花样年华

I’m renaming my reading/media review to consumptions because it’s really about everything my brain has eaten and what my imagination is feeding on.

2022 was cynical but 2023 was paradoxically both a dumb-jock and theatre kid era. It felt like I didn’t have braincells to go around because I was doing so much sport and socialising every weekend, but I also met a friend who got me into plays and musicals.

As always, there’s a bunch of sci-fi here because it’s my comfort genre.

Hyperlinks indicates I've written about it in a separate post.

I enjoyed this Murakami so much because I was writing my Murakami thesis at the time. (March 2023). I was so excited every time I encountered a familiar trope because it seemed to fit into my metaphor theories or added a new dimension of meaning. I borrowed this book from the library and dog-eared every page so badly, it took me half an hour to undo it all before I returned it.

The premise was actually unique to Murakami, K, the narrator, is an outsider to the main events which is the relationship between Sumire and Miu. Sumire and Miu recount their stories to him, which gives the novel this gothic mood because it becomes a frame narrative (a story within a story, like Frankenstein or Rime of the Ancient Mariner). The thing about frame narratives is that the whole structure creates this cautionary tale or parallel back to the narrator, this subtle warning about what could happen. And so when I saw the unrequited love conga line of K -> Sumire -> Miu, my brain just started broadcasting exclamation marks (!!!!!). People loving who they can never have!!!! Suffering because of a love that can not be contained within their body (!!!!)

Reading Murakami is like a fever dream, like one second I can absolutely understand why he’s Nobel candidate material and the next second I’m reading about ghost pimp Colonel Sanders offering sex for a magic rock and completely accept that it is necessary for plot purposes.

I’m feeling a little crazy, this post started as a musings download after reading Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, but I finished reading it in 2021. And gentlemen, now we are in the year of our Lord 2023.

With Kafka, something unlocked in me about all the other Murakami books I’ve read. Stray cats, mysterious women, supernatural quests — all of a sudden the tropes in his previous books became a theme. And the themes transformed a language by which I could use to understand the message in Kakfa. And then after Kafka I read Killing Commendatore and started screaming when I saw the same themes re-appearing, and then I read Sputnik Sweethand and dog-eared the library book so desperately, it took me half an hour to undo my crimes.

So this post is a Kafka essay hijacked by a Murakami thesis. Or, this is how I read Murakami.

What can I say about the English Patient? I had borrowed it from the library and left it so dog-eared that my notes took weeks to write out. My loan got renewed twice and was about to expire for real and I still haven’t finished thinking through what I liked and was already 3 pages deep. So I bought it on kindle :) and just :) highlighted my heart out :)

(Goodreads: would you like to make your 165 notes and highlights visible?; hwa: no I would not)

Four people in a villa in Italy at the end of World War 2. The war lives on in all of them. You have the English Patient upstairs who is obsessed with the past. Then there’s Hana, the young nurse who is obsessed with the English Patient and Caravaggio, the reformed thief who is obsessed with her sanity. And there’s Kip, the Indian sapper obsessed with defusing bombs for the English. And then there’s the past.

( Death means you are in the third person. )

My summer clerk recommended this and lent me a copy!! (Alas I have not returned it). It came up because we both loved literature in translation and post-colonialism.

The book is structured as a dictionary of words used in Maqiao, a tiny village where the narrator was sent to during the Cultural Revolution. Each dictionary entry is a vignette from life and the collection of entries form a snapshot of an era, a microcosm of culture.

Mid-way through 2021 I started being more reflective after reading. I usually read things once and move on but I found that I barely remember what I thought about a book. I remembered whether or not I enjoyed it, and maybe some quotes because I took notes. But that was it.

November 12, 2020. We shall see.

(A mix of 'things I think will happen' and 'things I want to happen' and 'fuck me if this happens')