An appreciation for blandness as a separate category of experience—and not a new one—may help us understand how Murakami has managed to produce an intensely interesting body of fiction around characters, and sentences, that operate in a kind of continuous monotone. He follows a century of Western writers of negation, absence, and “plainness” (Kafka, Hemingway, Camus, Beckett, Pinter, Carver) but the resemblance is—perhaps by design—only superficial. Blandness, for Murakami, is not a symptom of late capitalist culture, the endpoint of cultural disintegration, or a post-apocalyptic end of history, but a condition that precedes those things and, more disturbingly, renders them harmless. Depending on one’s position, his characters’ calm acceptance of wind-up birds, sheep men, and cat towns, their ability to regain emotional homeostasis in the most dire circumstances, might seem the essence of weightless global cool or the soulless literary equivalent of a shrink-wrapped airline meal, but either reading ignores the obvious: every literary sensibility, like every shred of pasta, comes from somewhere.
more from Jess Row at Threepenny Review here.