69 by ryu murakami

This I know.

This landscape is familiar. These boys, sitting on the grass reluctantly sharing a bento talking about Rimbaud and Godard, making up impossible stories to satisfy their egos. The revolution will not come: they are just looking to shag some girls.

I am at ease here and though much of my approach to reading is find out that which I know nothing of sometimes I fall in love with familiarity. Here is a book I can recognize, it is foreign to me and yet it makes me think of all those years of Japanese cinema, it makes me think of my love for Oshima, which is true love no matter how you look at it, his youth films, his pessimistic disillusioned youth films. The memory of a conference by Robert Cueto about cinema and taboo, with bits of Tokyo Decadence shown, with the exploration of masochism as something cathartic. The memory of the years and the thousand of hours of loving fictional japanese teenagers. Everybody falling in love with Ryuhei Matsuda in Blue Spring while I was busy falling in love with Hirofumi Arai. Falling off rooftops. Rooftops are a very japanese fictional device. Now I think about the end of 21st Century Boys. Now I remember all the rooftop scenes in all the doujinshi I collect. My Prince of Tennis doujinshi are full of rooftops. I want to write books full of rooftops. I can't remember if there are any rooftops in All About Lily Chou-Chou but whenever I think about Japanese teenagers I think about Shunji Iwai's film. Now I can't listen to Debussy without thinking about the green grass of Lily Chou-Chou.

All this inform my reading of 69, and my love for it. My love and frustration at Murakami's novels Almost Transparent Blue and Coin Locker Babies. The other ones, In The Miso Soup and Audition, were easier to read but maybe for that very reason I liked the earlier ones more. 69 is like the earlier ones but also easy to read.

It's also a very funny book.

This is the kind of humour I want in a book. Here is my fondness of unreliable narrators (here is me thinking about Kyon in Suzumiya Haruhi and here is me thinking about Tomokazu Sugita's voice, which is the voice I hear when I read the Suzumiya Haruhi books, which I read in Spanish, so really it is Tomokazu Sugita's voice speaking into my head in Spanish, a very private experience). (Now I can't listen to Satie without thinking about Suzumiya Haruhi). The adventures of the narrator trying to shoot a low-budget film reminds me of reading a biography of Shinja Tsukamoto. It must have been 2001 or 2002. I still have that book. I have all the books on Japanese cinema that I once bought. I have sold many of my books but not these.  In 69 I find all that I love about Japanese fiction, about why I love these films, these manga. When I say love I realize I should be saying "obssession". But in 69 there's also the protagonist's obssession with the French. With the nouvelle vague. With looking like Alain Delon or feeling like Jean-Paul Belmondo, or the other way around. About dreaming of French movies he has not seen. In this I recognize myself almost painfuly. I spent my youth dreaming of French movies I had not seen.

69 by Ryu Murakami is the anti-Haruki Murakami novel. This is a good thing.

My love for this book works by association. When the protagonist says that terrorism is the only option I remember all the Wakamatsu films I've seen. All the Wakamatsu films I haven't seen but I say I've seen.

All books should have a scene where two teenagers share a bento in the grass. (They also should have a character that could be played by Tadanobu Asano because if not, what's the point in writing a novel?) Now I remember how, last year, I wanted to write a novel which was a sad, gay version of Touch! I wanted to write about the relationship between the silence of unrequited love and desire and the silence of mute manga panels. I still want to write this book. All my books are a form of fanfic.

Of all the novels I've read this year 69 is probably my favourite.