Freckles & Doubt

It's an interesting person, I hasten to add, just rather weird, in the sense that his emotional affect is completely flat. I'm wondering if this is actually intrinsically necessary to achieve that strange magical-realist effect his novels have; a more emotional protagonist would destroy the matter-of-fact taken-for-grantedness which gives the weird a lot of its force. I really think Murakami's closest literary relative is someone like Gabrial Garcia Marquez.