Great. Reminds me of the start of a Murakami novel. "I was cooking pasta in the kitchen, and carefully preparing a simple salad, when I noticed the clock in the wall began ticking backward. That wasn't all, outside... "
oh I mean "reminds me of” as a term including "sounds like"... and was just copying what I think of as Murakami's style and some of his common tropes such as pasta, cooking, strangeness in mundane situations.
If you're interested in reading, I reckon it's safe to read his books in chronolgical order. You can see how his style and preoccupations develop over the years.
The first story I read was "on meeting the 100% perfect girl one April morning" out of a short story collection called "the elephant vanishes" which is not his first book. I was in a bookshop in early 2003 and just randomly looking for the shortest thing I could possibly read and this story got me hooked on Murakami. and then I think after reading that short story book the next thing I read was "hear the wind sing", his original short novel. And then "pinball 1973" and then I think "Norwegian Wood."
I like his sort of loose universe how similar characters and types of characters and tropes kind of return but the the recurrence is not necessarily central to any of the particular stories they're just kind of like motifs.
Agreed. Murakami introduces all sorts of weird / surrealistic / magical elements into stories, but there's rarely if ever any attempt to explain them. They're just part of the fabric of the story.
Magic realism is kind of weird genre. Sort of "in between" in that "magic shit happens, but in our ordinary world, not a world where magic shit happens". That is, magic happens, but not in a Harry Potter'ish or Tolkein'ish world where magic is explicitly part of the world.
All of that said, I love Murakami. Need to finish reading the rest of his novels one of these days.
