This country has never produced a single good writer.

the oldest zoomers are 24, 1998.
under 18 would be "based chad skibbidi gworl dinner"

It pays homage to noir and old Hollywood without being overly cartoonish about it. The characters aren't very deep but it works because the setting is just as much of one.

This isn't limited to Murakami (although he's a pretty egregious example), but one of the reasons Japanese pure lit doesn't appeal to me is that it completely ignores the natural phrasing of Japanese speech, in favor of ugly translationese that apes the western lit that these guys were influenced by.

>結局のところ──と僕は思う──
Nobody speaks like this. This is not Japanese. This is JD Salinger translated into Japanese. The irony being that Salinger deeply scrutinized the way people around him were speaking and developed it into this unique, natural-but-moreso style of English, whereas Murakami just laps it up as style while ignoring the philosophy behind it. Another one that that I notice a lot is sentences ending in 「~だからだ。」 You could take a corpus of 10,000 hours of colloquial Japanese and never see this construction, but Sayaka Murata uses it on every other page.

I guess for 純文学 fans this is the point, and there's no reason to take this reverence that postwar Anglo-American writers have had for colloquial speech and develop it into a universal ideal. Spanish and French literature also annoy me with their flowery archaisms. But personally, the going style of Japanese lit is, for me, not it. I'll stick to Anglos and Italians, who at least write as if they've heard human beings talking before.

Earthlings isn't awful only because the first 1/3 or so of the book is great. Once the MC is grown up it's basically a thematic rehash of CSW except it's much less focused and has less to say. Somehow the ending comes off as both rushed and meandering at the same time. Besides that my biggest complaint would be that once the time lapse happens all other characters become flat. You can argue "unreliable pov/reflective of the MC's mental state" but I don't accept that--there's not enough nuance/sprinkled detail given for the reader to pick up on characters besides the MC and the MC doesn't have a lot going on that hasn't already been shown to the reader. Besides her everyone else is just stock, not flattened by the MC's perspective but just 2D stereotypes, and it makes the book less interesting.

moronic headcanon made up by troons like you.

>I refuse to believe such a thing exists.
It's erotica written by a woman what do you expect. FYI the series revolves around an aunt's attempt to groom her niece (protagonist) in becoming her ideal partner, the aunt is author's self-insert and she teaches him how to capture and frick other virgin girls.