To sum up: A tale of unrequited loves, and of those who, despite deep and close friendships, remain alone—all of us.

“Somebody once said if it’s something a single book can explain, it’s not worth having explained…”

I often wonder how Murakami manages to make poetry while writing of contemporary life and emotions. The poetry that comes from the weaving of images and themes, which evolve, shift and change. His works are rooted very much in everyday life that subtly derails “normality” and reveals a kind of surrealism which is very refreshing & irreducibly strange.

Trying to write a review about his seductive, distinctive surreal Murakamian narrative is like trying to bottle fog. If you see, it is an easy to follow novel, at least at the beginning. He seems to fancy the idea of loneliness and the dark side of loving someone while being alone. What a weird theme to have!!!However, through K, Sumire and her eventual love interest, Miu, Murakami weaved a hauntingly beautiful story. It’s like all three characters are standing in one line, each looking at the back of the person and unable to make them turn back.

“All the wonderful things in life are often obscure. We try our best to disintegrate them into little meanings that would or could make sense to our lives not realizing that such things are best admired when left as is.”

We don’t always make the smartest choices with the people we hold most dear to us and our actions towards there are clunky even though in essence they were/are good intentions.

 “We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We’re connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”

Like I said it starts off as being a kind of triangle love story, but then turns into something completely different and completely surreal, which then propels us into a mysterious drama. Sometimes it’s just as easy to explain why a novel is wonderful: when you can see what a classy writer is doing with language and narrative and, though it may make you catch your breath, you’re not lost for words of your own to describe it. All too rarely, a different sort of novel altogether comes along. One that entertains captivates and energizes you, but, when you try to define its magic, just slithers away out of reach. How to begin to describe what it is or does? So I’ll come right out and say it: I don’t really know what’s startling about this!!!

Thus begins this novel by Murakami which muses upon the question of love. It’s about love and death and hits you straight in the heart.

“An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains—flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado’s intensity doesn’t abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be seventeen years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it all wound up. Almost.”

The three characters K, Sumire and Miu are impeccably realized, modern and real. Sumire is puzzling – represents a very rare group of free – spirited spontaneous individuals. I really liked Sumire’s character and could easily relate to her, she doesn’t quite fit in with traditional expectations but clearly she wants that but just doesn’t know how to bridge that gap between want and reality. She loves to write – about anything, everything, and nothing. She is one of the few characters that I have read and really felt like I KNEW how she felt, like I was reading ME at times. Sumire just draws you in throughout the book.

Miu is as charismatic to me as she is to Sumire and I’m sure her grace would intrigue a cat-like ( personally hate cats) interest in me, where I would just move around her feet and gaze at her wide-eyed. And K is very much in love with Sumire. He is attracted to her spirit and her passion as well as her eccentricities but she does not feel the same.

And Miu’s husband – A never-consummated relationship, a close relationship between one who is madly in love and another who has no such desire to take “that step,” is the source of great sadness and lonesomeness. I’ve not encountered a writer yet who writes of this as well as Murakami.

Throughout the story, the reader is presented with a number of transformations in identity and personal awareness. Often, the characters experience changes that alter their appearance and slowly, their identity, without knowing how to describe the reality of the situation. Sumire is constantly trapped in her own mind, her own world with no one around her who really understood her and even though she was able to articulate herself through writing….no one could decipher what it was she was trying to say exactly and that can be very alienating. The story follows this same kind of thinking….what it’s like to be alienated from everyone you know because no one can or wants to understand you….no one who you can identify with no one you can talk to, no one to interact with except the thoughts that come out in one scrambled signal that only you have the antenna to. It is very lonely but eventually someone tunes into your station and like Sumire you find someone who ‘gets’ you. Sumire’s problem is that she found the ‘right’ someone in her mind but Miu was not REALLY the right someone for her.

It leaves you with the sense that you have been dreaming. But as K says:

“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.”

The three of them are bound by baffling circumstances. The three of them love so desperately. And lose so painfully. It feels like waiting at a train station with all the trains whizzing past. The presence of their loneliness is not due to the absence of love; it is there because their loves pass each other and never really meet. However, even the unrequited love that surfaces in them can have a great impact on their lives.

“I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.”

As the telling spins and shifts through fantasies and realities, it slowly unfolds a magical lyrical tale that orbits around desire and loneliness. He seems interested in the paradox of a present continuous self, as well as an individual’s relationship with externality. It is as beautiful and light as a feather, and yet enduringly sad. I don’t really know what is new about this, but it has definitely touched me deeper and pushed me further than anything I’ve read in a long time. As a girl who is emotionally very sensitive I’m unsure whether a novel should bring tears to your eyes and pain in your heart but laying here alone in my room today that is what happened. He just sent me spinning, orbiting wildly like a lost SPUTNIK.

“Love all that is Murakami”

He is a master of creating sexually enigmatic characters who seek happiness and love but only from people who cannot reciprocate. Instead of a proper verdict, I would rather leave you with a quote which defines the novel more perfectly than any type of conclusion I could write:

“We were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.”