Maybe I'm weird, but here's something you can do that might be fun.

Go to Goodreads and search for a book you really like, scroll down to "community reviews," and select the filter "1 star." You might get boring non-reviews, like "I hated this book so much that I can't even talk about why." I saw that on a book I loved. It doesn't matter which one.

But I was looking for reviews of the book I'm reading now — "Men Without Women" by Haruki Murakami — which I'm immensely enjoying, and I stumbled into the "1 star" filter. Someone who goes by "Jack" wrote:

This review didn't begin so negatively because I hate the author and the kind of person who's attracted to his style; on the contrary, I've read his entire oeuvre, more or less, and enjoyed a decent majority of his works. The criticisms of Murakami's style are well-known at this point: he has a bag of narrative or aesthetic tricks, and there isn't a single thing in one of his stories he hasn't repeated somewhere else....

He's a casual read, uncomplicated but mostly superficially pleasing, like the bland emotionless sexual encounters in 95% of everything he writes. There's only so many times one can read about a relatively handsome Japanese man, in his late-thirties or maybe middle-age, who likes jazz and cooking and being a milquetoast zombie at once content and uneasy with his vapid life, without thinking that maybe Murakami isn't writing about some aspect of the human condition, or the plight of men, or something like that: maybe he's just putting himself into every novel, adding a weird dream or two, a cat, some sort of mundane fantastical event that goes unexplained, and repeating until the publishers phone up and say it's time for him to make them more money.

I became interested in Murakami's writing as a teenager because I was a big manga and JRPG nerd, and wanted to continue obsessing over Japan while gaining some sort of literary foothold that put me above the unwashed nerdy masses. He was an easy read while channeling an ineffable sensibility, and he was big into Anglo-American culture so I could understand most of his references. I might reread The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle sometime down the line and discover that there's still a lot in Murakami's style I enjoy.

For the most part, I can only conclude I've outgrown him. He didn't change; I did. By that line of thinking, maybe I shouldn't be making a value judgment of his work, if I've just come to a change of taste, right? Well, no. His prose is clunky at best, profoundly meaningless at its most infuriating. This is still a pretty bad short story collection, but if you like it, you're in luck! You'll like everything Murakami's ever written right up until the moment you realise you hate him. 

Ha ha. That was well written, and I don't think it will hurt my enjoyment of Murakami's writing... until (I guess) the moment I realize I hate him.

Why am I reading that book? Is it because of the incels in the news or the men-without-women amongst the commenters of this blog? No. There were 2 things:

First, I read a Murakami book last September. As described in a post titled "A song about singing off key," I was clicking around aimlessly and happened onto "15 sights that make Tokyo so fascinating" (HuffPo), and #7 was the Murakami novel "Norwegian Wood" ("For millions of readers around the world who've never been to Japan, it's been a way for them to experience in some small way, Japan's capital of the past").

Second, a reader familiar with my "Gatsby project" emailed to say, "I’m reading Murakami’s 'What I talk about when I talk about running.' I came to one paragraph (see attached) which made me think of you and which you might enjoy."

Here's the paragraph:

One other project I’m involved in now is translating Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and things are going well. I’ve finished the first draft and am revising the second. I’m taking my time, going over each line carefully, and as I do so the translation gets smoother and I’m better able to render Fitzgerald’s prose into more natural Japanese. It’s a little strange, perhaps, to make this claim at such a late date, but Gatsby really is an outstanding novel. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it. It’s the kind of literature that nourishes you as you read, and every time I do I’m struck by something new, and experience a fresh reaction to it. I find it amazing how such a young writer, only twenty-nine at the time, could grasp— so insightfully, so equitably, and so warmly— the realities of life. How was this possible? The more I think about it, and the more I read the novel, the more mysterious it all is.

I can't imagine translating Gatsby, because the sentences are so weird. Do you translate literally to preserve the weirdness, or do you make it sound natural and idiomatic so people won't say you don't know how to translate, or can you find similar ways to be weird that fit the translated-to language?

And if you're thinking of fighting my opinion that the Gatsby sentences are weird, please click on the "Gatsby project" link above. Each post is about exactly one sentence — such as "A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble."

When I heard about the Murakami translation of "Gatsby," my heart leapt but only for a half-second. I can't read Japanese! I almost studied Japanese long ago, and nothing prevents me from studying it or anything else even now. But it made me want to read Murakami again, and "Men Without Women" seemed to be the most recent fiction. I started in on that. After reading 5 of the 8 stories, I put the nonfiction "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" in my Kindle too. Don't want to overload on fiction. And the 5th story was really great.

By the way — "Men Without Women" is also the title of a story collection by Ernest Hemingway. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is a story collection by Raymond Carver. And, obviously, "Norwegian Wood" is a Beatles song.

From the 5th story:

“Mr. Kino, you’re not the type who would willingly do something wrong. I know that very well. But there are times in this world when it’s not enough just not to do the wrong thing. Some people use that blank space as a kind of loophole. Do you understand what I’m saying?”