That is the name of the author of the book that I am reading. You can see Haruki's Books lying around in the place that I am living in the sitting room, bedroom and sometimes even the toilets :P.
The reader being my own roomie Shocky. He told me his stories are real good and that I ought to read them, I was never a voracious reader myself, I have just read a select few books. I do not mind listing them here actually.
- Hitch hiker's Guide to Galaxy - Douglas Adams
- God's Debris - Scott Adams
- Dilbert Books - Scott Adams
- Harry Potter Series
- Chaos Theory - James Gleik
- Lord of the Rings (Part I). - J.R.R Tolkein
- Alchemist - Paulo Chello (This was a disappointing one for me, I know most of you will tend to disagree)
Now I can add to that list the Books by Haruki Murakami too, I haven't yet read any novels of his but I am reading this collection of 24 short stories with the title "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman." The funny thing is I haven't read stories or rather I say "incident reports" just like you read a news article in the morning papers.
I have read about 5 stories from the book now and most of them don't have a concrete starting and most even end without a proper conclusions, some of the stories are still a mystery to me. A good example is the Story "New York Mining Disaster", which describes the life of a guy in Tokyo and some of his unusual behavior (remember the title and this has nothing to with Mining or New York for that matter) and in the end there is a paragraph where he describes about a group of people stuck in a mine in New York and other people digging from outside trying to save them, does that sound ridiculous to you? Well that is the way he writes stories, I do not know how the novels go by, but this style of writing was particularly new to me. When I asked a friend of mine about what this means, he put the answer back in form of a question, "Have you heard of Butterfly effect?", Well that was in no way helpful.
One thing that I like about this author is the way he describes things with very vivid details without leaving even the smallest of details. One of my favorite from the book is "The Seventh Man", the story is about a person who lost his best friend to a big wave that occurred in a typhoon.
His description of the eye of the typhoon was so vivid I almost felt for a moment that I was looking into the eye itself. The proverbial "There is a Calm before the Storm" could be applied here. Another very disturbing but beautiful description was when the Narrator's very close friend "K" was swept by a tidal wave. The second tidal wave brings Mr.K engulfed in a bubble of water and our narrator sees this. Mr. K is not panicking unlike what I was expecting to read but was having the biggest grin on his face that stretched from Face-to-Face. I was just shocked and amazed by the description that he gave. I imagined myself in the narrator's position and then in K's place also. But why the grin and no panic still remains a mystery to me.
It is good to read something different very different from the ordinary for a change.
