So, I've just started reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I read A Wild Sheep Chase sometime last year, and this book seems quite similar: breezy, almost detached prose, with this pervasive feeling of...oddness, which eventually turns into overt bizarre-ness, and yet somehow keeps a feeling of the everyday. On the surface, things are fairly ordinary: the husband is unemployed, the cat is missing, they have a fight about tissues that is really about the husband not paying attention to his wife. But you can tell that everything will turn upside-down and mystical and freaky fairly soon. I'm only about 30 pages into it, but I'm enjoying it so far.
There's one odd similarity between the two books that I've noticed already: a fixation on women's ears. They seem to be mentioned quite a bit, and a woman's perfectly shaped ear played a major part in A Wild Sheep Chase. Is this a cultural thing? I mean, I suppose that people can have ear fetishes or fixations or what have you anywhere in the world, and maybe this is just the author's thing. But maybe ears are a sexier body part in Japan than they are here. I'd be interested to find out.
Posted by thevieve at August 2, 2005 9:50 AM