Murakami Makes Me Grumpy

I am officially, 100% on holidays. This fact came to me again and again throughout the day, like the ocean waves pounding against a windswept shoreline. I would be caught up in some mindless activity, some mere chore, some absent manouvre of manual dexterity which, together with all the other deeds performed throughout the day enable me to put - as they say - a roof over my head - when another wave of pleasure welled up and hurled itself upon the desolate beach of my innermost thoughts and I would offer in return a frail smile, like a gift that the tentative giver is quite unsure will stir within the receiver quite the desired emotions. Perhaps the gift will be mis-interpreted and some imagined slight be born, like the seed of a small frond destined to be a great and mighty oak tree...

Okay okay. Horrible, isn't it. I've been reading some Murakami and he makes me cranky. Why does he write the shit out of everything? Check this from a story about the wind: "Outside in the absence of sound, the trees - Himalayan cedars and chestnuts, mostly - squirmed like dogs with an uncontrollable itch. Swatches of cloud cover slipped across the sky out out of sight like shifty-eyed secret agents, while on the verandah across the way several shirts wrapped themselves around a plastic clothesline and were clinging frantically, like abandoned orphans."

Is he taking the piss? What the fuck is all of that? Three similes in one short paragraph about the wind is way too many. And as if the squirming dog-trees and shifty-eyed secret agent clouds weren't bad enough, that orphan thing doesn't even make sense. If the orphan is clinging surely it has not yet been successfully abandoned. I see a future orphan clinging to its parent's leg which makes it a not-quite orphan caught up in the messy business of being abandoned. It's quite simply not yet an orphan... bah!

So anyway, I'm on holidays. Plan to catch up on a bit of reading. Should be nice... like a Murakami simile is not.