Haruki Murakami

[coinlockerbaby]

Thats so funny you said that...coz I *loved* Ryu Murakami's "Coin Lcoker babies" but his first novel "Almost Transparent Blue" didnt do it for me at all. I put it down halfway and never picked it up again. Just depressed people having depressing graphic sex and taking drugs page after page after page...so bleak and pointless...

And yet I thought "Coinlocker..." was just the opposite - a bleak situation that he portrayed with real beauty and redemption. Guess Ryu picked up some tricks as he went along...

Have yet to read "In the Miso Soup" or 69 - anyone here read them?What did you think?

[breams]

I've read In the Miso Soup - it's ok, but I don't think it's great. It's very short, and can be done in a few hours. It's worth a read though, certainly.

[Red Dead]

i've been getting into murakami too this summer; i just finished norweigan wood and underground recently, both of which i enjoyed very much. i've picked up a bunch of his other works from the library the other day, thought i'm not sure how i'll respond to the fanciful/supernatural elements in his other books considering the first two i read are his more reality-based works.

[oweng23]

I've read In the Miso Soup - it's ok, but I don't think it's great. It's very short, and can be done in a few hours. It's worth a read though, certainly.

I have read that and thought it was quite good but a bit short.

As for haruki murakami i have read nearly all of his except the latest one I dont really have a favorite as i like them all.

[fallen angels]

Anybody else watch the screen version of Tony Takatami? What did you think?

yea i have it.. its a pretty accurate translation of the literature into film in terms of character and events, and especially because the pacing of the film truthfully matches the pace murakami used in the story. and it's a short film, just like Takitani was a short story.

[masuerte]

Does anyone want to start a book exchange?

[GiZMO]

http://magna.cs.ucla.edu/~hxwang/newyorker/blog/040409.html

Some of his short stories. I want to be able to read more, does anyone have sources? Aside from his books, are his short stories published in a book form? Or only magazines or what. I have yet to see an authentic print of any of his short stories.

[fallen angels]

http://magna.cs.ucla.edu/~hxwang/newyorker/blog/040409.html

Some of his short stories. I want to be able to read more, does anyone have sources? Aside from his books, are his short stories published in a book form? Or only magazines or what. I have yet to see an authentic print of any of his short stories.

a lot of his short stories were published in books. check out Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, The Elephant Vanishes, and After the Quake. they're all collections of short stories. some of his short stories are occasionally printed in The New Yorker magazine too.

[tweeds]

dunno if anyone has seen this--i'm sure some of you must have.

----

By HARUKI MURAKAMI

Published: July 8, 2007 in The New York Times

I never had any intention of becoming a novelist — at least not until I turned 29. This is absolutely true.

I read a lot from the time I was a little kid, and I got so deeply into the worlds of the novels I was reading that it would be a lie if I said I never felt like writing anything. But I never believed I had the talent to write fiction. In my teens I loved writers like Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Balzac, but I never imagined I could write anything that would measure up to the works they left us. And so, at an early age, I simply gave up any hope of writing fiction. I would continue to read books as a hobby, I decided, and look elsewhere for a way to make a living.

The professional area I settled on was music. I worked hard, saved my money, borrowed a lot from friends and relatives, and shortly after leaving the university I opened a little jazz club in Tokyo. We served coffee in the daytime and drinks at night. We also served a few simple dishes. We had records playing constantly, and young musicians performing live jazz on weekends. I kept this up for seven years. Why? For one simple reason: It enabled me to listen to jazz from morning to night.

I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers performed in Kobe in January that year, and I got a ticket for a birthday present. This was the first time I really listened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thunderstruck. The band was just great: Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone and Art Blakey in the lead with his solid, imaginative drumming. I think it was one of the strongest units in jazz history. I had never heard such amazing music, and I was hooked.

A year ago in Boston I had dinner with the Panamanian jazz pianist Danilo Pérez, and when I told him this story, he pulled out his cellphone and asked me, “Would you like to talk to Wayne, Haruki?” “Of course,” I said, practically at a loss for words. He called Wayne Shorter in Florida and handed me the phone. Basically what I said to him was that I had never heard such amazing music before or since. Life is so strange, you never know what’s going to happen. Here I was, 42 years later, writing novels, living in Boston and talking to Wayne Shorter on a cellphone. I never could have imagined it.

