The last flight: & Murakami's new book

Every time I fly I say, this is the last time I'm going to fly. And then I invariably fly again, finding some reason for flying, and say the same thing all over again, this is the last time I'm going to fly. The reason I fly again is always a compendium of reasons, all central to me: that flying is more expedient, a far more contemporary way of traveling, less expensive in the long run than driving or simply staying at home, and that there is, statistically, less chance of dying in an airplane than in a car.

Flying, I take books I never read, unable to read in the air because I'm flying. Nothing makes sense at 36,000 feet, nothing, not even Haruki Murakami, the Japanese writer I admire so much because he has a way of making nothing much much make sense in his writing.

Murakami's new book is, "Men Without Women" (Knopf, 2017). There are seven stories, each more or less forty pages long (as I once noted of the poet James Longenbach, he writes either long short poems or short long poems). The language is extremley banal, so banal that some say Murakami's a master of banality. Murakami certainly employs the banal to produce an artificially created literary atmosphere that may be understood by people who would rather not read, who would rather sit at the airport bar during their flight delay and drink Corona beer, watch tv on the large-screens on the wall, while listening carefully for the PA announcement that will instruct them at long last which gate their re-scheduled flight is departing from. 

Once in the air a Murakami reader is allowed to escape real life, sit back and read. The only interruption is the stewardess's announcement that drink service is being curtailed because of "expected turbulence", and a short demonstration of how to properly adjust the oxygen mask in case of an unexpected drop in cabin pressure. 

As the plane bounces around in the sky from cloud to cloud, the Murakami reader closes the book, having no need anymore for fiction, sure that he's entered the strangest, least appropriate place to be in the world.