is a writer from Buffalo, NY. ‘Le mal du pays.’ The groundless sadness called forth in a person heart’s by a pastoral landscape. And though the stakes—and potential profit margins—couldn’t be higher, we don’t feel the tension build until the human dramas begin to play out at the station. To say you’ve inspired me would not begin to describe it. And yet she was the one in the group who had an artist’s soul and genuine musical talent. In the meantime, I am also reading a book about the history of the notion of Genius and I am starting to believe that Tsukuru is the Genius that our times need: an individual who bravely faces his own shadow and past woundings, works through his pain and emotional turmoil, being brutally honest with himself in the process in order to undergo a transformation. It was a major disappointment. You’re able to push open what Aldous Huxley calls ‘the doors of perception.’ Your perception becomes pure and unadulterated. Like all Murakami works, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is rich in symbolism and beautifully told. Still, not all the mysteries get solved… I do not mind that at all. Some of Barrett’s stories feel like experiments with voice and tone, particularly the humorous ones, which were more like sketches than full-fledged stories. Unfortunately, as the novel continued, Tassie’s perspective felt less and less true to me. These four friends each have a name that is a color in Japanese:   two males, Aka (red) and Ao (blue), and two females, Shiro (white) and Kuro (black). When he convinces himself to proceed with Kapitoil, it isn’t as a cover for underlying greed but an extension of a healthy ambition to better the lives of his sister and father. For once he captures the tragedy of this truism. To get there, a Shinkansen from Tokyo (100 min.) Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. This material in the novel was successful and meaningful to me.

State of Wonder has some questions, none of them as urgent, but compelling still. You need to learn to accept the limits of how much you can know as an individual consciousness. Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog’s 1982 film about dragging a steamship over a small Peruvian mountain, makes an appearance, as does Lost Horizon, the 1933 novel that invented Shangri-La. I am not sure how this period of intense speculation as young boy impacted my later perception, only that eventually I have become fascinated by these types of themes of darkness and the void as our found in this novel by Murakami. Set in the present day, the novel is best described as a “relationship mystery,” as the main action involves Tsukuru trying to uncover why he was expelled from a tight-knit group of friends without explanation twenty years earlier. Show me a talented musician who had a happy, stable childhood, and I’ll show you a kid who went to Julliard and now plays violin in the symphony. I finished it in just four days, I think. There is a side to Shiro that comes off as secretive, removed, or distant.

Deep in the farthest reaches of the Amazonian rainforest, a middle-aged drug researcher who was sent there on business but has no business being there succumbs to fever, and the secretive field scientists he’s with dash off a quick note to the States. I was gripped by this book from page one.