Since I have been taking a bit of a break from writing, I’ve
been catching up on my fiction reading this past month. First I tackled Harumi
Murakami’s The Windup Bird Chronicles.
I read this book more than ten years ago and remembered loving it, so I was pleased
when my book club suggested it. Oddly, other than a scene where a character is
stuck in a dry well, I remembered very little about it.
I looked forward to reading The Windup Bird Chronicles again because Murakami is one of the few
authors I’ve read who write about the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Yet, while the book has several sections
about World War Two, the main story is about a directionless man, Toru Okada,
who loses first his cat, and then his wife. Various odd people drift in and out
of his life, a teenager named May Kasahara, a woman in a red vinyl named Creta
Kano, as well as a woman who calls offering telephone sex. Unlike my reading of
ten years ago, I found the book meandered, and the link to the World War Two
sections tenuous at best. The end left me unsatisfied.
I went to book club feeling exasperated with Murakami, but
I left the evening with an entirely different feeling for the book. I was
reading Murakami as a historian and also as a writer. I wanted the history of
World War Two, of the Japanese occupation to shed light on contemporary Japan.
As a writer, I wanted to read the book and be able to marvel at the structure,
the coiled underbelly that held the story together. My friend Nancy, who
teaches philosophy, read the book in a different way. She read as a
philosopher, so to her, the book is a lesson on how to live. To her, Toru Okada
is a lost individual, who doesn’t feel, who doesn’t live, but through his
adventures looking for his wife and cat, finds a way to live. I found myself
leaving book club with a more profound appreciation of the book, which is what
book club should be all about.
For something completely different, I read Longbourne by Jo Baker. This is the
servant’s version of Pride and Prejudice.
It’s both a beautiful tribute and stands on its own. While I wouldn’t call
myself an Austen addict, I do enjoy her work, and re-read her books from time
to time. I like social history, so I was intrigued by the details of running a
house in the early 19th century and about soldiers’ experiences in
the Napoleonic wars. Like Pride and
Prejudice, Longbourne, has just
enough bitter at the end to make you doubt whether a sweet ending will come. If
you’re a Downton Abbey fan, this
is a book for you. 
And for another change, I also read Kevin Power’s The Yellow Birds, about a soldier’s experience fighting in Al
Tafar, Iraq. Twenty-year old Private Bartle pledges to bring another solider,
Murphy, home safely. Neither of the two men are prepared for the mental
onslaught of fighting and their experiences change them forever.
While I don’t usually read war books, The Yellow Birds is so well written,
that I was completely taken into the story despite the violence. I loved the
first line: “The war tried to kill us in the spring.” I also loved the way this book is structured.
The events don’t unfurl chronologically, and I want to re-read the book to
figure out how Powers makes this work.
And you, what are you reading these days?
