As noted in my previous and first entry, Real Combat, I’m interested in what Amalfitano, in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, calls “great, imperfect, torrential works.” It was therefore only natural that I were to eventually crack open the used, single-volume edition I had of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for far-too long.

I’d been reading Murakami chronologically, with a few skips—After Dark and Sputnik Sweetheart—and with Kafka on the Shore thoroughly devoured back in 2019, while attending a writing residency up in the Catskills, finding myself in an eerily-similar mountain cabin as Kafka Tamura, complete with an outhouse and zero running water—a strange coincidence that no doubt heightened my love of the novel—the time had finally come.

I was excited, but at the same time hesitant. I have mixed feelings about Murakami—his writing—as I’m sure you do, if literary Twitter is a decent enough gauge; opinion seems to have shifted over the past few years to the point where his failure to win the Nobel Prize yet again, even losing out to Abdulrazak Gurnah, who is definitely not as household a name (even a literary household), was almost expected. Did he miss his chance?

As noted above, I loved Kafka on the Shore. The same goes for Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but I share many of the same criticisms you’ll find highlighted elsewhere: poorly-written heroines, often needlessly sexualized, especially the teenagers among them. A sense of inherent misogyny. The repetition, which can come across as snobby—he can write as fast as he wants, revise as little as he wants, doesn’t need to worry about rejection—or just plain lazy. Pretentious, lovelorn men who always attract beautiful, younger women. I’d thus taken some time away from the author and his narrators, which often seem like cooler versions of himself, their parkas and windbreakers and tennis shoes and baseball caps and cups of water and cups of black coffee, only for the film adaptation of the short story, Drive My Car, to renew my interest and compulsion to pick up where I’d left off.

I’m someone who must finish a book or series once I’ve started it, so I try to choose wisely. I even forced myself through Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, which is among the worst pieces of fiction I’ve ever read (I’m talking about literature, and I’m picky, so it’s not like I’m comparing it to Fifty Shades of Gray. Still, this is no doubt an unpopular opinion I’ll face some backlash for. But hey, it’s my column, and I’m tired of pretending to like something or find it interesting just to stick with established thought, in this case that of literati or those posing as them. I don’t care if it’s Vonnegut, who made you want to get an MFA. He has far better work. I could be missing the point entirely. Why was Sirens so well received? Why is it still held in such high esteem? Perhaps it can be justified as satire, but that’s usually how bad writing is justified, and I found myself quite pained, insulted even, that he could get away with publishing, let alone winning awards for, something so poorly written—mockingly-so; did no one take notice?—when so much far-better stuff never sees the light of day. Obviously, Sirens is not the only book that arouses such sentiment. It’s a mystery how some stuff makes it to the shelves).

I’d also made the mistake of reading some of the reviews of 1Q84 beforehand, as I didn’t want to waste any time, considering it’s over a thousand pages long, and saw much of the same aforementioned criticism. It even won Literary Review‘s Bad Sex in Literature Award. And yes, that scene is atrocious. But let’s be honest: are Murakami’s sex scenes ever very good? Is that why we read him? Aren’t they meant to be at the very least weird?

The New York Times Magazine seems to think so. In their review cited in the frontpages, they talk of weird sex as if it were the natural byproduct of the novel encompassing the whole of Japan, as if weird sex, whatever that means exactly, isn’t a universal concept, or the author (and his team) isn’t catering towards an Americanized international market, perhaps American readers in particular. Regardless, sex scenes in general, whether in film or fiction, rarely seem necessary. They’re usually forced, like the author is fantasizing or feels compelled to add a selling point, the publishing (culture) industry in the back of their mind, its many voices, including those of the agent or editor, who might suggest just that, Add a little sex, wanting to make their own lives easier, forcing the extra work upon the author who struggles to keep up, to find that balance between what they want to write—Write for yourself, we’re told—and what the industry wants written. Art is becoming increasingly superficial as we follow our algorithms and the lowest common denominator, lowering it in the process.

