Where to start with Murakami
Norwegian Wood begins with memory, love, music, and rooms you can stand in; his stranger worlds make more sense afterward.
Cats, wells, and parallel worlds are all you know of Murakami, or the surreal novels have kept you at a distance.
Starting with Kafka on the Shore or Wind-up Bird, getting carried by the surrealism, and concluding that Murakami is a writer of dreamlike weirdness with cats. He is — but the weirdness is doing emotional work that only registers if you have already met the loneliness it is sitting on top of. Skip the realist door and the magic looks like decoration; read the realist door first and the magic looks like the only honest way the loneliness could be written.
Books in order
- Norwegian Wood — Read it slowly. Note how almost nothing surreal happens — and how Murakami's full emotional range is already there, in the music, the silences, the conversations that almost manage to say what they mean. This is the Murakami the later weirdness is built on; meet him here first.
- Kafka on the Shore — Two storylines, one boy running from a prophecy and one old man who can talk to cats. Read the chapters slowly; the surrealism does precise emotional work, and the novel only resolves emotionally — never logically — because the form is the argument that some kinds of grief can only be approached sideways.
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — Murakami at full length and full ambition — wells, missing wives, the Manchurian war, an entire neighbourhood Tokyo. Read it after Kafka has earned your trust in his procedure; the novel is sometimes diffuse, often haunted, and it carries the surrealist method to its hardest test.
Further reading
- Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche — Murakami's nonfiction book — interviews with survivors of the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack and, in the second half, with members of the cult that carried it out. Read it after the surrealist novels; it is the unexpected key to the whole project, and the surrealism in the fiction is sharper once you have read the writer trying to give shape to a real piece of public horror in his own city.
- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running — Murakami's small memoir on running, writing, and the long project of staying in shape for both. Read it as the lightest, most direct piece of writing about his actual working life; it is neither realist nor surreal, just a working novelist's notebook on what the discipline costs.
- Dance Dance Dance — Functionally a sequel to an earlier trilogy you have not read, and most rewarding when its echoes have somewhere to land. Save it for after the major novels, where it works as a coda rather than an introduction.