New Murakami

[jd]

I enjoyed Wind Up Bird Chronicle quite a bit for the most part but it
became obvious towards the end that he was writing "on the fly", in
that he didn't know from the beginning how to tie up all the loose
ends.  I saw him speak at MIT and he said that that was, in fact, how
he worked, so I'm not just lobbing baseless comments here.  It was
definitely evident, but up until maybe the last 70-100 pages I thought
the book was very, very good, and by the end I thought it was just
good.

On 6/24/06, jbor at bigpond.com <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/not-lost-in-translation/2006/06/22/
> 1150845292121.html
>
> Excerpt:
> [...] About to return to Harvard, Murakami imagines moving back to
> Japan permanently in a few years: "When I'm 60, I guess it will be time
> to settle down." Despite what Japan's most hidebound pundits argue,
> Murakami's writing has always been closer to his homeland than the
> fictional universes of Fitzgerald, Carver and Chandler. Occidental
> critics often compare him with postmodernists such as Don DeLillo and
> Thomas Pynchon. But in Japan, as Murakami tells it, "people do not
> think my stories are postmodern". [...]
>
> best
>
>