When I turned 29, all of a sudden out of nowhere I got this feeling that I wanted to write a novel — that I could do it. I couldn’t write anything that measured up to Dostoyevsky or Balzac, of course, but I told myself it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to become a literary giant. Still, I had no idea how to go about writing a novel or what to write about. I had absolutely no experience, after all, and no ready-made style at my disposal. I didn’t know anyone who could teach me how to do it, or even friends I could talk with about literature. My only thought at that point was how wonderful it would be if I could write like playing an instrument.

I had practiced the piano as a kid, and I could read enough music to pick out a simple melody, but I didn’t have the kind of technique it takes to become a professional musician. Inside my head, though, I did often feel as though something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.

Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist. Even now, almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model.

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

[jpgm]

im currently reading 'number 9 dream' by david mitchell....it was shortlisted for the booker prize and is amazing so far.

really similar vibe to murakami in my opinion, it gets my tick of approval....check it.

[Comma H]

Ive just started reading After Dark. My first Murakami book, but its going pretty good so far.

[cyberPUNK]

i actually purchased a movie made in what seems the late 70s early 80s of a few of his short stories. the only one i remember in particular was a portion of "the bakery attack," but i believe a few more were on the dvd as well. definitely worth trying to find out there on the internets.

[fallen angels]

Ive just started reading After Dark. My first Murakami book, but its going pretty good so far.

what did you think? dont be discouraged if you didnt like it, IMO its not a good example of Murakami's prowess because i felt it wasnt nearly as strong as a novel than his other stories.

FA, link me to the Murakami thread. I'll contribute to the discussion; I've read all of Murakami's works (except for Sputnik Sweetheart) multiple times, and I've read multiple secondary sources on his writing. (Back when he was a lesser-known quantity, I had to get a dissertation by Matthew Strecher printed up for me from the University of Michigan from a photostat machine, as I was hungry for any information and criticism I could find on Murakami.)

You know that Murakami's works heavily influenced Wong Kar-wai's, right? The germ for Chungking Express was contained in "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning."

are you saying you havent read Sputnik Sweetheart at all, or just not multiple times as you did with his other works? based on your past hunger for murakami, i'm guessing youve read it before but not again. why didnt you like it? personally i liked it...

i can see some parallels between "100% Perfect Girl" and Chungking Express, but i never knew it was such a direct influence on WKW's films, thats pretty interesting. however, i did read an interview with Tony Leung where he stated that reading is one of his favorite hobbies and that his favorite story is "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning"

currently reading Kafka on the Shore, its the only book by him i havent read yet. anyone familiar with Murakami's other stories have any opinions/comments about KotS and how it compares? i've heard mixed reviews.. no spoilers of course!

[wrong_move]

/obligatory Iive read Norwegian Wood, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hard Boiled Wonderland and they're all wonderful post

Although i don't really read a lot i found it hard to put down those three when i first read them. And being the casual reader that i am, i'll be honest and say that i enjoyed going through Norwegian Wood the most.

[jizzimmy]

I've read Kafka on the Shore and Hardboiled. I really enjoyed both of them. As a matter of fact, I think I'll see if the library I'm in carries any of his work.

[popPOPpop]

Murakami is an outstanding author I would have to say. I'm not a casual reader, but I've enjoyed the books I've read by him and of the two I've read I can't choose a favorite. The Wind-up Bird Chronicles was an adventure and I would recommend it to anyone looking into reading something by Murakami. I also thought The Elephant Vanishes was very enjoyable. "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning." Had to be one of my favorites..

[landho]

what did you think? dont be discouraged if you didnt like it, IMO its not a good example of Murakami's prowess because i felt it wasnt nearly as strong as a novel than his other stories.

Yeah, after dark is a minor work, written as a reaction to Kafka on the Shore, which is basically a summation of the themes and ideas he had been working with up to that point.

are you saying you havent read Sputnik Sweetheart at all, or just not multiple times as you did with his other works? based on your past hunger for murakami, i'm guessing youve read it before but not again. why didnt you like it? personally i liked it...

