"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" - Haruki Murakami

Published in 1997 by Haruki Murakami, 1998 by First Vintage Int. Translation by Jay Rubin.

Murakami starts his novel with a pot of noodles, I was immediately hooked.  The pot boils, he receives a call from a woman who knows him but will not identify herself, he returns to his noodles (slightly overcooked) and he feels confused.

This novel is everything my brain connects with Japanese culture.  It is calm, it is creepily calm, even the fights are calm.  But you can't stop reading.  It centers on Toru Okada, a man who is unemployed and supported by his wife Kumiko who works in publishing.  We follow him as his cat goes missing, then his wife, he meets a psychic prostitute, gains a facial blemish, meets an old veteran who has seen awful things, takes a lot of naps and makes friends with a lot of women.

I am still a little dizzy from everything that happens and at times it gets a bit confusing.  But push on, because the last third is thrillingly well written, and mind-bendingly good.  I don't think I understand what happened yet, but it was big.  Big in a calm way, and that says something.

Quotes:
"Let's go to Crete together.  This is not the place for us anymore: not for you and not for me.  We have to go to Crete.  If you stay here, something bad is going to happen to you.  I know it.  I am sure of it."

"Money had no name, of course.  And if it did have a name, i would no longer be money.  What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability"

Rating: ****

"Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" - Jamie Ford

Published in 2009 by Ballantine Books

At first, I wasn't really feeling this book.  But then about a quarter of the way through I got sucked in and couldn't put it down.

The story of a middle aged man in the mid-eighties who has just lost his wife to cancer and is recalling his first love.  Growing up Chinese during the second world war and having a Japanese friend would be hard enough, but young Henry Lee falls in love and everything about his day to day life seems to change.

Follows the internment of the Japanese and the following war years, while simultaneously creating a story in the eighties about how Henry's life turned out and his relationship with his son.

Very sweet, not wonderful or life-changing but a nice read overall

Quotes:
"It was a sigh of resigned disappointment.  A consolation prize, of coming in second and having nothing to show for it.  Of coming up empty; having wasted your time, because in the end, what you do, and who you are, doesn't matter one lousy bit.  Nothing does."

"Henry woke up feeling like a new man, even if he was only twelve"

Rating: **