In what is in many ways a bookend to 1Q84, Murakami blends science fiction, gothic novel, noir mystery, horror (think Kiyoshi Kurosawa\u2019s film Pulse), and coming-of-age story. His protagonist and narrator, as the novel opens, is a 17-year-old boy aswoon in love with a 16-year-old girl. \u201cAt that time neither you nor I had names,\u201d he sighs, and when the girl slips away, he knows too little about her to find her. Before that, though, she transports him to a walled city that\u2019s not on any map: \u201cNot everyone can enter. You need special qualifications to do that.\u201d Both of them have those qualifications, the young man filling the urgently needed role of a reader of dusty and long-backlogged dreams. The girl moves on, the boy becomes a middle-aged man, and back in the real world where \u201csilence and nothingness, as always, were my constant companions,\u201d he abandons Tokyo for a little mountain town to become its librarian, curating real books, not dreams. There he encounters two otherworldly characters, one a neurodivergent teen, Yellow Submarine Boy, who memorizes every book he reads, whatever the subject. The other\u2014well, as he explains, \u201cwithout hesitation, I\u2019d say that although it\u2019s rather dated and convenient, you could call me a ghost.\u201d Both characters point in their own ways to a fleeting world where all that matters, in the end, is love\u2014and where love is always just out of reach. It\u2019s an elegant fable that deftly weaves ordinary reality\u2014\u201csomething you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives\u201d\u2014with a shadow world that is at once eerie and beautiful.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In what is in many ways a bookend to 1Q84, Murakami blends science fiction, gothic novel, noir mystery, horror (think Kiyoshi Kurosawa\u2019s film Pulse), and coming-of-age story. His protagonist and narrator, as the novel opens, is a 17-year-old boy aswoon in love with a 16-year-old girl. \u201cAt that time neither you nor I had names,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1076,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}