K., our dedicated narrator, is in love with Sumire, a young woman with absolutely no interest in him beyond friendship. Sumire, in turn, falls in love with a mysterious, captivating woman – Miu – who cannot and will not return her affections. On the surface, this is the tale of a love triangle – but it is so much more.
Author: Haruki Murakami
Pages: 229
Published: 1999
Bottom Line: An eccentric, intriguing dalliance from real life. This work of magic realism takes on the love, loss, and loneliness that is the cornerstone of human experience in a very fresh and beautiful way.
This is the first novel of Murakami’s that I’ve read, and I find myself desperately in love with his effortless, effervescent writing style. The way he chooses words and structures sentences is truly a thing of beauty, and yet he makes it seem so real and so unstudied. Whereas some authors write poetry or prose, Murakami writes life. The master tailor has deftly created a new world by stitching together the fabric of our own with a thread woven of magic, mystery and profound human emotion.
The plot is simplistic, and yet it is so full of the complexities of the human heart that render it nearly impossible to summarize.
K., our narrator, is a teacher who is deeply in love with Sumire, a young writer. Sumire is, at best, an eccentric and at worst, irreparably odd.
She is actually quite a few things: nearly devoid of sexual desire, a prolific writer who can never finish anything, nocturnal – often calling our narrator at 3 in the morning from a payphone near her apartment, unable (and unwilling) to hold down a regular job, and not at all interested in K romantically.
Sumire, in turn, falls in love with Miu – an older business woman who hires Sumire as her personal assistant. Miu is a mysterious figure full of dark secrets, and a traumatizing experience in her past that has left her soul permanently halved.
In essence this is a book about love, and how an unrequited romance can be the loneliest experience of a human life. But it is also the story of the vagaries of the heart – the explosions of passion, the depths of despair, the steps we are willing to take for love, and how we can be utterly and completely destroyed by it in both a literal and figurative sense.
The characters in this novel are extraordinarily human, and yet are all tinged with an aura of possibility – it seems that in this world, anything can happen.
Sumire is endearing, familiar, and infuriating in turns. She changes herself so completely for love that she begins to lose her grasp on identity – she becomes everyone else, and nearly loses herself. K is pitiable – he is so deeply in love with someone who can’t seem to love him back, and yet he is willing to wait forever. His heart is an immovable object tethered firmly by hope. Miu is an enigma. When she finally opens her shell, is there a pearl inside or decomposing flesh?
I highly recommend this book. The dialogue is effortless, the characters ethereal, and the imagery evocative. Once I started this book, I didn’t dare put it down. It is beautifully strange, and should stir deep emotions within every reader. Come for the quirkyness and Murakami’s fascinating writing style, but stay for the reflections on romance – and how those who are in love can be the loneliest of all.
THE NOVEL NEMATODE 
Your writing is so pretty that sometimes I think it’s better than the books you review!