Colorless Tsukuru

Hardcover, 2014

Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite contemporary authors, so when Colorless Tsukuru came out in the U.S. in August, and I picked up a copy pretty quickly. However, I didn’t get a chance to start reading it until the beginning of the new year because I was working on a ghost writing project of my own.

Title: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Author: Haruki Murakami

Year: 2013 (Japan) / 2014 (U.S.)

Genre: Fiction

Setting: Nagoya and Tokyo, Japan

Characters: Tsukuru (narrator), Aka (“Red,” the smartest), Ao (“Blue,” the rugby player), Shiro (“White,” the pianist), Kuro (“Black,” Shiro’s best friend), Sara (girlfriend), Haida (swimmer)

Plot: In high school, Tsukuru, Aka, Ao, Shiro, and Kuro, were inseperable best friends, but Tsukuru is the only one who leaves to go to college in Tokyo. He becomes a railway engineer, designing railway stations, and one day, he receives a call and is told to never talk to his four friends again. He reels from depression and struggles with ever trusting or letting anyone in again, especially after befriending Haida, a swimmer, only to lose him mysteriously as well. Sixteen years after he loses touch with his friends, Tsukuru meets Sara, who tells him he must resolve the issues in his past, and he finally reconnects with his friends and discovers why he was cut off and whether he can trust anyone again.

Verdict: I missed the elements of magical realism that 1Q84, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore incorporate, though the character Haida does offer a glimpse of that mystery, which is never really resolved. Murakami also scaled back on the historical elements that he often interweaves, choosing only to mention some of the student protests in the 60s. However, I connected with Tsukuru’s struggle to trust, his fear of being abandoned, his tendency to isolate and disconnect. The chapters were well-paced, and I enjoyed my time in each era of Tsukuru’s life. This wouldn’t be my first recommendation if I wanted someone to read Murakami, but it’s more digestible and accessible than a tome life 1Q84 and was a good book to start out the year.

Lucky Us

This was Riot Read #3 (September), though I read October’s first. The inside flap promised me an interesting story of America in the 1940s and of two sisters with madcap lives… or at least that was what I expected going in. I also hoped the lion and zebra on the tight rope would figure in.

Title: Lucky Us

Author: Amy Bloom (cousin to Harold Bloom; US)

Genre: Literary Fiction

Characters: Iris (older sister, actress), Eva (younger sister, tarot reader, eventually), Edgar (father), Reenie (Iris’ partner), Gus (Reenie’s husband), Danny (stolen orphan), Francisco (makeup artist)

Setting: 1940s WWII: Ohio, California, New York, and Germany

Plot: “My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.” And so Eva’s mother leaves her on Edgar’s doorstep, and Iris and Eva enter a partnership of sisterhood, culminating in a trip to Hollywood away from their father. Eventually Hollywood doesn’t pan out (lesbian orgies are faux paux, apparently), and when Edgar shows up, the sisters and Francisco, a benevolent gay makeup artist, pack it up and head to New York City. Edgar becomes a butler and Iris a governess, and Iris falls in love with the cook, Reenie. She falls hard enough that she reports Reenie’s husband as a German spy, and he is arrested and sent to North Dakota, where he eventually takes a one-way ticket to Germany. We learn pieces of the plot through letters from Iris and Gus, while Eva is the main narrator and the one who is an anchor through the shifting tides of love and loss.

Verdict: Of the four Riot Reads so far, I am least impressed with this one. I’m a shade more in its favor than to say I’m ambivalent, but it was not as impressive as Land of Love and Drowning or Broken Monsters. I enjoyed the historical flavors of Hollywood, New York CIty, and Germany, but I didn’t like the letters as a form of plot advancement. They enforce the separation between the sisters and the intensity of Gus’ experience, but I don’t think they were well executed and it made the transitions between chapters awkward, to me. I was also a little disappointed that there was no lion and zebra on a tight rope, but I can stretch the putty of my literary brain to see symbolism beyond the aesthetics. The brain putty can also recognize a lot of interesting commentary on racial, religious, and cultural identity, but who am I to comment on meaning?

