This book is the ultimate bible for the biggest Haruki Murakami fans! Written by one of Murakami’s translators, Jay Rubin, it gave a structured overview onto the years from where Haruki Murakami started and where he got to with time. It went as far as even recapping the content of every book written by Murakami up until the publication date of this book in 2012. If you’ve been longing for a new book touching upon Murakami’s world, this might be the right pick for your next read.

Murakami knows how stories are told – and heard. He is sensitive to the rhythms of exchange between teller and listener, and is conscious enough of the mechanics of this process to recreate it – which he often does – in a fictional setting.

p. 5

The first warning straight away though, I felt like you would have needed to have read all of Murakami’s books to truly enjoy this one. Even though this was the case for me, I have read so many of them so long ago, that I couldn’t remember all the details anymore. At times, too much of the plot of the novels was revealed for you to properly enjoy it, if you were intending on reading some of them in the near future. This is where the only ★ reduction came from for me. I expected the book to give even more insights into the translator’s work or ideally, into Haruki Murakami’s work, and be less about the evident things, as in, what Murakami’s books are about. Nevertheless, the majority of it had fascinating little insights like the one below sprinkled throughout. This is why I ended up changing my initial rating of 3/5★ and finally settling for 4/5★ instead.

To be sure, Murakami’s long fictional works succeed in drawing the reader in for the duration of unique and often mind-altering journeys. They have the paradoxical magic of novels in that they force the reader to rush through many pages towards an end that is dreaded because the reader will be evicted from their mesmerizing worlds by the turn of the last page.

p. 263

I loved reading about how the author got to writing, under which circumstances he started working on his first book, how he managed to already publish so many novels during his lifetime and the perseverance it takes to produce such a significant amount of writing! It was really satisfying to find out about Murakami’s literary influences and it really was an “aha” moment, seeing how these rubbed off on his style. What I also found this book really helpful for, was to understand in which order to read Murakami’s books. This is a question that I often get myself and it becomes completely clear that they should be read in their original chronological order of publication in order to get a feeling for how the author’s style developed throughout the years. This was also a point where your curiosity got really satiated, when you read through explanations on why some of Murakami’s books are written in a specific style.

The most time I could ever squeeze out of a day was an hour or, at the most, two. This is the reason my first novel has very short sentences and chapters. […] [T]he main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

p. 30

Elsewhere Murakami has written on style: “At first, I tried writing realistically, but it was unreadable. So then I tried redoing the opening in English. I translated that into Japanese and worked on it a little more. Writing in English, my vocabulary was limited, and I couldn’t write long sentences. So that way a kind of rhythm took hold, with relatively few words and short sentences.”

p. 36

This is a book that I see myself going back towards, re-reading certain parts as I will be re-reading Murakami’s novels at some point. I think that it does have tremendous value of giving an overview over the author’s essence, Murakami being someone who doesn’t usually share that much about himself as a person and an author. Even if the last Murakami novels were not my favourite ones, the author has a very special place in my heart and I’ll keep on reading whatever he publishes next. To finish off the review, this phrase explained this phenomenon best within the book:

I believe in the power of the story. I believe in the power of the story to arouse something in our spirits, in our minds – something that has been handed down to us from ancient times. John Irving once said that a good story is like a narcotic fix. If you can inject a good one into the readers’ veins, they’ll get the habit and come back to you for the next one, no matter what the critics have to say.

p. 82

★★★★☆ (4/5)

_{Edition: ISBN 978-0-099-45544-8
Vintage, 2012}