I've read it only once. I like a good part of it a lot, but a lot of it to me felt like ideas gleaned from his other works--Norwegian Wood and Wind-Up Bird Chronicle especially--and not fully developed. I should probably give it another chance at some point, but I remember after finishing it that it just seemed forced. Like that entire scene where Miu gets stuck on the Ferris wheel and sees that guy with the giant penis fuck (an image of) her in the window--that scene just struck me as nonsense. (Compare that to the scene in Wind-Up Bird where Noboru Wataya is psychically raping Creta Kano, for example; the scene from WInd-Up Bird is frightening in its intensity and strangeness, whereas the scene from Sputnik just seems silly.) I'll probably reread it again sometime within a year, though, so I'll reevaluate it then. After all, I didn't like Wind-Up Bird too much after my initial reading, but I am now convinced that it's one of the twentieth century's greatest novels.

i can see some parallels between "100% Perfect Girl" and Chungking Express, but i never knew it was such a direct influence on WKW's films, thats pretty interesting. however, i did read an interview with Tony Leung where he stated that reading is one of his favorite hobbies and that his favorite story is "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning"

"Wong's chief inspiration for Chungking Express was a short story entitled 'On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning' by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. The story is about the mutability of perceptions, and begins with the sentence, 'One fine April morning, I passed my 100% woman on a Harajuku back street.' Chungking Express similarly begins with a chance encounter, which becomes a motif in the first episode....Wong develops the themes of chimerical relationships with the same evanescence displayed in Murakami's short story. People's lives just touch but never interpenetrate (maybe they do not even touch but just brush past, mere possibilities, foregone opportunities to connect, impermanence). Like Murakami, Wong injects a sense of magical element into everyday life but with a sense of fatal consequences. Like Murakami, he invokes icons from popular culture to suggest the part that memory plays." (from Wong Kar-wai by Stephen Teo, 50-51)

I had been reading Murakami for several years when I began watching Wong Kar-wai's movies, and while I drew connections between the themes that they both explored, I did not know that Murakami's work directly influenced WKW's work. I was very excited to find out that it did--the idea that two of my favorite artists were connected was made manifest. Also, WKW's methodology is very, very similar to Murakami's; when they begin on a new work, neither knows the direction that they are heading. The process of creating for both of them is integral to the creation itself. It cannot be separated. This is the opposite of how, say, Alfred Hitchcock or Vladimir Nabokov worked. WKW had, I think, about 3000 minutes of footage (not just takes, but footage proper) of In the Mood for Love. In the editing room, he parsed it down to the story that we know. If you watch the documentary @ In the Mood for Love, you will see scenes in which Tony Leung's and Maggie Cheung's characters and relationship are basically unrecognizable from the finished film. I guess WKW had to film those scenes to realize that they didn't fit. (Happy Together was originally a three-hour film and included a couple of significant female roles, one of which was a nurse who nurtured Tony Leung's character back to health after he attempted suicide; it ended up being about 100 minutes long.) Likewise, when Murakami began writing Norwegian Wood, he said that he didn't know what the novel was going to be about or where it was going or how it was going to end; all he knew was that there would be five characters, three of whom would die.

[currently reading Kafka on the Shore, its the only book by him i havent read yet. anyone familiar with Murakami's other stories have any opinions/comments about KotS and how it compares? i've heard mixed reviews.. no spoilers of course!

I loved Kafka on the Shore, and I think you are reading it in the right place (after you've read his other works). It's basically a summation of all the themes and ideas that he had been exploring in all his works prior. (An analogy would be 2046 to the rest of WKW's work.) You see through Kafka again and again explicit references to Murakami's earlier work. As much as I loved it, however, I felt that he had reached the end of the line, so to speak--he could no longer explore those same themes as they reached a climax with Wind-Up Bird and South of the Border and had been synthesized and recapitulated in Kafka. Which is why, I think, after dark is what it is--a radical departure from his earlier work, much more cinematic, much less personal and emotional.

