Two of my favorite living writers are Kazuo Ishiguro and Haruki Murakami. The similarities and differences of these writers, both Kakfa descendents, are a subject of endless fascination to me.
Ishiguro is clearly the better writer. His novels can sometimes be almost perfect — three of them: remains of the day, never let me go, and a pale view of hills, are, for what he sets out to do, about as close to perfection as I think a novel gets. By that I mean that not a word is out of place, characters are exactly who they need to be, and nothing happens without a reason. Ishiguro has a plan. He knows exactly what he wants to do, and he lets you have it in tiny doses. His writing is the opposite of chinese water torture.
By contrast Murakami is a complete mess. His books are powerful disappointments — in the sense of promising much more than they deliver. The trip is usually the same. Murakami is wildly creative and about half way through a Murakami book I am convinced of his genius. That’s until I realise he isn’t actually going to solve the problems he is laying out. He has no idea what he is doing or where he is going. And you can always pick up the strain as he tries to tie up as much as he can in the last few chapters.
But nonetheless I continue to read Murakami, irresistably, and love it. He’s like a method actor. The book, basically, is about him, and all he can write about is himself. I love watching his characters cook their food and play their music (two things they always do), because basically you’re just watching Murakami. The pleasure is the same you might have just watching Marlon Brando do anything in the Godfather. What attracts us to these kind of writers and actors I have no idea. But Murakami’s presence and power is enough to keep me through the book, even if by the end of it I want to throttle him for promising so much and failing to deliver. Or delivering is such a clumbsy way, Tom Wolfe-like, that sometimes you call it satire to be kind.
I suppose its the inevitable tradeoff for any creator: power against control. Ishiguro has perfection in every detail but less of that kind of power and passion that propells you through Murakami’s books. For example, I doubt Ishiguro could write a sex scene, or anything like the man-skinning scene in Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.
The most interesting question, finally, is who is more evocative of their common master, Franz Kafka. Murakami has chaos, absurdity, and dreaminess in spades, and that wierd sexual energy of Kafka’s books. But what Murakami doesn’t get, and what Ishiguro does, is Kafka’s understanding of absurdity. In fact Ishiguro sometimes does better than Kafka in forcing his characters to react to completely absurd situations without relying on devices (like beetles) to bring out the absurdity. So on that score I’d hand the Kafka prize to Ishiguro.