Haruki Murakami sucks. The book is a prefect example of a senseless, though artful, concoction of literary references and popular postmodern devices. It sounds like a 101 course in Comparative Literature. It could be written by anyone who has taken a literature course on that level and has read a Marques novel, (or
Tolkien in the worst case....) with a pinch of Pynchon - and I mean here the leeches falling from the sky, the door to a different reality, the quest for a magical stone, the d
ivine idiot talking to cats, the Hegel quoting prostitutes, the American pop-culture icons (a Johnny Walker as a cat-murderer....??! - did I really read that?...), the elementary
reductionist references to Aristotle, Plato, and Chekhov, the
mystifications of some spiritual "depth", the Oedipal plot, the transsexual character, the menstruating teacher episode, and the entire existentialist scam that
Murakami perpetrates on the unsuspecting reader....And the
writer's "
Japan-ness" hanging on by sentences like "His penis was hard as
porcelain."!?...
Murakami's success as a writer is one more indication of the snobbery of the reading public who can't think for themselves and indulge their provincial
pseudointellectualism by letting the literary scam artist flatter their vanity misleading them to believe that they belong to an "educated" reading club (which unfortunately they are not...Far from it...).