One That Got Away?

John Esposito has been reading Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and, like me, experienced a worrying surge of waywardness in the final third.

"I wonder about even Murakami's ability to make a book like WUB into a "perfect pebble." This thing is huge and unwieldy (of course, some might argue that so is life, and that's Murakami's point), and I'm not entirely sure that he could have made it all fit together. We assume that the author always can do something and if he doesn't it's for a certain reason. Well, I don't know. Maybe toward the end this one got away from Murakami a little and he decided that that was just fine with him."

The same issue of whether more could have been allowed to "drift up to the surface of consciousness" arises with Kafka on the Shore. Yet I'd agree that us fond-readers of Murakami's fiction are prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, precisely because we know that something of the suggestive nature of his writing would be lost if he were to set about being more explicit.