If I had to recommend, I’d say …. yes, read it, but make it a upper mid-list pick.

Broken Monsters

I subscribe to Riot Read, a monthly book subscription club from Book Riot. Each book is a new release hardcover and arrives sometime mid-month, and content surrounding the book is curated online to supplement the experience. This was October’s pick.

Title: Broken Monsters

Author: Lauren Beukes (South Africa)

Genre: Thriller/Suspense

Characters: Layla Stirling-Versado (16-yr-old girl), Gabi Versado (Layla’s mother and police detective), Cas (Layla’s best friend), Jonno (writer gone video blogger), TK (homeless ex-con), Clayton Broom (artist)

Setting: Current-day Detroit, recovering from economic crisis through start-up avant-garde artists and young entrepreneurs

Plot: The top half of a young boy’s body is found attached to the bottom half of a fawn, which initiates an investigation that develops into profiling a serial killer. Layla struggles to fit in at school and relies on her friend, Cas, who seems to have confidence in spades. This leads the two of them to catfish for a sexual predator online. While Layla is trying to keep her life and these pranks under cover, her mom is the lead detective on the murders. Meanwhile, we get an insider’s view of the Detroit art scene through Jonno, who stumbles into a relationship with a DJ who has connections to the artists and a vision for Jonno’s future as a video blogger. We find out early on who the murderer is, and we watch his mind succumb to the Dream of truly great art, of art that if given a chance and the right audience, will come to life.

Verdict: I haven’t read many thrillers outside of Stephen King, so this was a somewhat new experience for me. It was creepy enough to give me the heebie jeebies from time to time, but as usual, I tore through the book for the plot. Beukes invested a lot of time and thought into this book, though, and it offers interesting social commentary on a lot of different relevant topics, especially on social media and privacy and sexual content + minors. There was the reminder that what goes on the internet doesn’t ever really disappear (like this shitty book synopsis that I’ll one day regret), and the reinforcement that messages and posts aren’t just sent into the ether; they have consequences. It did remind me of the danger of incorporating modern technology/trends though, for at one point, Cas and Layla are using SpinChat… and I thought that was just a blip on the radar of stupid online websites people have fixated on. Maybe I’m just out of it, and everyone’s at home on SpinChat but me. I don’t feel great loss, somehow. Anyway – I say read this book, read it hard, especially if you like those trendy tv-crime dramas and serial killer crazy business but with some real backbone.

Counting by 7s

Paperback ARC

I picked up an ARC copy of Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan from the Family Bookshop in DeLand; I thought I recalled it being mentioned on Book Riot, and it was free with an appealing cover. Why not?

Title: Counting by 7s

Author: Holly Goldberg Sloan

Genre: Young Adult

Main Characters: Willow, Mai, Quang-ha, Patti, Jairo, Dell Duke

Plot: Willow’s parents are killed in a car crash, and she has no immediate friends or family. Dell Duke, the school counselor, and Mai and Quang-ha are with her when she finds out. She ends up living with her Vietnamese friends who must lie about their housing situation (consequently moving into Dell Duke’s apartment) to get social service’s approval for temporary guardianship. They all learn valuable lessons about compromising, opening up, pursuing dreams, etc.

Verdict: Yes, it was predictable; there was a happy ending and the pieces of the puzzle fell into place pretty neatly at every turn. However, the details of Willow’s obsessive compulsive tendencies made her character more vulnerable and realistic, especially when she chooses to ignore her previous compulsions in favor of being numb. I like that Mai and Quang-ha are Vietnamese-Mexican-American and that the book is about people of color; Willow sees Dell Duke as having his own foreign culture just as much as Mai and Quang-ha do. I think the book poses a good question about why there aren’t self-help books for young adults written about life-shattering events — but that may be my own bias in thinking there’s a need for the self-help book I want to write for young adults for a particular life-shattering event.