Home
The title of Haruki Murakami's 1993 masterpiece Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World could well stand as shorthand for the Japanese novelist's wonderfully eerie artistic vision. ''Hard-boiled'' sums up his noirish cool; ''wonderland'' points to a fondness for down-the-rabbit-hole disappearances and the revelation of hidden worlds; ''end of the world'' captures his lovely tone of spare despair.
Now, two newly translated volumes reintroduce Murakami to American readers. In Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (Vintage, $14), the author trains that sensibility on nonfiction, investigating lives altered by a religious cult's 1995 nerve-gassing of the Tokyo subway system. The book is essentially a collection of compelling transcripts, reportage unmarked by the author's narrative skills. To see those again at play, pick up Sputnik Sweetheart (Knopf, $23), a novel that, though paler than his best work, offers the same hypnotizing pleasures.
The nameless narrator is a twentysomething schoolteacher, a guy uncomfortable with his obligation, as storyteller, to introduce himself: ''I've always been disturbed by the thought that I'm not painting a very objective picture of myself.'' He's long been in unrequited love with a woman named Sumire, a fledgling novelist. She, in turn, loves Miu, a middle-aged businesswoman who hires an eager Sumire as her assistant and takes her along on a jaunt to Greece -- where Sumire vanishes. As the telling spins and shifts through fantasies and dreamscapes, Sputnik Sweetheart reveals itself as a lyrical tale about the surreal orbits of desire. Both books: B+
