A seductive and gratifying intellectual and romantic adventure.
Casual acquaintances and complete strangers alike meet and pass during the small hours of a Tokyo night, in the terse, riddling new novel from Japanese master Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, stories, 2006, etc.).
Its characters are ships in the night that carry cargoes of suppressed emotion and unresolved desires; hence their interactions comprise a spare narrative quite different from Murakami’s hip, weird epics (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore) and more reminiscent of such plaintive tales of unrequited or misdirected affections as Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart. It begins “around midnight” as young trombonist Takahashi invites himself to join college student Mari, as she’s studying in an all-night Denny’s restaurant. Though he recalls meeting her while courting the attention of Mari’s beautiful sister Eri, Mari seems indifferent—until Takahashi (realizing Mari speaks Chinese) persuades her to assist his friend Kaoru (who manages an all-night “love hotel”) in helping a Chinese prostitute who’s been savagely beaten by one of her johns. Characters thus brought together subsequently split off, as Murakami’s omniscient narrator focuses alternately on the abusive john (a computer specialist, Shirakawa) and on the aforementioned Eri, who is observed languishing in a death-like sleep from which she emerges only randomly and briefly—and whose mysterious condition is somehow linked to Shirakawa. The connection is never fully explained, as the advancing hours bring the sleepless in and out of one another’s orbits, and the realistic details of Murakami’s enigmatic plot are deployed to suggest how—whether by design or by chance—we are all simultaneously involved in one another’s lives and prohibited from fully understanding, or even entering, other people’s “worlds.” The result is a pellucid dramatization of disconnection, alienation, the hunger for human contact and the strategies by which we all manage to “make it through the night.”
A seductive and gratifying intellectual and romantic adventure.Pub Date: May 14, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-26583-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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