‘You know,’ a teenage girl says to Toru Okada, the narrator of Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, whom she’s found at the bottom of a dried-up well doing some thinking about his missing wife and cat, ‘you’re pretty weird.’ Later she refines the idea: ‘I mean, you’re such a supernormal guy, but you do such unnormal things.’ It’s a fair description of Murakami’s first-person narrators, who are often referred to by the writer’s fans under the generic name ‘Boku’ – a word meaning ‘I’, as Jay Rubin explains in his guide for Anglophone readers, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2002), ‘but an unpretentious one used primarily by young men in informal circumstances.’ (It’s part of Murakami’s unstuffiness to use it instead of the more formal personal pronouns commonly used in literary Japanese.) Boku tends to be an easygoing type, fond of staying in, cooking, having a couple of beers and listening to music, especially jazz. When unusual things happen to him, he plays along in a deadpan, quasi-hardboiled way, coming out with rueful one-liners and trying to keep his feet near the ground.

LRB 15 December 2011 | PDF Download