[landho]

[A Wild Sheep Chase]

read it over the weekend. not that bad but probably one of my least favorite by him

A Wild Sheep Chase was Murakami's third novel and his first attempt at a longer, sustained work. It's a little whimsical for my tastes, but it's great as it establishes the themes and tones that he would explore more in depth later. Also, it was the first book that Murakami wrote that had political themes at all; if I remember correctly, there is implicit criticism that no one, not even the sheep herders, is removed from the military-industrial complex, as the wool that they produced was eventually used to line the jackets of Japanese soldiers committing atrocities across mainland Asian.

I love the sequel, Dance Dance Dance, a great deal, but Murakami had by that time become a much better writer (having written Hard-Boiled Wonderland and Norwegian Wood in the meanwhile). It's much darker and more sophisticated than Wild Sheep Chase.

[Yardsale]

I have to agree with DDD being better than Wild Sheep Chase. I accidentally read DDD first You can see how improved his craft had gotten just reading them back to back.

[fallen angels]

you know, my first impression after reading Wild Sheep Chase wasnt that impressive, but in the following days/weeks i found myself thinking about the story a lot, and it kind of grew on me. i can say i like it a lot more now, like you said it is his earliest work where you start to see the surreal themes that he masters in his later works. DDD is one of my favorites, i've read it countless times. Hardboiled Wonderland is for sure my favorite though

[landho]

I have to agree with DDD being better than Wild Sheep Chase. I accidentally read DDD first You can see how improved his craft had gotten just reading them back to back.

I did that too! When I first began reading Murakami, only DDD, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Wild Sheep Chase, and Elephant Vanishes were available, and Wild Sheep Chase was available only on Plume. I was so blown away by HBW and Elephant, though, that I just read DDD anyway. Eventually had to go back and read both.

you know, my first impression after reading Wild Sheep Chase wasnt that impressive, but in the following days/weeks i found myself thinking about the story a lot, and it kind of grew on me. i can say i like it a lot more now, like you said it is his earliest work where you start to see the surreal themes that he masters in his later works. DDD is one of my favorites, i've read it countless times. Hardboiled Wonderland is for sure my favorite though

Hard-Boiled Wonderland will always have a very special place for me. It was the first Murakami novel I ever read, and the entire End of the World sequence, with the narrator being separated from his sentient shadow and reading the dreams from the skulls of the unicorns....It was breathtaking.

Have you watched Haibane Renmei? It's an anime directed by Yoshitoshi Abe, who also directed Lain, and it's directly influenced by the End of the World sequence in Hard-Boiled Wonderland. I bought it on a lark a few years ago because I was hungry for anime and it was what I settled on after browsing the anime shelf for an interminable amount of time at Fry's. (Kind of a weird way to choose something.) I was pretty shocked to see Murakami's fingerprints all over the work, down the wall enclosing the community.

[fallen angels]

I've read it only once. I like a good part of it a lot, but a lot of it to me felt like ideas gleaned from his other works--Norwegian Wood and Wind-Up Bird Chronicle especially--and not fully developed. I should probably give it another chance at some point, but I remember after finishing it that it just seemed forced.

i can see what you mean, i agree there are some parts of the story that were not as well constructed for his standards. but for me, i guess i liked the story because of a message i got. the narrator practically loses everything and everyone he had, but life goes on. for some reason, that thought really got to me.

here is the particular passage i have in mind:

"So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us --that's snatched right out of our hands -- even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness."

i think this idea describes some of the themes/characters seen in wkw's films pretty well (fallen angels, ashes of time, happy together, itmfl -> 2046). in each film there are characters who lose something and there is an "emptiness" or painful memory that they carry on, and after that point you can feel it as it becomes part of their character

[landho]

I remember really liking the beginning of Sputnik Sweetheart when I first read it but then being exasperated with the resolution and the execution. When I pulled it off the shelf, however, I saw that I had noted quite a few passages in my copy. So good stretches of the book must have made quite an impression on me. It's true that the beginning and the end make the biggest impression, so maybe my negative reaction to how the novel wrapped up unduely influenced my impressions.

I mean, I don't dislike the book; I only like less than his other books.

[fallen angels]

Hard-Boiled Wonderland will always have a very special place for me. It was the first Murakami novel I ever read, and the entire End of the World sequence, with the narrator being separated from his sentient shadow and reading the dreams from the skulls of the unicorns....It was breathtaking.

word, HBW seriously blew my f--kin mind, man... the story grabbed me by the balls and didnt let go until the conclusion, which in my mind, was the perfect ending.

