For me, conversations about Murakami inevitably contain some variation of this sentence:
I don’t really like his writing style, but I feel like he’s trying to communicate something deeply important.
I just finished 1Q84, completing all of Murakami’s novels translated into English. Looking back, I think the claim that his works are just rehashes of the same story is a fair one. Wistful person loses somebody, has encounters with elements of the “other side,” indulges in some combination of jazz/classical music/Cutty Sark/cats/unsatisfying sexual encounters. A lot of his novels repeat these motifs.
However, I don’t believe that the rehash argument is valid as criticism. Murakami writes because writing is a form of expression and he is going to keep writing the same book until he captures that “something” and fills in that void.
And that’s really what this “something” is — an engulfing sense of loss or recognition of emptiness. These losses can be as life-changing as the death of loved ones or as mundane as feeling bored at work.
In modern society, our “gains” (success, food, sex) are increasingly superficial, and fail to compensate for the heaviness of personal loss. What Murakami does is restore the magic, the childhood wonder, the almost spiritual importance of everyday activities.
