Pynchon's coffee and open-ended endings in Murakami

[Mark Kohut]

About none of the reviewers/journalists/readers I've read on his new one
have remarked that the unresolved (in a key element) ending cannot
help but remind one of the ending of The Crying of Lot 49.....

AND, there are two coffee-related remarks in COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI

1) "coffee, which separates day and night"....(night/dark/shadow
selves pretty important in Murakami)

2) our protagonist has his culminating encounter over coffee in a
handmade mug with an old friend who has become a potter.
"The cream-colored mug was handmade. it was a strange shape, with a
distorted handle, but was easy to hold, with a familiar feel to it,
like a
family's inside joke......My oldest daughter made that mug".........
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l