Japan is a country that is known for his systemic, institutional, and cultural subordination of women. Thus, it is additionally strange that on top of being a strange story about a strange encounter with a magical woman, that this story is about the power that women have over men, whether they are passerbys on a train late one night in Tokyo, or whether they are devoted, prim housewives that tirelessly devote themselves to the pleasure of their husbands. The primary characters in "Almost Transparent Blue" include Reiko, Ryu, and Okinawa. They all abuse heroin together. As aforementioned, a distinctive quality of this story is the involvement of the author as a character in the story. This is one of several ways that the story demonstrates its self-awareness as a story, as a piece of literature, and its relationship to factual discourse. This story is very much aware of itself and its relation to real life, which on one hand is very interesting and unique, but on the other hand it disconcerting. There is a kind of a comfortable distance that readers can have while they read -- people read to escape, and to engage in worlds that are different from their own, even when the story is based in reality. This story disrupts this distance between the reader and the story. This story disrupts the distance between the author and the text!

Murakami is one of Japan's most famous modern authors, with a reputation for surreal and masterful storytelling, and "Almost Transparent Blue" is one of those examples. Murakami has an amazing talent for beginning stories in real life, in issues or actions that have or could quite plausibly happen, and then spinning them into fantastically surreal stories, in a way that is almost invisible to the reader until the reader is deeply immersed in the story itself. "Almost Transparent Blue" is an...

A reader may not be certain what the crux or theme of the story is until deeply immersed in it, or until after the reader is done. This is the subtle power of the journey of Murakami's stories.
We begin in this story, just like "Newlywed," in media res, in the middle of things, such as Reiko and Ryu preparing to shoot up heroin using needles. Just like the homeless are strange and out of place in Japanese society, heroin is a drug that not very popular in Japan, as it is a country that has many recreational drugs available (and sometimes legal) for people to use. Heroin is an opiate -- a euphoric depressant, which is revealing with respect to the characters. The characters, including the author, want to feel euphoria, as an escape from the drudgery, and yet they also do not want to be active or ambulatory. They prefer to be euphoric and sedate at the same time, which, to this author, is a strange choice, but if we consider the characters as figures or microcosms of Japanese people, then the choice of heroin is revealing regarding the social politics of that country. Furthermore, one of their friends/associates/fellow junkies is named Okinawa. Okinawa is one of the numerous islands that compose Japan. Some Okinawans do not consider themselves Japanese; they consider themselves Okinawan, something completely different. Okinawa is also one of the places in Japan where there is still a transparent United States military presence, which does not sit well with the Okinawans or Japanese people. Even as recently as a few years ago, U.S. military personnel were in the news in Japan for physically and sexually assaulting a young Japanese girl. Murakami has a way of tightly packing politics, culture, and history in extremely subtle ways, which is indicative of his style and which is also very Japanese.