69 by Ryu Murakami

The only other Japanese fiction I've read up to now has been Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country. Kawabata was a Nobel prize winner, and he killed himself. Not unlike Ernest Hemingway, but I digress. Anyway, I wasn't too impressed with Kawabata, which I blame on myself for being too shallow to understand all of the layers of what was going on in his book. It was deep, but I wasn't really in the mood for deep when I read it, so I read it quickly and didn't understand what I read and was relieved when it was finished.

69, on the other hand, knocked my socks off. Ryu Murakami is definitely an author that I will try to find again. This book really entertained me and I was sorry that it was so short. The cover art was pretty lousy, but that only goes to prove a cliché.

What was so great about 69? I don't know. I suppose just that it was so brutally honest. The narrator's motivations throughout the entire book are crystal clear: he wants to get laid. Everything he does is focused on attaining this goal. The setting of Sasebo, Japan is beautiful too, it was great that it wasn't the standard megapolis that you always think of when you think of Japan. The whole island of Kyushu sounded like a wonderful place to visit, and that's an important quality to me in a book. I've read books about the sixties before too, and it was fascinating to get this new point of view about the subject -- filtered through the Pacific Ocean.