Melissa Freeman, NCL, Technology Services Librarian. Haruki Murakami is a postmodern Japanese writer who is frequently described as being a surrealist and melancholic. Fans of Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, Mikhail Bulgakov, Milan Kundera, and Chuck Palahniuk will find a kindred spirit in Murakami.

Classical music fans will adore his gentle weaving of musical references into his writing. If you are the type of person who likes to have music on while reading, your playlists are created for you. His relatable characters are flawed, and therefore perfect and value solitude and freedom (just like mountain folk!).

I first heard of him from a friend who shared the same train commute as I did back in Texas. She had a glimmer in her eye and a dreamy distance to her words when describing Murakami’s novels that assured me that she was onto something good.

Murakami’s recent novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage left me absolutely awestruck. I’ve been a fan of his for several years now, but it hit me hard this past week. I found myself tracing and retracing paragraphs with a heavy heart and uncertain tears in my eyes. He gives me a sense of being overwhelmed in the beauty of universal truth as he writes about things that we are afraid to talk about. What racing feelings we might darkly scribble out in our diaries like they never existed, he wears bravely and explores deeply.

In Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, the protagonist Tazaki is prompted to seek to understand his abandonment after living in pain for half of his life, so that he may forge intimacy from the remaining shards of his confidence. Don’t be fooled into believing that this is a happy novel that teaches you a lesson, nor believe that it is anything else either.

Murakami doesn’t offer a guarantee of resolution in any of his novels, and I’m not going to be the one to spoil that for you.

Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet to “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” Murakami embodies this effortlessly and demonstrates it every time he picks up a pen.

My own attraction to Murakami’s writing is best described through the words of his character Tazaki when he concludes, “One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility.” His captured pain and fragility speak to my own, and that reassurance of humanity and connection is priceless.

Check out a novel from Haruki Murakami by visiting the Nederland Community Library in person, or visit the digital book collection online. For help in downloading e-Books or for more book recommendations, come see me at the library during Tech Tuesdays from 2-3pm each week.