It's not hard to understand the lure of Murakami's work: it's very easy to read, yet reading him still earns one more respect than reading, say, Chuck Palahniuk. Is it because we (outside of Japan) are conscious of the work as translated text that we forgive the thudding banalities of Murakami's récit ("Shimamoto was a large girl, about as tall as I was, with striking features. I was certain that in a few years she would be gorgeous.")?

Miller cites the following line (from a larger excerpt) as evidence of the charm of Murakami’s style: "…sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. ... They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that are never spoken are no longer words." But I’d argue that there’s as much to be irritated in that passage as there is to be charmed by, since, in any case deeper than a skimmed reading, the sentence reveals itself to be smoothly meaningless.

Meaningless in a way that Murakami specializes in. I’d call him a genius at impregnating the innocuous with implications of depth, and of spinning dead-end narrative threads that read deceptively like a writer making it all up as he goes along, but for the obvious fact that he isn’t a genius, and, often, he really is making it up as he goes along. And what depths the deep-as-lamination prose evokes are evoked in no small part because he’s Japanese, so we (non-Japan-acculturated readers) expect (and project) a little literary Zen; a little inscrutable mysterioso. In many ways similar to French semioticians analysing Cher Maitre Jerry in the belief that a prat fall is so much more than a prat fall. But it isn’t.

All clever writers have a technique or two for getting the reader to finish the job at hand...the riddle technique, the longing technique (‘give the protagonist a tooth ache’), or a conflation of both (good old suspense), etc. Murakami has to be given credit for perfecting the ‘this story can’t be as simple-minded as it seems, so I’ll keep reading until the twist kicks in’ technique. Of that he is a master. A sample from his ‘The Folklore of Our Times’:

"Now let me tell you about the girls. About the mixed-up sexual relations between us boys, with our brand new genitals, and the girls, who at the time were, well, still girls.

"But, first, about virginity. In the sixties, virginity held a greater significance than it does today. As I see it - not that I've ever conducted a survey - about 50% of the girls of my generation were no longer virgins by the age of 20. Or, at least, that seemed to be the ratio in my general vicinity. Which means that, consciously or not, about half the girls around still revered this thing called virginity.

"Looking back now, I'd say that a large portion of the girls of my generation, whether virgins or not, had their share of inner conflicts about sex. It all depended on the circumstances, on the partner. Sandwiching this relatively silent majority were the liberals, who thought of sex as a kind of sport, and the “conservatives, who were adamant that girls should stay virgins until they were married.

"Among the boys, there were also those who thought that the girl they married should be a virgin.

"People differ, values differ. That much is constant, no matter what the period. But the thing about the sixties that was totally unlike any other time is that we believed that those differences could be resolved."

And so on. Perhaps it's wry in the original.

If Benjamin Kunkel had written ‘Norwegian Wood’ (and had managed to get it published), they’d still be scraping bits of him off of the New York Times book review. Imagine Philip Roth writing and then actually publishing ‘The Folklore of Our Times'...you’d wonder what was wrong with the current state of fiction. A given text can’t really be gold under one byline and straw under another. The difference is supra-literary. It's kinda like cheating.

I like Murakami, and though I think I give him more credit than you do, there are still weaknesses in his work, and even at his best I consider him an enjoyable light read rather than a great novelist (as Miller would have it). I enjoy his playing around with pop culture without getting arty about it, and his pop existentialism. There's a Robert Coover quality to him (granted, if he possesses the jewelled style of Coover, it does not come through in translation), and I'd guess a little Julio Cortazar as well. But he's more M.C. Escher than Pablo Picasso, if you know what I mean.

That Escher vs Picasso riff is an apt analogy, actually.

I'd responded with a "Thanks" but I must have not pushed the "Publish My Letter" button because it never showed up. Don't know if you still check back here time to time, but I thought I'd give it another shot anyway.

How odd that only two people have commented. I suppose Murakami's star is falling.