This book brought back a lot of memories. Being in high school, being a disruptive student, crushing on the local beauty queen, and art class. One of the best 'coming of age' stories I can remember reading. None of the usual Ryū Murakami violence or gore, just good ol' fun story telling.

3.75 Stars

This book was a lot of fun to read. Even though our main protagonist is very unlikeable, the way the author portrays him makes him incredibly comical. The protagonist Ken is both a satire of the anti-establishment teenager of the 1960s and a true representation of the adolescent experience. His idolization of both himself and certain girls is ridiculous but often hilarious in its exaggeration. The female characters are not very complex, but to be fair, they are only representative of the way Ken either puts them on a pedestal or completely dismisses them and should not be read as being a true representation of women and girls.

Of course, I couldn't write this review without comparing Ryu to Haruki. I enjoyed this novel much more than Haruki's Kafka on the Shore because it takes itself far less seriously. Unlike Kafka, Sixty Nine does not pretend to be actually representative of the way people act and behave. In Sixty Nine, the characters' behavior is exaggerated to criticize youth culture of the era as well as the established norms and social practices. In Kafka, the characters' unrealistic interactions was supposed to be taken at face value by the readers - at least, that was how I interpreted it. For me, it seems, a horny teenage boy narrator is more palatable when the novel isn't afraid to satirize the pretensions and hypocrisies of teenagers, rather than trying to make the teenage narrator out as the world's biggest genius and most misunderstood person.

As expected, I did find a few minutes to finish 69 by Ryu Murakami yeasterday. Ryu (not to be confused with Haruki, the other Murakami I have been reading) also has a distinctive, exceptionally good, flow to his work. I've also read In the Miso Soup, which had the same distinctive flow, but not as intriguing of a plot. 69 is a fast and easy read, yet still clever. The "69" refers to the year 1969. Written as the memoir of a smartass kid from a navy base town, the story is essentially the smartass's efforts to get a musical/film festival going in town (dubbed the "Morning Erection Festival"). It's a humorous read, woven with Murakami's flow of words, and a peek into an era of Japan that I certainly didn't know very much about.

I'm not sure how I really feel about this novel. It's supposed to be a semi-autobiographical piece and if that's really the case, I must say... If I had been a classmate of a 17-year old Murakami, we would have had a BEEF together because he seemed truly kind of obnoxious. On the other hand, I must say that I enjoyed the heck of the last pages of the novel. It's definitely far from a book that I would recommend but I'm glad I gave it a shot.