Gonna dive into Murakami for the first time and see what the fuss is. Do you have a favorite...

Gonna dive into Murakami for the first time and see what the fuss is. Do you have a favorite? Might start with A Wild Sheep Chase.

Japanese John Green.

Veeky Forums hates a lot but that is an outstanding (and hilarious) book. If murakami has a flaw it's that he likes to write the same book. This can be overcome by limiting yourself to Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World, Norwegian Wood and if you need one more Kaftka on the Shore.

I see, thanks user. A lot of reviews have said similar things about him liking to write the same book

> If murakami has a flaw it's that he likes to write the same book.

A million times this. Great fun though.

this
only more alpha

here is a typical scene:

Around young, beautiful, fat women, I am generally thrown into confusion. I don't know why. Maybe it's because an image of their dietary habits naturally congeals in my mind. When I see a goodly sized woman, I have visions of her mopping up that last drop of cream sauce with bread, wolfing down that final sprig of watercress garnish from her plate. And once that happens, it's like acid corroding metal: scenes of her eating spread through my head and I lose control. Your plain fat woman is fine. Fat women are like clouds in the sky. They're just floating there, nothing to do with me. But your young, beautiful, fat woman is another story. I am demanded to assume a posture toward her. I could end up sleeping with her. That is probably where all the confusion comes in. Which is not to say that I have anything against fat women. Confusion and repulsion are two different things. I've slept with fat women before and on the whole the experience wasn't bad. If your confusion leads you in the right direction, the results can be uncommonly rewarding. But of course, things don't always take the right course. Sex is an extremely subtle undertaking, unlike going to the department store on Sunday to buy a thermos. Even among young, beautiful, fat women, there are distinctions to be made. Fleshed out one way, they'll lead you in the right direction; fleshed out another way, they'll leave you lost, trivial, confused. In this sense, sleeping with fat women can be a challenge. There must be as many paths of human fat as there are ways of human death.

a similar passage about sofas and sandwiches made me drop my last attempt to read him again

that's an amusing passage

hurricane and drizzle is an amusing passage too

That's from the first chapter of Hardboiled Wonderland which is the best part of his best novel. The protagonist encrypts corporate secrets by processing messages back and forth from his left and right brain lobes, to this end his brain is surgically modified. His nonchalant and directionless observations hint towards his missing something upstairs while remaining honest and verbally sophisticated.

I'll try not to lavish him with too much praise because having fell for the Murakami meme for a period of time, I wholly concur with Veeky Forums in that he is truly a meme in the negative sense. I've also read Norwegian Wood and Wild Sheep Chase, they're boring. I haven't read A Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I feel that I've mostly exhausted his shallow perspective. Dispassionate guy does his day in day out routine, surreal image appears, he remains a dispassionate guy going through the motions, a comfy scene, more surreal things happen. Thing is, Hardboiled trumps his other novels in terms of surrealness so that's the one I recommend.

>while remaining honest

that's what i question. i dropped hard-boiled wonderland exactly because it felt fake (i also had read woolf recently then and by the contrast the fakeness seemed appalling to me), here is that sofa passage:

The sofa was perfect for sleeping. Not too soft, not too hard; even the cushions pillowed my head just right. Doing different tabulation jobs, I've slept on a lot of sofas, and let me tell you, the comfortable ones are few and far between. Typically, they're cheap deadweight. Even the most luxurious-looking sofas are a disappointment when you actually try to sleep on them. I never understand how people can be lax about choosing sofas. I always say—a prejudice on my part, I'm sure—you can tell a lot about a person's character from his choice of sofa. Sofas constitute a realm inviolate unto themselves. This, however, is something that only those who have grown up sitting on good sofas will appreciate. It's like growing up reading good books or listening to good music. One good sofa breeds another good sofa; one bad sofa breeds another bad sofa. That's how it goes. There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate sofas in their homes. I put little trust in such people. An expensive automobile may well be worth its price, but it's only an expensive automobile. If you have the money, you can buy it, anyone can buy it. Procuring a good sofa, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior sofa. That sofa among sofas.

p.s. haibanei reinmei are made after that novel and they are better than the novel