Closing Thoughts

When I first read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, the very first Murakami book I touched, I was enthralled. His rich imagining of a corner of history I was unfamiliar with, the aggressively mundane but endearing main character, the countless plot developments and characters that just kind of made me tilt my head and go "huh"? I was worried for a time that the more I read of Murakami, the less his magical little worlds would impress me. Hard Boiled Wonderland failed to grip me the way it seemed most readers, and I wondered whether Murakami was just a one trick pony. I haven't really found that to be the case after taking this class, however. There's plenty of similarities in his work, from character archetypes to specific images, and yet I think Murakami has managed to keep writing without getting stale. There's a real sense of maturity, a confidence of voice, that I find in novels like Wind Up Bird and Tsukuru Tazaki that I don't feel as strongly in A Wild Sheep Chase. I've really enjoyed getting to explore Murakami's voice in his short stories, in the works that inspired him, in the strange little films that have been made based off his work. It's shown me that even though Murakami largely retells the same couple stories over and over, he's able to find new ways to do it, and that there's something that remains impossible to nail down about his writing after all these years.