Then Murakami subtley disappoints:
As Miss Saeki went around interviewing people for her book, maybe she met my father. It’s entirely possible. There can’t be that many people around who’ve been struck by lightning and lived, can there?
I breathe very quietly, waiting for the dawn. A cloud parts, and moonlight shines down on the trees in the garden. There are just too many coincidences. Everything seems to be speeding up, rushing toward one destination. (p. 253)
There are a few passages such as the above, where Murkami appears to have the narrator do the thinking that ordinarily is left to the reader. Murakami, I’m thinking, even while throwing in some danged wonderfully enticing thought-provokers such as the intrigueing characters and events, likes to maintain control. In several cases he has spent a couple pages on backstory. This, halfway through the book when we’ve come up with what we felt were rather good ideas of our own.
It’s almost like telling the reader he’s wrong; no, this is what happened, not what you’re thinking.
Murakami is a master storyteller, laying out threads macramed into a pattern. But the design is almost too elaborately deliberate. As our young Kafka says, "There are just too many coincidences."
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Susan, I think I understand how you feel. I’m not one to pay particular attention to author perspective or control but I just read a book that was so exceptional until I read the last two chapters and there I said, “Why did this guy continue to write?” I had formed conclusions that satisfied all he had told me, and then he delivers this extraneous bit that diluted all that had been so wonderfully detailed in previous chapters. It was the first time I realized a book can be over-written till there is no white space left just like a painting can be overpainted until it loses all appeal.
Exactly. If there are things that can be left up to the reader to imagine, then nothing is worse than offering the answers after they’ve been decided by the reader. McCarthy did a bit of this himself in The Road, but with McCarthy, there was so little info given, that as reader I always held my thoughts in reserve as possibilities only. Thus, being handed some insight well into the book was gratefully accepted rather than annoying.