1Q84 is undoubtedly imperfect. It’s undoubtedly torrential. Is it great? I’m not entirely sure—probably not, in the greater scheme of things, not just in the Murakami oeuvre—but that’s kind of the whole point; novels don’t need to be good or bad, great or terrible. They don’t need to be—shouldn’t be, the most enduring among them, anyway—so easily categorized, labeled, or summarized, even if that’s what the industry wants. What’s important is that books—their authors—strive in some way. They struggle, taking on themes and structures and perspectives and plots difficult or impossible to pull off; it’s fiction after all. They lay the groundwork for later works, or the works of other authors, who see in them something they can harness, refute, react to. Maybe I can pull that off! Maybe my voice needs to be heard. More perfect executions, like Norwegian Wood, don’t offer the same thing, even if they offer wonder and inspiration and beauty, and put words— images, scenes, dialogue—to sentiments that left you at a loss for them.

What separates good or mediocre and great artists is that the latter seek to change and evolve. In order to do just that, to progress and push art and culture and society and thought and civilization forward, as they must, as is their duty, artists should be allowed to take risks. They should be allowed to fail and fall. And we readers and observers and consumers of art should be allowed to see the failures and falls, scratches and all. We should be unsettled by the gore and sickened by the stench, to bring back Bolaño, and see if they get up afterwards.

Does Murakami? I’ve not yet read his later books, so I’m not sure, but Drive My Car, the film at least, is something special, and imperfect in a manner that gilds its beauty, to use the appropriate metaphor of kintsugi, marking it as Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s greatest film, and the director as a true great artist. But it seems like agents and editors, to return to the literary world, even the most indie among them, are determined to whitewash the process. Grant us only the perfect. Or their version of the perfect: often the most sellable. Grant us the Parthenon, the one we see today, the iconic, fifth-century BC iteration of; it’s all a strange act of censorship that doesn’t take into account the church with its unique spiral-staircase tower that was later built over the site (and demolished), or the Frankish tower and mosque thereafter (also demolished). It’s like nationalism, the mythos of a one true people.

Murakami, like Vonnegut and indeed all famous authors, can pretty much publish anything he writes, even something that, like Sirens of Titan, were it to be written by a debut author, would be immediately discarded or left to rot in the slush: the preferable form of rejection these days. This is frustrating, of course. Unfair. But at least the former doesn’t seem to take this entirely for granted. In 1Q84, he doesn’t mock his readers, or simply provide exactly what they want. He disappoints by not sticking to his proven formula, as many famous writers would, and indeed do. He doesn’t churn out book twenty-two of series eight, coauthored and ghost-authored, Jeff Kooned to the fullest; hello, Robert Patterson. He tries the third person, and loses himself in the wrong details and uncharacteristic conversations, forcing connections that don’t quite work, rethinking and rewriting what seemed previously settled on, embodying his philosophy that “a narrative takes its own direction, and continues on, almost automatically,” even if that direction is the wrong one. He’s fine with that, knowing, “Writers have to keep writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.”

That atrocious sex scene, the lazy writing, the overwriting, the repetition, as if it was being serialized; why didn’t the editors go to town on this? They let him get away with far too much, perhaps, or he left too much up to them, and they were too afraid to do their job, to sully the supposed sacred. But at least they gave us something truly imperfect, signs that Murakami was at least trying, wrestling, perhaps, with his own celebrity, unafraid of dismantling it—fear is art’s greatest enemy, as it is society’s—even if the result was his greatest fall, down into a literary, dark dank well, as one of his harsher critics notes.

Again: does Murakami get up? Does he mature as a result? I’ll leave that to those who’ve read his later works, or to myself once I’ve done so. I think I’ll start with Drive My Car,and the rest of that collection, Men Without Women. But I admire what appears to be courage nonetheless, an attempt at change, at maturity, regardless of what came with it: geez, that sex scene was bad. I let myself fall with him, briefly, into a world of two moons, leaving the one-mooned one briefly behind, knowing, unlike the narrators and the character lost in the cat town, I could eventually climb my way out.