The first Murakami novel I read was Kafka on the Shore. It was unlike anything I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d read before, and to my 9th-grade mind it was bogglingly fresh. I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite sure I liked it, I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite sure what I felt about it. The book, like so many of Murakami\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s works, falls under the genre of magical realism, juxtaposing fantastical elements with the narrative. The plot (the central plot) follows a Japanese boy Kafka through a journey and traces the people he meets along the way. <\/p>\n
I should probably insert a disclaimer here that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not a diehard, religious Murakami fanatic\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI enjoy his works, I keep up with his new ones, but I have yet to read every single novel he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s published so far. And to be completely honest, his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was far from my liking. But Murakami\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s writing has a strange way of drawing me back in time and time again, and I have yet to tire of it. <\/p>\n
Over the summer I picked up a copy of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage as soon as it came out, and I loved it\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI agreed with many of the reviews that mentioned how this may be his best work of date. Of the ones I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve read so far, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the most colorful (pun absolutely intended) of Murakami\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s novels, but the subtlety in the way he utilizes all the tropes he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s known for makes the book succeed. And let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s face it, Murakami is famous for having tropes\u00e2\u20ac\u201dso famous that the New York Times made a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcMurakami Bingo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/a> when the new book came out. <\/p>\n Right now I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m working on After Dark with the Bingo board in hand, crossing off these elements whenever they appear. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know where the story will lead, but that makes it even better.<\/p>\n To be continued. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first Murakami novel I read was Kafka on the Shore. It was unlike anything I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d read before, and to my 9th-grade mind it was bogglingly fresh. I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite sure I liked it, I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite sure what I felt about it. The book, like so many of Murakami\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s works, falls under the genre […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":195,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5709"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/195"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5710,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5709\/revisions\/5710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}