[popPOPpop]

Have you watched Haibane Renmei? It's an anime directed by Yoshitoshi Abe, who also directed Lain, and it's directly influenced by the End of the World sequence in Hard-Boiled Wonderland. I bought it on a lark a few years ago because I was hungry for anime and it was what I settled on after browsing the anime shelf for an interminable amount of time at Fry's. (Kind of a weird way to choose something.) I was pretty shocked to see Murakami's fingerprints all over the work, down the wall enclosing the community.

I've watched Haibane Renmei a while back and since you mentioned it I'm interested in reading HBW and watching the end of Haibane. Yoshitoshi is brilliant for directing both Lain and Haibane Renmei.

word, HBW seriously blew my f--kin mind, man... the story grabbed me by the balls and didnt let go until the conclusion, which in my mind, was the perfect ending.

Just on that description, I'm determined to go out and purchase the book.

[Wolves]

I finished After Dark awhile ago and it was fucking good.

[fallen angels]

i just finished reading Kafka on the Shore today, and damn i really really liked it, a lot more so than i was expecting. it was the last novel by him that i haven't read, and i went into it without high expectations and found it really enjoyable. i definitely think it is better to read it after reading his earlier works first, it really is a summation of many of his earlier ideas (as landho mentioned), especially the themes in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

if anyone has any recommendations for other fiction novels by modern authors with a similar "styles", please share them!

I loved Kafka on the Shore, and I think you are reading it in the right place (after you've read his other works). It's basically a summation of all the themes and ideas that he had been exploring in all his works prior. (An analogy would be 2046 to the rest of WKW's work.) You see through Kafka again and again explicit references to Murakami's earlier work. As much as I loved it, however, I felt that he had reached the end of the line, so to speak--he could no longer explore those same themes as they reached a climax with Wind-Up Bird and South of the Border and had been synthesized and recapitulated in Kafka. Which is why, I think, after dark is what it is--a radical departure from his earlier work, much more cinematic, much less personal and emotional.

[landho]

i just finished reading Kafka on the Shore today, and damn i really really liked it, a lot more so than i was expecting. it was the last novel by him that i haven't read, and i went into it without high expectations and found it really enjoyable. i definitely think it is better to read it after reading his earlier works first, it really is a summation of many of his earlier ideas (as landho mentioned), especially the themes in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

if anyone has any recommendations for other fiction novels by modern authors with a similar "styles", please share them!

Don't know if you will be able to find anything that closely approximates Haruki Murakami's work, but here is a brief list of other works you may enjoy:

• Almost Transparent Blue
  
• Coin Locker Babies
  
• 1969, all three by Ryu Murakami. These three works are all really good, although Ryu Murkami lacks the writerly qualities that Haruki Murakami's writing has. His writing is edgy and disturbing and oftentimes surprising, though, so it's probably worth checking out.
  
• Out, by Natsuo Kirino. I am not a fan of thrillers, but this one is amazing. Intensely psychological and emotionally tense.
  
• Watchmen, by Alan Moore
  
• Neuromancer, by Wiliam Gibson. You probably know about both of these, but they're among the very best things I've ever read. I've read them both multiple times and have always learned something new with each reading.
  
• Buddha, vol. 1 through 8
  
• Phoenix, vol. 1 through 11, both by Osamu Tezuka. I am certain that within our lifetimes Tezuka will be recognized as a major figure of world literature. His works, especially these two, can be described only as transcendent.
  
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
  
• The Yiddish Policemen's Union, both by Michael Chabon. The two best novels by arguably the best writer of fiction in English today.
  
• Gun, with Occasional Music, by Jonathan Lethem. A super enjoyable science-fiction noir and a very good debut novel. You kind of wish Lethem had stuck to genre work.

I am very tired and am actually heading to bed, but if you have any questions, feel free to follow up or PM me! I'll try to be more thorough then.

[hellogoodbye]

whenever i read murakami books i can't help but wonder how much of his true style/message etc is lost in translation. i'm sure many other people feel this way?

[Leugwai]

yea, i purchased After Dark too, about a week ago. Im like 30pgs in, haven't had time to read more. But i will.