My first Murakami novel: mini-review

I read 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland & The End of the World' earlier this year. I hadn't heard of Haruki Murakami until last year, and then it seemed like all of a sudden he was being mentioned everywhere. I heard enough about his style to be interested, even though I don't normally read fantasy-type novels.

I really enjoyed it. The alternating chapters skip between a world where the protagonist gets drawn into strange events in the Tokyo underground and a strange isolated walled city where nothing quite seems right. Murakami gradually reveals more about how these worlds are related with little drips of information from time to time throughout the book, and by the end you come to find out how they fit together. All very satisfying. The chapter titles themselves are fun too.

The thing that stands out most, perhaps, is the vast cultural intelligence Murakami displays. He drops references to western culture liberally around the pages, in a way that impresses rather than annoys. It seems to be relevant, and the references link in to themes in the book, such as music and the flow of consciousness. The other notable feature is his apparent taste for the bizarre. Unicorns, strange subterranean creatures, and jazz albums are prolific here. There is a blur between extraordinary but scientific reveries and occasional dips into more mysterious concepts. In particular, a major theme is the brain. Without wanting to give too much away, the book pivots around the idea that a professor has managed to wire new circuitry into some people's heads, and that this affects their subconscious in various predictable and unpredictable ways.

A gripe: it annoyed me the way he referred to one character continually as 'the chubby girl', even though this was a major character throughout the book. It just seemed a bit off.

However, there were so many things to like in this novel, it was definitely a winner. My favourite passage was the following: [SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT]

"Next thing I did was t'read your black box into the computer pre-programmed with those patterns, and out came an amazin' graphic renderin' of what went on in your core consciousness. Naturally, the images were jumbled and fragmentary and didn't mean much in themselves. They needed editin'. Cuttin' and pastin', tossin' out some parts, resequencin', exactly like film editin'. Rearrangin' everything into a story."
"A story?"
"That shouldn't be so strange," said the Professor. "The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for colour and shape. Mental phenomena are the stuff writers make into novels. It's the same basic logic. Of course, as encephalodigital conversion, it doesn't represent an accurate mappin'...."

Overall, I would definitely read more Murakami, and I would recommend him too.