Published years apart, these two books seem like companion pieces to me, sharing a literary landscape of life and death, memory and impermance.  But, then again, lots of books occupy that crowded plot of land.  What is intriguing to me about these two books (and also clearly to Vintage, which published both of them) is the surprisingly similar style in which both stories are told.

As a writer, I’m always curious when authors play with narrative in an unusual way.  Granted, I tend to find most experimental work a bit off-putting.  I had read some Murakami before and had always found him a bit chilly.  He always seemed to be working hard to ensure that the story he was telling would be more or less incomprehensible to me.  Something surreal would happen, and I would read the passage again and again, until I finally decided I wasn’t supposed to understand.

What is even stranger about my inability to enjoy Murakami is the fact that my own writing instincts tend toward fragmentation and ambiguity.  I often find myself going down roads to nowhere and ending up in unusual (but not necessarily accessible) places.  Then, I have to spend time taming my manuscript and bringing it back to a coherent whole.  It’s just part of my process, though I’ve never figured out it this makes me a sadistic or a masochistic writer.  I suppose it depends on whether you feel that I’m abusing the story or myself (if the two can be separated).

But I digress.  As usual.  And reading what I just wrote, and knowing what I’m about to write, makes me wonder if I shouldn’t give other Murakami books a new look.  Maybe, as they say, the problem was me.

Because Hard-Boiled Wonderland was a completely different experience.  I flew through it.  The two phrases in the book title actually refer to two distinct worlds in the novel.  The first, which is indeed hard-boiled, is a slightly futuristic Blade-Runner-esque city where the narrative is told like a detective pulp.  The second location is called the Town, and feels vaguely as if it were located in a fantasy novel.  The book jumps back and forth between these places in alternating chapters and each location has its own distinct first-person narrator.  The reader knows these stories must be connected and what fascinated me was that ability to tell two completely separate narratives, yet keep me feeling like it was a cohesive and deeply satisfying book.

So then, a couple of years later, I came across Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead, which would seem like a long title if not for Murakami’s.  Despite different writing styles (which may be mainly due to the fact that Murakami has to be translated from the original Japanese), the similarities were striking.  Again, in alternating chapters, I was getting two distinct worlds that were clearly linked together.   In this book, the more-or-less real world is Antarctica, where a survivor of a global plague is trying not to die.  The other world is a kind of purgatory, where victims of the plague find themselves for stays of varying lengths before disappearing.  Like Murakami, the “real-world” plot has a genre feel to it, though in Brockmeier’s case it is an adventure story, rather than a detective story.  And in the end, the connection between the world hinges on the author’s concepts of memory, the afterlife and the elusive ties between the brain and the soul.

I suppose it is not surprising that Brockmeier has two Murakami books on his list of favorite books, which apparently he takes with him to readings.  The two writers definitely seem to be working in parallel.  I would strongly recommend reading these two books back to back, if for no other reason than to allow the similarities to bring out the full flavor of the differences.