Earlier this week, a glitch in the Amazon matrix caused some readers of Haruki Murakami’s new novel 1Q84 to mistakenly conclude that the Kindle version of the book is only available for reading on one device rather than the usual six. This turned out to be a mistake, but before the problem was resolved a half dozen readers left one star reviews on the page for 1Q84. Read More
The pleasures of reading Haruki Murakami could easily be mistaken for a list of his vices. His heroes are lonesome, underemployed everymen with casually refined tastes and plenty of time on their hands to be drawn into precarious intrigues or dispatched on romantic quests. But a friendless bachelor who likes nothing better than to crack open a can of beer while stirring a pot of spaghetti and listening to classical music in his Tokyo apartment you might also call a nonentity. That is, until the phone rings and on the other end is some mischievous operator or femme fatale. (Mr. Murakami’s female characters are hard to distinguish from common male fantasies.) These tend to get Mr. Murakami’s plots moving, to the extent that his one-thing-after-another books relay the impression of being plotted; indeed, they are often better when they don’t. Read More
