Grant loves the opening (which grew from a short story) but quit caring once the narrator sits in a well and astral-projects, which he calls cheating.
Where it appears 3
the forbidden wonderland of murakamiTamir calls it Murakami's greatest work, containing nearly every Murakami trope. Salih explains that Jay Rubin's English translation (607 pages) is abridged and that a 2020 German retranslation from Japanese runs over 1,000 pages with extra Cinnamon and Manchuria chapters. Tamir reads the cat and wife disappearing as what rescues the protagonist from an obscure, meaningless life.
portal to the unknownMurakami's novel in which the protagonist goes down a dry well. Tamir closes with its line that everything in the well was unchanged and yet everything had changed. He reads it as a picture of how your relationship to the shadow changes once you integrate it.
Connections
Written by
Mentioned alongside
- The 1,000-page German Wind-Up Bird
Salih shows Tamir the blue German edition of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, retranslated from Japanese in 2020 at over 1,000 pages vs. the 607-page Jay Rubin English text, with whole chapters…