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Haruki Murakami

Encyclopedia : H : HA : HAR : Haruki Murakami

is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator. His work has been described by the Virginia Quarterly Review as "easily accessible, yet profoundly complex."
Contents

Biography

Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 but spent most of his youth in Kobe. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest. His mother was the daughter of a merchant from Osaka. They both taught Japanese literature.

Since his early years as a child Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly in terms of Western music and literature. He grew up reading everything from the works of American writers such as Vonnegut and Brautigan, to Dostoyevsky and Balzac, and he is often distinguished from other Japanese writers for his western influences. Japanese literature often puts emphasis on beautiful language, which can result in stiff, restricted composition, while Murakami's style is relatively free and fluid.

Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo where he met his wife, Yoko. His first job was in a record store (which is where one of his main characters, Toru Watanabe from Norwegian Wood, works). After finishing his studies, Murakami opened the jazz bar "Peter Cat" in Tokyo, which he ran from 1974-1982. Many of his novels have musical themes and titles referring to a particular song, including Dance, Dance, Dance (from The Dells), Norwegian Wood (after the Beatles song) and South of the Border, West of the Sun (the first part being the title of a song by Nat King Cole).

Murakami taught literature for several years at Tufts University.

\"Trilogy of the Rat\"

Murakami did not write any fiction until his early thirties. According to Murakami, he was suddenly and inexplicably inspired to write his first novel (Hear the Wind Sing, 1979) while watching a baseball game. Murakami worked on it for several months in very brief stretches after working days at the bar (resulting in a fragmented, jumpy text in short chapters). After finishing, he sent his novel to the only literary contest that would accept a work of that length, and won first prize. Even in this first work many of the basic elements of Murakami's mature writing are in place: Westernized style, idiosyncratic humor, and poignant nostalgia.

His initial success encouraged him to keep writing. A year later he published Pinball, 1973, a sequel. In 1982 he published A Wild Sheep Chase, a critical success, which makes original use of fantastic elements and has a uniquely disconnected plot. Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball and A Wild Sheep Chase form the "Trilogy of the Rat" (a sequel, Dance, Dance, Dance, was later written but is not considered part of the series), centered on the same unnamed narrator and his friend called "the Rat". However, his first two novels are out of print in English translation outside of Japan. According to Murakami (Publishers Weekly, 1991), he considers his first two novels "weak," and was not eager to have them translated into English. A Wild Sheep Chase was "the first book where I could feel a kind of sensation, the joy of telling a story. When you read a good story, you just keep reading. When I write a good story, I just keep writing."

Wider recognition

In 1985 he wrote Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a dreamlike fantasy which takes the magical elements in his work to a new extreme.

Murakami achieved a major breakthrough and national recognition in 1987 with the publication of Norwegian Wood, a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality. It sold millions of copies among Japanese youth, making Murakami something of a superstar in his native country (to his dismay). The book was printed in two separate parts, sold together. One book had a green cover, the other a red one. Some hardcore fans of the book wore clothing of one colour to show their preference for that part.[[Citing sources citation needed]] In 1986, Murakami left Japan, travelled throughout Europe, and settled in the United States.

Murakami taught at Princeton University in Princeton, NJ and at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. During this time he wrote Dance, Dance, Dance and South of the Border, West of the Sun.

An established novelist

In 1994/1995 he published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This novel fuses his realistic and fantastic tendencies, and contains elements of physical violence. It is also more socially conscious than his previous work, dealing in part with the difficult topic of the war crimes in Manchuria (Manchukuo). The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is frequently cited by critics as Murakami's best work. It won him the Yomiuri Literary Award, awarded to him by one of his harshest former critics, Kenzaburo Oe.

The processing of collective trauma soon took a central position in Murakami's writing, which had until then been more personal in nature. While he was finishing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Japan was shaken by the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack, in the aftermath of which he returned to Japan. He came to terms with these events with his first work of non-fiction, Underground, and the short story collection After the Quake. Underground consists largely of interviews of victims of the sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system. While perpetrators and events behind the attack are not the focus of the book, the picture of Japanese society that Murakami paints is shocking.

English translations of many of his short stories written between 1983 and 1990 have been collected in The Elephant Vanishes. He has also translated many of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Paul Theroux, among others, into Japanese.

Recent work

The succinct Sputnik Sweetheart was first published in 1999. Kafka on the Shore was published in 2002, with the English translation following in 2005. The English version of his latest novel, After Dark, is to be released in 2007. In late 2005, Murakami published a collection of short stories titled Tōkyō Kitanshū (東京奇譚集, translates loosely as "Mysteries of Tokyo"). A collection of the English versions of 25 short stories, titled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, was published in July 2006. This collection includes both older works from the 1980s as well as some of Murakami's most recent short stories (including all five that appear in Tōkyō Kitanshū).

Criticism and influence

Murakami's fiction, often criticized for being "pop" literature by Japan's literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, and at the same time reflects an essential alienation, loneliness and longing for love in a way that has touched readers in the US and Europe, as well as in East Asia. In addition, Murakami's writing has also been criticized because of his portrayal of Japan's obsession with capitalism. Through his work, he was able to capture the spiritual emptiness of his generation and explore the negative effects of Japan's all work mentality. His writing criticizes the decrease in human values and a loss of connection between people in Japan's capitalist society.

Recently, director Jun Ichikawa adapted Murakami's short story Tony Takitani into a 75 minute feature. The film has played at various film festivals and was released in New York and Los Angeles July 29, 2005. The original short story (as translated by Jay Rubin) is available in the April 15, 2002 issue of The New Yorker and as a [stand-alone book] published by Cloverfield Press.

Bibliography

External links

Interviews

 

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