One of my current goals is to read more books written by people outside my own cultural experiences. To that end, something like Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s work would be perfect. The back of my copy, and I am not even sure how I remember when I even got this one despite it sitting in one of my unread book piles, said that the main character went out looking for his wife’s missing cat, but then she herself also disappeared. There was a promise that the man would find out more than he had bargained for, and that much certainly proved to be true. My general knowledge of Japanese culture is fairly limited, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a well-written book all the same.
And you know what? This was a well-written book.
Protagonist and narrator Toru Okada has a small problem. Sure, he’s unemployed, but his wife Kumiko is still working and their expenses are low enough to support themselves on just her income. However, when their cat disappeared, Kumiko really missed their pet and insisted Okada find him. That much happened before the book opened, but Murakami tends to bounce his text around in time and space to fill in needed backstory as he goes. Okada is nothing if not an agreeable man and does set out to try and find the cat. He is largely unsuccessful until one day he finds his wife is also missing. She had disappeared without a trace, and if Okada wanted to find the cat before, he really wants to find her. He seems to only be getting messages through go-betweens, most notably his brother-in-law Noboru Wataya. As it is, Okada and his brother-in-law, an up-and-coming politician, absolutely despise each other for reasons Okada cannot quite grasp. That’s especially odd because Okada seems to get along with everybody.
Now, on the surface, this all seems pretty straightforward: Okada wants to get his wife back, but he doesn’t even know where she is or why she left. Sure, he’ll grant her the divorce various members of her family are pushing for, but only after he speaks to her directly. But there are odd things going on, many of them involving women. An unknown woman calls him on the phone, seems to know who he is, will not identify herself, and then seems to start talking like a phone sex operator. Before Kumiko disappears, they are put in contact with a medium named Malta Kano, a fashionable woman who wears a distinctively out-of-place red vinyl hat while offering vague prophesies on what is to come. Her younger sister Creta Kano is some sort of psychic prostitute and Malta’s assistant. And then there’s Okada’s neighbor May Kasahara, a chipper teenager who doesn’t go to school but talks about morbid things in the most pleasant and friendly manner possible.
By the by, I don’t know if this is a Japanese cultural thing or not, but most characters in this book are always referred to by their full names. The lone exceptions, at least where Okada gets a person’s name, seem to be Toru and Kumiko Okada, and I don’t think Okada’s name came up at all for quite some time going through the work.
Regardless, in a world where psychic mediums are apparently legit, and there’s some talk about parallel timelines, what is going on here? As odd as the book sounds in places, it actually was rather easy to follow. Murakami doesn’t quite explain what happened, but what starts off as a work where everything that happens could have a very real-world explanation soon goes into one where the fantastic can happen, will probably never get explained, but at the same time things do seem to somewhat connect together so it may not really matter. What does matter is the experience. Is Okada right in his intuitions or is he just fooling himself and his marriage really over? He’s an incredibly passive narrator, a man whose greatest skill may be he’s just a good listener. People want to tell him their stories, and he is inclined to if not just listen, then at least to ask, and the most repeated line of dialogue may be one character asking another if the listener understands what the speaker means by whatever the speaker just said. The book does get weirder as it goes along, but again, it’s about Okada and how far he would go to get his wife back from wherever she went. He’s not an action hero or anything. He just has his own special gifts and strong feelings on where and when he has to be at certain points.
I think it is safe to say that I freakin’ loved this book.
Grade: A
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