Tokyo Blues is the third book I read one of my authors fetish, Murakami. And although I hate to say it, is that I disliked so far. You do not have the magic of Kafka on the shore , or South of the border, west of the sun . It is much darker, more frightening, because the characters are lost and can not find their way and leave behind the ghosts that haunt them. However, despite the above, the reader gets caught in that atmosphere so typical that only Murakami is able to weave. There are paragraphs that hypnotize the senses, as if we entered into a Japanese room, we sat relaxed on the mat, and we were to meditate. The author takes us to an urban landscape, the city of Tokyo, which, however, there is no room for stress or rush. Life flows and the characters swim in it, in a quiet environment that surrounds us page after page. The story is told as a long flashback. Watanabe, thirty-seven, lands in a German airport before leaving the plane heard through the speakers Norwegian Wood, a Beatles song that evokes his student days in the sixties. The chain of memories begins with a hypnotic ride through a meadow with the beautiful Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend, Kizuki, which becomes the first major love in the life of Watanabe. This will face a severe blow that will make you suddenly enter into adulthood, when Kizuki decides to take his life with only 17. This will mark a before and after in the life of Watanabe, a young moody and solitary always drag the memory of what happened to Kizuki:
"Until then I had intended to die as an independent existence, separate full of life." One day death will take your hand. But until the day we catch it we will be free. " I thought so. It seemed a logical reasoning. Life is on this edge, death in the other. We are here, not here. From the night he died Kizuki, I was unable to conceive of death (and life) in a manner so simple. Death is not opposed to life. The death had been Implicit in my being from the beginning. And this was a fact, though I tried, I could not forget. That night in May, when death was Kizuki at seventeen years, was a part of me. "
Meanwhile the fragile Naoko, a character beloved by sadness and sweetness that carries with Murakami portrays it, is even more lost than Watanabe, and mental ill health makes it extremely vulnerable. Watanabe, love it, fight to protect and remove the pit in which he seems to have been submerged. The relationship between the two is, in my opinion, the most beautiful part of the novel.
Murakami's portrait ago youth has little to do with the image that the literature we often give them. Watanabe behaves almost as an adult in many ways, but sometimes seems lost, it moves aimlessly, not knowing where his steps will be taken. Sex is a very important presence throughout the novel, Murakami serves to contrast the behavior of Watanabe, who does not renounce the fleeting relationships but can not find in them the comfort they need, and your friend Nawasaga a young promiscuous sex lives as a philosophy of life, feeling as necessary to keep alive his bulging ego. On the other hand the suffering appears as one of the forced learning that we all have to face some time in their life. The importance of pain as an obstacle to be overcome to move forward appears very evident in reflections like this: "Knowing the truth does not alleviate the sadness we feel at losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity neither the strength nor the baby are able to heal the sadness. The only thing you can do is go through that pain hoping to learn something from him, but all one has learned not serve for anything the next time you visit the sadness suddenly. "
is curious that this novel was published in Spain in 2005 after Murakami was already an established writer after the publication of Bird Chronicle winds the world, Sputnik , my love and South of the Border, West of the Sun . However in reality was the first of these he wrote, in 1987, and it was precisely the overwhelming success of this novel that made the writer to leave his country, first to Europe and then America, where he currently resides.
again abundant in the novel are references to a wide variety of songs from the 60's, both jazz and pop culture. In fact, one of them, Norwegian Wood (Norwegian Wood), is the full title of the novel and, as I mentioned above, which leads the river of memories of the young Watanabe. I leave here a youtube video where you can listen and read the letter. What better way to end a review of Murakami?
More reviews of works by Haruki Murakami:
- South of the Border, West of the Sun
- Kafka on the shore
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