Up until this point far I’ve read two novels by Haruki Murakami (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and After Dark) and one by Ryu Murakami (Piercing) and I’m beginning to notice a sinister underlying theme with these Japanese authors.
Paper.jpg)
Firstly, you cannot doubt the dark angle and twist of the stories involved. There is some sick twisted element to all of it which makes it both enticing but revolting at the same time. Secondly, the characters are always normal people with some deep flaw or tortured soul or whatever else it is which makes them 1) act really weird and 2) have some crazy, CRAZY thoughts.
After reading Haruki’s work and all the reviews, etc. I was intrigued and thought the books were ‘cool’ in that underbelly-of-society type of way… but after that, when all the books I’m reading by them tend to be about generally some sort of excessively deviant behaviour and just plain weird shit, I’m starting to question what the point of it all really is.
I do want a point, a moral, a lesson… something I can learn from it apart from being thoroughly freaked out by these crazy motherfuckers these authors seem to come up with.
I think I’ll try one more by Haruki before trying some other sub-cultural authors for different countries. Stieg Larsson (Swedish) also had some crazy elements but at least his work had a golden thread of a story to follow through to the end.
One thing I have to admit is the breadth of imagination these guys seem to have, albeit towards the fringes of darkness and insanity, I’m wondering if a similar movement of authors are available focusing on the more… positive side of life. The search begins.
“Perhaps most famously, Gibson wrote Neuromancer without the aid of a computer, and indeed, without knowing much about computers at all. This ignorance led to a lesson that every scifi writer, fan and everybody else should learn: your knowledge might be crippling your imagination. Gibson was free to imagine virtual social networks and complex visual interfaces primarily because he had no reason to think otherwise.” — Avi Abrams, 
