I’ve always had a soft spot for the works of Haruki Murakami. I wouldn’t exactly call him a proficient storyteller, he’s too much of a “gardener”-style writer for that, but his works are incredibly alluring — you’re completely draw into his dreamlike worlds of writing even though you’ll usually find yourself in some odd, confusing place or another.

This is an effect of his writing style as well as his themes. Murakami himself has stated he sometimes has no idea what certain aspects of his works actually “mean” — or where he’s going to end up when he sets out on a new story. That’s understandably frustrating if you’re new to his kind of surreal fiction, or if you expect every little plot detail to act like Chekov’s gun — an intentional seed that blooms into something meaningful down the line. But it’s also one of the things that makes Murakami charming and surprising. And being charmed and surprised are certainly two of the more appealing aspects of postmodern writing, to me.

This time around, in “Absolutely On Music”, our odd place is the concert hall, and on the stage is the famed Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa. He lifts his arms, baton held aloft, and then whips them through the air, a bush of messy grey hair flopping around with his swaying movements. Pure music spreads throughout the hall. There in the anonymity of the crowd sits Murakami, eyes closed, lost in the sounds… These are kind of mental images you get reading “Absolutely” which, as a book, has the odd effect of being a mental exercise in thinking about music, a medium that demands to be heard. You’re mind tends to fill in the emptiness with sounds of its own.

The book fits in neatly after the factual, interview-based reporting of “Underground” and makes sense with all of the overt nods to music in Murakami’s fiction, especially those classical. Released years ago in Japan and only out last September in English, “Absolutely” boils down to a number of chit-chats about symphonic music between Murakami and Ozawa. And, boy, are these guys into it. They’re casual by nature, though there’s a ton of ground covered here.

Unless you’re well versed in classical Western music, some of the topics in this book are bound to fly over your head. Murakami impresses with how much he knows about music and obscure musical techniques, especially considering the man isn’t a musician himself. He’s but a connoisseur. At one point in the book he mentions how he often writes while sitting alone in his room listening to records, year after year, perfectly content.

This interest is almost concerning due to his insane level of obsessive knowledge about specific musicians in Ozawa’s orchestras and about the life and work of the conductor himself. He proudly recounts listening to Ozawa’s entire oeuvre and comparing and contrasting several lengthy recordings of the same piece made at different points in the conductor’s life. It seems excessive to me, though I suppose it’s kind of like a baseball fan knowing a star player’s batting average or tenure on a certain team. Murakami is a super-fan meeting his idol here, and it really shows.

He praises the variety of Ozawa’s repertory, and says his style has it’s own “autonomous, irreplaceable magnetism.” Murakami’s respect for Ozawa is admirable in that it’s one accomplished artist talking with another accomplished artist. Murakami’s respect is especially clear in one section where — when watching a sickly Ozawa conducting — he wishes he “had the power to find him a spare body or two to keep him going.”

Another quote I loved was how Murakami describes the different phases of Ozawa’s musical life. Only Murakami could write such a passage:

“It sounds as if you’ve got the music doing a lively dance on the palms of your hands. There’s a kind of reckless audacity … But then you went to Boston and took over a major orchestra, and it feels as though you’re cupping your hands, embracing the music, carefully letting it ripen. And now comes the recent Saito Kinen performance, and I get the impression you’re unfolding your hands a little, letting the air in, freeing it up … Listening to these three very different performances of the Fantasique, I could feel the three different phases of your musical life.”

I think “Absolutely” really uncovers some profound admiration for Seiji Ozawa. Murakami respects him precisely because he possesses a quality that Murakami also has: a unique kind of artistry.

On this topic Ozawa says a person “who still doesn’t have his own technique in place ends up imitating someone else’s outward form, just superficially copying another person’s movements.” It’s an interesting line of thought, since Murakami is known for such having such a particular voice, even if it does often repeat the same phrases (cats, ears, nihilism, etc, etc).

Towards the end of “Absolutely,” Murakami ties this thread of artistry, writing and music together, saying: “So how did I learn to write? From listening to music. And what’s the most important thing in writing? It’s rhythm. … I write as if I’m making music.”

Speaking of writing, one of the things I loved about “Absolutely” is Murakami’s use of similes. When Ozawa is listening to a “tiny little clarinet part,” (lovingly transcribed as taa-ra-ra-ra, beep and, beep and,) Murakami adds, “The clarinet adds an indefinably mysterious touch to the melody, the strange notes of a bird crying out a prophecy deep in the forest.” It’s something I’d expect to come straight out of one of his fiction books.

Or another where “The music comes to the section where the strings and the wind instruments clash head-on and become entangled, like the tails of several complicated dreams.” They are always so startlingly original, and I think give some good insight into the man’s keen imagination.

Apart from Murakami’s gushing, I also enjoyed learning about Ozawa from his own lips. I’d never heard about him before, but he is clearly a very prolific and accomplished artist. His life story is given in snippets here and there, and you slowly uncover how he humbly began as an assistant conductor under Leonard Bernstein in New York and, upon first arriving in America, had such bad English that it caused him no end of trouble at work.

From reading just a short bit about him, you can tell Ozawa is completely immersed in his music, single-mindedly. He claims to have resorted to practicing scores backstage at Carnegie Hall at all hours as a young conductor. You can feel Ozawa’s innate passion when he says, “I have something that enables me to get completely inside the music.”

These are some of the things the two artists have in common: obsession and persistency. And their respect goes both ways. As Ozawa notes in the afterward: “I have lots of friends who love music, but Haruki takes it way beyond the bounds of sanity. Jazz, classics: he doesn’t just love music, he knows music.”

There’s a lot of good stuff in this book. They touch on Mahler, Western vs Eastern music, critics, teaching students, Italy’s “culture of booing,” and more. Also, the casual interjections captured in the book’s dialogue are so charming that they can’t go unmentioned:

Ozawa: Is it okay if I eat this o-nigiri rice ball?

Murakami: Please do. I’ll make tea.

I make tea.

And a short while later, another random comment interjects the dense discussion:

Ozawa: [He eats a piece of fruit.] Mmm, this is good. Mango?

Murakami: No, it’s a papaya.

You almost feel as if you’re there, listening like a fly on the wall in what must be a small yet cozy flat, somewhere in the sprawl of Tokyo, no doubt surrounded on all four walls by vinyl records and stacks of books, sitting there among two friends talking articulately and passionately about interesting topics, about art and life, no doubt sipping tea at first, a bit of Cutty Sark whisky later, and you yourself want to reach out for a piece of fruit and taste how sweet it is, too.

Bonus Review! After being pleasantly surprised by stumbling upon “Absolutely On Music” in a bookshop, I did some online clicking to see what other Murakami books I’d somehow missed.

I ended up finding a slim volume called “Haruki Murakami Goes to Meet Hayao Kawai,” which is almost exactly the same chit-chat format, though noticeably less meaty. It was written sometime after “Wind Up Bird Chronicle” with a famous Japanese Jungian psychologist.

It’s a light little read, and only really a necessity for Murakami obsessives looking for something to give them a fix until the English translation of Murakami’s next novel “Killing Commendatore” sees an English release sometime in the next few years.