The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Can also be found on Goodreads.
I have mixed feelings about this book.
On the one hand, this is a typical Murakami book. Parallel worlds, lost love, jazz, spaghetti. Reading Murakami is like reading a dream. It gets close to reality, and then you read about unicorns and someone losing their shadow as if its a person, and you're back dreaming.
On the other hand, it's very long winded. Here and there something big happens, while the moat of the book describes trivial events. All in all it doesn't really matter if you didn't capture all these events, because the story doesn't have a clear start and ending anyway. If you are comfortable with that, this book is just for you.
This is not the first Murakami book I'm reading. During college I read Murakami's books alot, but I can barely recall any story (yes that could be my problem). I just remember the books being fun to read. His writing style has this playful element that makes any story fun. Even if that event wouldn't happen in the 'real world'.
I read the Dutch translation, so I looked into the work of the Dutch translator, Elbrich Fennema. I learned that the narrator has to make a lot of choices, because of the way Japanese is constructed. Fennema mentioned in an interview that she can't really ask anyone if a translation is correct. There's no one correcting her. She can ask Murakami, but she barely gets a response.
In one interview, Fennema explains how she met Murakami once, in Tokyo, and decided to ask him about a certain choice she made for a translation. Fennema translated a word into 'a Methapor', while she wasn't sure if it was singular or plural. Japanese doesn't have a clear distinction between the two. When she asked Murakami, he answered that it doesn't matter. To me, this means that Murakami doesn't care too much about explanations.
Most fiction has a clear story. A protagonist wants something. There is a reason, a cause and effect for why and how things happen. In this book, there isn't. In that regard, Murakami's books are one of its kind. It makes me question why we should care so much about the 'why' in the first place. Maybe Murakami is an existentialist, and he's trying to tell me, through 600+ pages, that things don't make sense anyway. Which is fine as long as you keep dreaming.