All Intensive Purposes

I've finished Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase, one of his earliest novels, and once again I'm hard-pressed to articulate why I find Murakami so compelling. It's not that he draws characters particularly skillfully, and it's not that you get to take a little trip to Japan -- although his characters are deeper than they first appear, and you do get some sense of Japan. For this reader, Murakami comes at you from a different vector than anyone else, and that in itself is a reward. The book jackets variously compare him to Phillip K. Dick, or Don DeLillo, or Thomas Pynchon, but I don't buy it. (I don't buy DeLillo or Pynchon -- I haven't read enough Dick to say, but since it's only the early novels that draw this comparison, I gather the publishers have dropped that comparison.) He's coming from an entirely different place.

Every so often, I remember that I want to write a novel. Murakami makes me want to write a novel.