What’s The Best Murakami Novel?
Listing my three favourite Haruki Murakami novels.
Someone asked me recently what the best Murakami novel is. Such questions are incredibly subjective, of course, so I cannot say what the best one actually is, but I certainly know which ones are my favourites.
1. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
My favourite Murakami book is the one for which this blog is named: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I believe it is the most developed, complex, and intelligent of his novels, and it marks a pivotal moment in his writing career.
Prior to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami was an interesting, quirky writer with some fun ideas and some very depressing themes (specifically, grief). He tended to write fairly short novels about single guys facing personal problems. These were definitely elements of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but with this book he made a sudden leap into new territory, writing on a much larger scale and about much bigger topics.
One really important consideration is that this novel deals with Japan’s actions in World War II, something that is largely ignored in modern Japan. Murakami had previously dealt with personal traumas in his books, but with this one he moved into discussing national-level trauma. I don’t mean to suggest that Japan was “the victim” in that war but rather that its citizens were made to participate in it and many of them did profoundly evil things, which haunts the nation all these years later, whether people want to talk about it or not.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was creative. It was thought-provoking. It was daring and intelligent and weird. Whilst depressing and violent, it was also funny in places. It was hard to pick apart, so you had to read it again and again. It also gave us a great many of the tropes that we now joke about as “Murakami Bingo”: cooking, wells, cats, other realms…
This is his masterpiece, in my opinion. It is almost as if everything before it led to this book and everything after it was an attempt at reclaiming that level of genius. (That may sound harsh, but I do think this was his greatest achievement and any writer would be delighted to have produced something of this brilliance.)
2. After Dark
My next favourite of his books is After Dark. Whilst the previous choice probably won’t have surprised many, this one probably will. Maybe I’m picking it partly out of sympathy, for I think this is a very underappreciated book. But I also think that the people who criticise it simply fail to understand it.
After Dark is Murakami writing a short, detached, toned-down work. It is in some ways a transitional book and it honestly requires several reads to really get into its depth. Whereas Murakami can go on for many hundreds of pages of navel-gazing, this book is fast and brutal. It is filled with terse conversations, darkness, and allusions to violence.
It is a genuinely creepy book. There are the obviously supernatural bits, of course, in one of the dual storylines, but in the main thread—which is ostensibly realistic—it bubbles away just beneath the surface. Its depiction of a city as a living being, with all its citizens closely connected, and somehow unsettingly close to another, darker realm, is chilling.
I think it is in books like this that Murakami plays around with new ideas and whilst some might say these are less satisfying books, I think they are wrong. If you really like an author, you’ll appreciate the places where he experiments as much as the soaring triumphs.
3. Hear The Wind Sing
Hear the Wind Sing is going to be my third choice. Actually, in third place I’d like to choose several books, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but I’m a sucker for an underdog, and this is yet another underappreciated work.
Call me a hipster, but I also like artists’ early works. I’m not saying they are necessarily the best but I think that in these raw, flawed, perhaps naïve early efforts we often see more heart and soul. These are the works artists make when they have no one to please, no one looking over their shoulder. (Not that Murakami has ever been that sort of writer.)
I know Murakami is a jazz nerd and his early works allude to pop tunes, but this book makes me think of grunge. Yes, it pre-dates grunge by about a decade, but it’s got that grunge feel… It seems simple at first, but it’s not. It’s deceptively deep. It’s grimy and in places a bit loose, but somehow these just add to the appeal. It’s angry, silly, intelligent, dirty, and cathartic.
I like this book as a short, weird, quirky piece of writing. I like that Murakami is embarrassed by it and doesn’t really want it widely read. I like that few of his fans seem to know it.
Hear the Wind Sing is incredibly different from everything the author wrote after it (except for Pinball, 1973). Yet at the same time, we can see his origins. We can see his early concerns as a writer. We can see his constraints.
You can sit and read this book in an afternoon, which makes it a nice book to pick up on a rainy weekend. As much as I think The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a vastly superior effort, this is definitely an easier and more fun read.
In summary, then, my favourite Murakami books are:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
After Dark
Hear the Wind Sing
Let me know yours in the comments.