my thanks to all for the thoughtful comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
One reason I've delayed in posting (aside from busyness and general sloth) is that I still haven't decided whether my reaction is valid or puerile. What surprised me most was that I felt bludgeoned by the Western cultural and even culinary references.
A few paragraphs into the first story, Komura breakfasts on toast and coffee, which sounds like the breakfast of an American secretary from the 1950s to me. I read once that breakfasts were the most resistant of meals to outside influences and that made sense to me, but ok, so Komura likes toast and coffee. But then the cultural references came thick and fast: the Beatles, Pearl Jam, Jack London, Tolstoy, Erroll Garner, John Updike, Schubert and more. Culture is global these days, but in the absence of similar references to Japanese writers and musicians, this world seemed off kilter to me. I wondered if the earthquake was merely the physical manifestation of other seismic shifts, and if a loss of culture was a cause (or possibly an effect) of the hollowness or death inside the characters.
By the last meal, with spaghetti and tomato sauce for dinner, and red wine for the adults and OJ for the child (gack!), it felt to me that the stories could have been set anywhere at all. It required a conscious effort on my part to hold the thought that these stories were set in Japan and peopled with Japanese. But, since I have no familiarity with Murakami's other works, I have no idea if this Western orientation is typical of him or whether it was supposed to mean something in particular in the context of these stories.
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actually, this is so very true, and I had not noticed at all!