself struggling in my imitations - which is deserved since I hadn't an original idea in my head. Kafka's prose is too pure, Mann's too polemic, Nabokov's too genius for availability, Amis's too fooled into thinking he's Nabokov. Thomas Pynchon wrote only two pieces that were digestible ("Entropy" and The Crying of Lot 49), the rest is a game where there are no winners. Fitzgerald is poetic but he lost it with too many pedestrian characters. Overexcited translators make me question Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev. Ionesco and Pinter are playwrights. Simplifications aside, I've learned from them all. But nothing has made me completely re-think the way I choose to write.
My first was to blame. The short story writer Saki. It's all so clever. It made me sick. I, too, then had to be clever. I make me sick.

Lately I've been on the search for new writers, new teachers, new voices, and ideas. It's like starting any kind of committed relationship. You go out casually with short stories. You want to be impressed, but you're also suspicious, your eye is keen on mistakes and cracks; but if, after a couple more dates, a few more drinks with the same writer, you begin to trust his choices, you close your eyes and gulp, and start the novel. (If you carry out this analogy further you could say that the classics are all sluts.) Looking for leads in two anthologies of short fiction, The Vintage Book of Amnesia and The Art of the Story, I finally found the guy: Japan's Haruki Murakami (currently a creative writing professor in Boston). I was tickled after reading "The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and the Realm of Raging Winds" in the former anthology, and was taken with an itch that could only be called addiction after finishing "The Elephant Vanishes" from the latter. In both stories the main character assumes the role of narrator, and tells the story with a great regard for orderliness, time-tables, and exactitude.

The narrator of the novel TheWind-Up Bird Chronicle has this same kind of voice, though for all the orderliness and attention to detail, his life suddenly becomes a mystery, with disappearances of cats and wives, dream worlds commingling with the world of reality, memories of World War II fighting with domestic wars, and a plethor of seemingly random characters. The novel's first lines rope you in:

"When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta….
'Ten minutes, please,' said a woman on the other end.
I'm good at recognizing people's voices, but this was not one I knew.
'Excuse me? To whom did you wish to speak?'
'To you, of course. Ten minutes, please. That's all we need to understand each other.' Her voice was low and soft but otherwise nondescript."

The prose reminds me of my favorite composer, French pianist Erik Satie. He composed enigmatic pieces with simple, almost playfully childish lines. He never went long or grotesque simply because he knew he could. Simplicity lets the bizarre breathe. Murakami has the power to digress, but does not. Everything is at its most simplistic. And truly bizarre.
There's a critical blurb on the inside pages saying that no American writer could achieve this kind of book. I'll go further and include British writers. It's a 600 page book. And a page-turner. And yet literary. There is a seventy-page section where the narrator hides in a well. And these seventy pages are still page-turners!

From what I know of Japanese pop culture, there is a lack of self-consciousness of being taken too seriously. Living naturally and with fluidity, not self-vigilant. And with this burden removed writers like Murakami or musicians like Cornelius (buy his excellent album Point) can move easily from fun to serious. And not just simply move, but to allow the two ends co-existence without the Westerner's hang-up. Even when the main character exiles himself into the bottom of a well for seventy pages, the sentences, so beautifully arranged, you trust this writer's choice. You know it's no indulgent device. The style even fits with the novel's theme: worlds coming together, the past blending with the present, somnambulism more alive than consciousness, the random becoming the ordered.

This is a gorgeous book.