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Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami

The Murakami binge¹ continues with one of the more bleakly depressing books I've read in a while. This is mainly because I avoid depressing books, except that all of the Murakami books are depressing in that cloudy, rainy, "poignant" (I hate that word) Japanese way.

This book is all about ill-defined apprehension. I kept waiting for the supernatural element, present in the Murakami books read to date, to manifest. I kept waiting for the horrible realisation that was foreshadowed quite darkly from early on. I kept waiting for the reckoning that seemed due for some of the behavior and attitude criticised in the book. It's almost like reading a Stephen King book, except there, you know demons are going to crawl out and eat the brain of the nearest five year old. In this book, the fear is atmospheric.

Some of these apprehensions came to pass, some did not. The supernatural element was confined to the natural supernatural, if that exists. I.e., the phantoms of mental illness, whether via the clear physiology of brain tumors or clinical depression. All the ghosts are internal, of the sort where a gear may have several missing teeth -- when those non-teeth come around in their cycle to the point where they fail to mesh with the teeth of an adjacent gear, anything can happen. From a simple, sliding, skip that has no noticeable effect, to a horrendous misapplication of torque that shatters the movement, to a subtle malfunctioning that causes a pernicious problem somewhere seemingly unrelated.

I read most of this book dreading what was going to come next. I really don't like books such as this in general, and the meta-brain kept telling myself that it was odd that not only couldn't I put this book down (ok, I took a break to read Terry Pratchett's new book to avoid carrying a hardbound book onto the plane), but I was really enjoying it, if a word such as "enjoy" can be used in the sense of "engrossed in the bloody naked slide down a sheet of unlubricated metal, slowing tearing away thin, thin layers of flesh."

It's an odd little romantic book about how effed up people are, how simple complex people can appear to be, how something such as 'love' can mean forty bazillion things to forty bazillion minus one people. While the book lacks much of a plot and substitutes almost impressionistic vignettes of the various characters' lives, it's spare and perfect and completely confusing at the end.

No, really, I have no idea what that ending means.

¹ I bought Dance Dance Dance on a trip to the local B&N because the back cover sounded appropriately (and accurately) surreal and absurd, which are two words that have the same effect as "chocolate and peanut butter" or "warm and wet". Before finishing the book, I ordered everything Murakami was selling on Amazon.