My First Brush with Murakami
One unforeseen advantage to going to school at Community College of Philadelphia is its close proximity to the Central branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. When I had big gaps in my class schedule, I would often walk over to the library, sit in the stacks of the Philbrick Popular Library section, and read whatever caught my eye. One day I happened upon a collection of Japanese short stories titled Monkey Brain Sushi: New Tastes in Japanese Fiction. Most of the stories in the book I found only mildly interesting, but one really caught me. The story was “TV People” by Haruki Murakami. It blended paranoia, charming surrealism, and a fun writing style, and had my attention from beginning to end.
When posting about this discovery on my personal LiveJournal, a friend of mine chimed in and proceeded to harp on mightily about the pleasures of reading Murakami’s works. Not long after his recommendation, I went back to the library and picked up South of the Border, West of the Sun and devoured it. Since then, I’ve read seven books of his: five novels and two collections of short stories, and still have two more books sitting on my shelf waiting for me to get to them.[1] Among those books are his most acclaimed, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the themed story collection After the Quake, and Norwegian Wood after the suggestion of a Japanese professor. Starting this semester, I’ll be taking a class on contemporary Japanese literature, and we will be reading his newest novel, After Dark. I can’t wait.
- I’m currently reading Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which is about 1100 pages long. It’s going to be a bit. ↩
