How I Read Murakami

The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is having a popular resurgence thanks to the recent publication of an English translation of his latest work, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, as well as a new translation of Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, one of his previous books that has many of the same thematic elements and settings as his newest release (down to sharing its structure of the books chapters being split between the real world and the City). Murakami is an interesting author to me because, while his books are not particularly difficult to read, people tend to view them as inscrutable. The magical realist elements, the interiority of his main characters, and the meandering sidetracks that his novels sometimes take are certainly part of the reason. I think, though, that people expect to read Murakami like they read other novelists. However, I would like to suggest that there’s a stylistic change that readers themselves can bring that makes his works more enjoyable and accessible.

Simply put, I read Murakami the same way I listen to jazz music. Jazz at its best and most virtuosic is about playing at your will within the confines of the song you find yourself in. The band can’t change the tune, but they can improvise within its confines. As a listener, you listen to see how the musicians play with material they’re given. The same song, played by a different band (or even just in a different club on a different night) can turn out very differently.

Murakami’s characters find themselves in bizarre and unchangeable environments, and we get to watch them (and the author) improvise within those confines. In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, one of these major confining aspects is quite literal: the walls of the city itself. We are informed early in the book that the walls are impenetrable and indestructible and that no one who enters the city ever leaves it again.

Of course, the main character is already inside the city. Now what?

This is a consistent theme in Murakami’s work: doing what you can in a world that seems impossible to change. Your solo can take any shape you like, as long as it fits the chord progression, which is immutable.

This same pattern exists between Murakami’s books as well. He is famous for reusing tropes, characters, plot points, and patterns between books, yet each book feels fresh in the way that he uses them. I can hear a thousand different recordings of “Caravan” and the solos and progression of the themes can always sound new, because each one is doing something different with the same melody, same chords, and same structure.

I don’t think it’s incidental, then, that Murakami, in his youth, ran a jazz bar with his wife in Sendagaya in Tokyo. His love for jazz is evident in his books, not only in how many times it’s mentioned, but the very structure of them. Characters will repeat actions over and over again. Locations will reoccur within and between books. But each time the characters will improvise in new ways that seem to make sense to them. These improvisations will often draw on themes created by other characters or be informed by what another character has said or done, like a motif being passed between soloists and developed over the course of a song.

The chord progression is the same but the soloist is free to do whatever they want within it.

I think the best way to read Murakami is to start with any of his popular books and to read your first Murakami book for tone and style. Look for the flow of the characters and how they move through the world. Pay attention to how they try to make sense of it based on what they learn from one another. Enjoy his simple, melodic prose (the swinging eighth notes of his book that serve to set the pace). Pay attention to the repetition and how the characters improvise. Look for themes, objects, or actions to crop up again and again and see how they get played with by the various characters thrown into these impossible, magical situations.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls, being a simpler book than some of his others, is a fine place to start. If you like it, I’d suggest trying The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Wild Sheep Chase next. So dive in, keep your ears open, and see where the characters’ improvisation takes you.