The people could not be stranger: an old man who speaks cat language, a hooker who quotes French philosophers - not to mention the presence of ghosts, magical stones, a haunted forest and characters with names such as Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders. What invites such powerful longing? Murakami's previous novel, "Kafka on the Shore," gives an answer: In it, a 15-year-old boy, Kafka Tamura, runs away from home to escape his father's curse, only to walk into a labyrinth that could have been imagined by Jorge Luis Borges on LSD. Murakami's stories have become a philosophical object of desire for his many followers and have transcended their cultish status to reach a wider audience than anyone could have imagined. This singular effect could be called many things, from "West fatigue" to "anxiety of clan." His books made me want to walk those streets, made me want in. Haruki Murakami's novels, in particular, never failed to make me long for the edgy coolness of Japanese culture. This desire had to do with the films made there and the contemporary fiction written there. Long before "Lost in Translation" brought to mainstream America a "fresh" way of looking at Japan, I had been coveting Japan. For the past few years I've been watching a lot of Asian cinema.
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