Word: okada
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...find the image...I'm thirty, I'm standing still, and I can't find the image." This is not only the narrator's affliction, but Japan's as well. After quitting his job at a law firm, Toru Okada spends most of the time loafing around the house--until he begins to receive a series of phone calls from a mysterious woman. This begins the search for a missing cat (yep, that's right) and Okada's identity. Okada must soon contend with his wife's desertion, the lost cat and a host of zany characters, including...
...felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel, that someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal," says Okada. While the story does has some surreal flashes, it is anything but unreal or badly written. Murakami's characters, though almost all off-kilter in some way, are never so ridiculous that they become unbelievable...
Murakami moves effortlessly between surreal comedy and tragedy. In one of his most striking and sparsely rendered passages, aging veteran Tokutaro Mamiya comes to visits Okada and describes in graphic detail how he watched a friend get skinned alive by a Mongolian soldier. This encounter is followed by one of the funniest episodes of the book, in which Okada and his Lolita-esque neighbor travel to Tokyo to take inventory of its bald inhabitants...
...narrative strands. "You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down...When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries. If everything dries up, the world is darkness." This is the philosophy impressed upon Okada by Mr. Honda, an elderly psychic with a weird fascination with phlegm. This analogy, intended to emphasize the nature of Okada's adventures in existential wackiness, is repeated throughout the novel ad nauseum. Although it's meant to serve to focus the book's many themes, it seems jarringly unoriginal...
...translated into the latest vernacular by Jay Rubin), Murakami delivers a synoptic reading of all the ills of modern Japan, from crooked real estate deals to two-dimensional media men to a wonderfully true, Sprite-drinking 16-year-old girl who works in a rural wig factory. And as Okada floats through his planless days, he experiences every postmodern malady, from unwanted phone-sex calls to--the ultimate heartbreak--an E-mail "conversation" with his lost wife. These contemporary scenes of listlessness and drift are thrown into the strongest relief by gripping, graphic accounts of atrocities during...