Why do so many people talk about this like it's serious lit? I read it to see what all the hype was about and it honestly felt like very light YA.
>>24920778I dropped it halfway because of something very stupid I don't even remember anymore. I think it was about this hag in the asylum.
>>24920778yea I also did not much out of this. Maybe his other books are better?
>>24920778Because it’s written by a heckin POC, and leftists are desperate to elevate non-white contemporary literature.
>>24920778Most people are accustomed to reading very light YA novels at best, so this is their speed with the added bonus of being exotic, written by an acclaimed meme author, and it namedrops the Beatles and other normalfag slop every other page, so they feel cultured>>24920797I guess, as in they are aggressively mediocre rather than plain bad. Half of kafka on the shore is decent
>>24920778His best work is "Superfrog Saves Tokyo".>https://bpb-ca-c1.wpmucdn.com/mycharlesbest.sd43.bc.ca/dist/c/2806/files/2023/10/Superfrog-saves-tokyo.pdf
>>24920778>Why do so many people talk about this like it's serious lit?I read it expecting it to be serious lit and it was just some boomer's meaningless sex diary
>>24920807>Because it’s written by a heckin POC, and leftists are desperate to elevate non-white contemporary literature.Nah east asians are a right wing thing now. I've seen you fags argue that Japs and Koreans are hecking based because Hitler called them "honorary aryans" 80 years ago.
>>24921123>"now">cites last centuryAlways*
>>24920778It IS YA.
>>24920778Better than anything you'll ever produce in your life.
>>24921432I produce better shit in my toilet bowl.
>>24921301>AI Overview>Norwegian Wood is not a typical young adult (YA) novel but is often read by young adults because it's a coming-of-age story about college-aged characters. However, it is not a YA book due to its mature themes, including explicit sexual content and the sensitive portrayal of mental illness, grief, and suicide. wrong idiot
>>24920778Are there a lot of jazz references in this one? That's most of the joy I can derive from this writing nowadays
>>24920778i read it while going through the /lit/ canon, so the light read was much appreciated. not much of a fan but it was a good palette cleanser between infinite jest and gravity's rainbow >>24922025a bill evans record most notably
>>24922025Mostly Beatles references.
>>24920778Murakami is YA, his prose is terribly weak and overliteral, he's obsessed with grotesquely graphic descriptions of sex in scenes they don't really fit in, and he's capable of writing exactly two characters he permutes over and over: the beatles-jazz-black-coffee-reader and the manic pixie dream girl.I thought Norwegian Wood was sort of fun, so I decided to read Kafka on the Shore, and realised that his skill as a writer was fully exhausted like 30 pages into the former. It's a condemnation of the whole world that he's regarded as a passable writer at all. While reading, you can keep an eye out for a single metaphor that isn't the simplest, most literal one. This'll only depress you; even Dazai is a better prose stylist, which is saying a lot.
>>24920778Because "many people" have read, out of their own volition, at most, Harry Potter
>>24922323I feel like he is a YA fans idea of mature fiction. most murakami fans i know also liked YA and genreslop
>>24920778>Anon has never gotten a Norwegian boner
>>24922323In what way is Dazai a bad/middling prose-stylist?
>>24920778Because Murakami is YA literature, the vast majority of his audience is women.
>>24922024>AI Overviewlmao seriously fucking kill yourself, you’re a waste of air
>>24920778Honestly I liked pretty much everything else I read him more. Never understood why this got a movie.
>>24922323>Adult fiction is when tough syntax
>>24925182Sorry, there's no helping you if you can't see the problems with Murakami's prose.
I enjoyed this novel very much. I don’t really like anything magical so I never wanted to read any of his other books but this exploration of a man and how his social relationships swirl around in his life are deep and tender I think. There is a very beautiful passage that always makes me tear up a little where he is describing his affection as a man as him being a furry and little but powerful bear that wants to take a girl and roll around in the flower. I think it is a beautiful and haunting book.
Reading this after going through the ebbs and flows of the book was a great moment of literature for me. I don’t really enjoy his other novels but then again I’m not really giving them much of a chance because of the magical stuff. I did enjoy Superfrog though. Praise for Murakami. The NY Times says “good shit” while the Boston Post Globe says “this jap’s alright”
>>24924063this
>>24920778I read mostly classical literature. Norwegian Wood is one of my favorite books. AMA.
>>24925978Well, I suppose the most obvious one would be "what is your retort to this anons criticism?">>24922323
>>24925978why did you read half as many books this year
>>24925981I avoid judging a book's quality by its prose, those who are inclined to that kind of "intellectual" mental masturbation can go read works such as those of Nabokov, who engages in this kind of prosaic minstrel show which would leave them agape.What makes Norwegian Wood great is that it is a true (and simple) love story—not a la Romeo and Juliet (which is ironic and didactic), that only covers one childish aspect, but something much more encompassing and universal.>>24925983I got a job. And this year I started reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, unabridged. Also read other long books, like Monte-Cristo and Don Quixote (both in their native tongue, which made me take more time).
>>24926010>true (and simple) love storyI found it artless and contrived. At times I felt Murakami manipulating situations and characters so much, that it felt like he was staging a puppet play with stringed-up cinderblocks. The pacing is also weirdly off too-- to the point where I suspect it was originally 2 separate menuscripts he later decided to kitbash together.
>>24920778why do so many dudebros treat YA as synonymous with "bad?"YA in its original sense before it got watered down to mean "teen" it dealt with almost universally experienced aspects of the human condition
>>24926070>I suspect it was originally 2 separate menuscripts he later decided to kitbash together.Iirc it was a short story he first wrote in english (which explains the even more dreadful than usual prose) which he stretched to novel size in nipponese
>>24927577>it dealt with almost universally experienced aspects of the human conditionSo do Disney cartoons. Doesn't make them mature, let alone good
>>24920778Do you think they have the same person spamming all these stock engagement bait threads, or is it automated? Could this site survive without bait posts? How dead would the platform be?
>>24927632OP hereI really just wanted to vent. I'm not here as part of any spamming effort
>>24922024>AI Overview this should be permaban-worthy
I prefer Ryu
>>24920778It’s overrated as fuck but the “discourse” around it compels me to defend it.
1Q84 is unironically good but the rest of Murakami's books are primarily formulaic slop.
>>24930137I am willing to believe you but I have already read 4 novels by him and they were all shit so I ain't gonna find out whether you are wrong or right
why purely read serious lit
>>24929967the discoure around it seems to be people under the mistaken impression that "i liked this book" is synonymous with "this book is one of the greatest of all time"
He became cool because that skinny pornstar posed with one of his books. Some of the novels are all right.
>>24930150nta, 1q84 was also my favorite but i only enjoyed the first half
>>24920778Hating popular things does not make you funny or interesting
>>24931368This is one of those semi-rare occasions where the contrarianism is well-founded and reasonable. This board likes to shit on anything that gets widespread acclaim, but Murakami is not only formulaic, but unimaginative, which you'll immediately notice if you look at what the writing's like between the 3-page scenes of fish falling out of the sky. He writes like a middle schooler.
