Haruki Murakami and His American Sources

Mystery in Murakami and Chandler  


  I've really enjoyed reading Murakami's short stories because he is able to really hone one what makes him so interesting and bizarre and make it more puzzling. In "Where I'm Likely to Find It," the reader only reads a couple pages of mystery and therefore the strangeness of Murakami's subjects ad events are that much more obvious. I appreciated Murakami's surreal-ness mixed into everyday life more in his other novels such as Sputnik Sweetheart and South of the Border West of the Sun than I did in A Wild Sheep Chase. Perhaps it is because those novels were later so Murakami had a stronger grasp on his craft. I felt at times that A Wild Sheep Chase knew where it was going but almost got a little bored with itself on the way and although everything that happened in the story was relevant plot-wise, it seemed to meander sometimes. In The Long Goodbye I had absolute confidence in Chandler the entire time I was reading the story that every detail was going to be resolved and we would be left with no questions. I thought Chandler made the red herring details as subtle as the large clues so that the reader was at his complete mercy. In A Wild Sheep Chase every detail was obvious in its importance from the beginning and the mystery was how the detail was important, not if a detail was important as in Chandler.