What makes people feel impressed when they’re reading a book like a dairy? A diary tells story of someone else’s part daily happenings. Often it’s hard to draw attention for others daily stories. It doesn’t have a dramatic story like a movie, what happens to them doesn’t matter to you, sometimes you even have to read complaints. It sucks.

Feeling writing as a painful task, the narrator, “I” re-tells story of his 1970 summer. He was a student of University of Tokyo then, and returned to his seaside home town for summer vacation. He sits with the Rat in J’s bar. They smoke, they drink, they eat peanuts, they talk about writing, they talk about women. Calling back his summer, and he thinks that maybe those really were the good old days…

Hear the Wind Sing is the writer Haruki Murakami’s very first novel, and the first book of Murakami’s I bought and read. I knew his name before I bought the book. He published “1Q84” in 2009, it appeared on TV and became really famous. I was 9 when it came out but I remember that the novel was sold out in any of book shops in Japan.

I first read this novel in Japanese of course, about 3~4 years ago. I felt that the novel was so “smooth” to read. It doesn’t contain a huge, dramatic or romantic story. The background of the story is nothing like interesting fantasy. However it was fun, took my interest, and I felt the same thing when I read it in English.

So again, what makes people feel “interesting” of this story? As I wrote in the logs of the novel, it is just a story of very short term of his life. No one cares normally.

I barely determine what are the components that makes this novel interesting, but I found some components that makes this novel easy to read. First, this while novel is only 152 pages, with 40 chapters. Some of the chapters are only one page. Chapter 11 and 24 have 11 lines, chapter 13 has only 9 lines, and chapter 2 and 14 have just 2 lines with a picture of a drawn T-shirt. Those chapters exist like intermission in the story, I’d say it’s also the rhythm of the story.  Moreover in this novel, there is no difficult or unsure words used even I can read it easily. The writer Haruki Murakami doesn’t put meaningless sentence in his novel. I’m not saying others do but he writes only what he wants to tell, with the most simple words.

It’s a good book anyway. I can’t put all the interesting components (I don’t even know what they are) but I’d recommend this book to some of my friends. 

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Writing