Amongst the most avid readers I know, there's a fairly even split between loving and hating. I suppose the most recent view was Syntaxfree's comment on her post "Canon Falls" where she mentions that one of the books she didn't get through was Murakami. I managed to get through it and came away with mixed emotion. When I tried to puzzle this out, I realised that the book reminded me of something... Ganguro!
I realise I may have managed to alienate every Murakami fan out there, but there is substance behind this claim. First of all, more than anything, Murakami is very, very Japanese. I was thrilled by references to Lawson, the Nakano prefecture and other familiarities. Next up is how overtly sexualised the tale is, without being sexy. I kept wondering how precise Japanese was, whether the translator was being wholly accurate when choosing to use "cock" instead of "penis". It looks totally different under google translate, though I suspect that isn't using the vernacular for cock (I also note that the characters for penis are the chinese ones, which means the word is fancy).
The third thing that Murakami has in common with Ganguro is utter randomness. Although the analogies worked, and I could see the morality/amorality he was driving at, some of the examples were somewhat extreme. Case in point, the massacre of a dozen cats (well, less, but conceptually). If he was more inclined toward GBH than catburglary he'd probably have used the bayoneting of children (see the WWII reference that I have no way of knowing is true or false? Am I reaching?) instead, but that probably wouldn't spur much debate since everyone is supposed to love children, but some people are allergic to cats.
The final example for today would be idology. Subsets of ganguro allegedly dress like the hag in Japanese folklore (who clearly would have had dayglo clothing, suck on that Kanye), who I'm guessing is popular in Japanese culture. Also popular in Japanese culture are Johnnie Walker and Col. Sanders, who both feature in the tale.
What say you? Does my Murakami-esque analogy work?
1 comment:
absolutely - i loved the randomness of it all and when i was done i said it was very japanese even though before i read it i wouldnt have been able to describe to you what being very japenese meant. anyways, you get my drift. loved it, can't wait for book club.
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