Some Thoughts on Murakami

1
Some Thoughts on Murakami

• From various sources

2
Alienation

• Alienation is key to Murakamis books and from
  them one
• comes to understand Japan a little better.
  Externally we see a nation conforming in dress
  and looks and attitudes. We see pictures of teens
  girls with crazes, buying millions of copies of
  one object or another. There appears to us to be
  a national will to conform and that is why
  Murakamis characters seem to be so strange and
  yet so popular with the Japanese. They are about
  people who cannot fit in, or make sense of the
  society they live in. They struggle to obey the
  rules and reject normal life, even when claiming
  to be ordinary.

3
Murakamis Method

• Murakamis own protagonists are not unlike
• detectives. They find clues by speaking to
  peculiar people in out-of-the-way places under
  cities, down deep wells. This reflects the
  visionary way Murakami himself goes about
  writing. If I knew everything before I wrote, it
  would be boring. The things and the people come
  to me automatically. I dont make up anything.

4
More on Method

• It is more a case of finding something. To
  generalize, Murakamis main character tends to be
  a man who is somewhat out of touch with his own
  feelings. Through his encounters with women, he
  discovers clues as to how his sense
  of self became unraveled. The man is a detective,
  but the crime has somehow happened within
  himself.
• The heros unpicking of a Hitchcock-style mystery
  dovetails with Murakamis own self-analysis
  through writing. As he puts it Im looking for
  my own story in myself....Thats why I like
  Joseph Campbell. People are looking for their
  tales inside themselves. Without tales people
  cant live their lives.

5
Murakami and Translation

• MY MOST INTENSE EXPERIENCE with translation, thus
  far, has involved a Japanese author. Like Javier
  Marías and W.G. Sebald, Haruki Murakami is a
  writer who is intimately acquainted with
  Anglo-American culture even as he remains outside
  it. (I think writers of this kind may well make
  the most interesting test cases for translation
  at any rate, I find myself repeatedly drawn to
  them.) Murakami, who has translated Raymond
  Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paul Theroux
  into Japanese, is quite attached to the Beatles,
  jazz, Scotch whiskey, Marx Brothers movies, and
  many other products of Western culture. He
  repeatedly injects something akin to an American
  sensibility -- a rebellious, non-salaryman's
  sensibility -- into his hapless fictional
  protagonists. Yet the novels are written in
  Japanese and set, for the most part, in Japan, so
  when we read them in English, we get (as with
  Marías and Sebald) a strange sensation of
  foreignness mixed with familiarity, of worlds
  collapsing in on each other.

6
Translation by Rubin

• Here, submitted as Exhibit A, are the opening
  sentences of the Rubin translation
• "When the phone rang I was in the kitchen,
  boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along
  with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's
  The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect
  music for cooking pasta.
• "I wanted to ignore the phone, not only
  because the spaghetti was nearly done, but
  because Claudio Abbado was bringing the London
  Symphony to its musical climax.
• Not bad, eh? Perfectly good English sentences
  presented by a reasonably interesting narrator.

7
Translation by Birnbaum

• But now listen to Exhibit B by Arthur Birnbaum
• "I'm in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the
  woman calls. Another moment until the spaghetti
  is done there I am, whistling the prelude to
  Rossini's La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio.
  Perfect spaghetti-cooking music.
• "I hear the telephone ring but tell myself,
  Ignore it. Let the spaghetti finish cooking. It's
  almost done, and besides, Claudio Abbado and the
  London Symphony Orchestra are coming to a
  crescendo.
• Whats the difference? Which one is better? Why?

8
And postmodernism

• No longer merely passive victims, the main
  characters in Murakami's major novels during this
  period--which include Sheep Chase and its sequel,
  Dance Dance Dance, and (perhaps his masterpiece
  to date) Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of
  the World-were now presented as questors seeking
  not merely romantic and nostalgic connections to
  the past but also a more active means of making
  sense of their lives and the bewildering
  plurality of hyperrealities around them.

9
And Consumerism

• No longer content, as he had been in Pinball 1973
  and Norwegian Wood, to tell a story about the
  conflict between self and environment in terms of
  daily, surface reality, Murakami devised a kind
  of "simulation approach" in which the conflicts
  existing within his protagonists' personal
  consciousnesses were immulated and then projected
  into the surreal, labyrinthine regions of dream
  and personalized, Jungian unconsciousness.
  Fully aware of the confusing, often banalizing
  impact that hyperconsumerism was having on Japan,
  these novels are all cautionary parables about
  the dangers of life under late capitalism--dangers
  which included information overload, the
  irrelevance of human values and spirituality in a
  world dominated by the inhuman logic of
  postindustrial capitalism, and the loss of
  contact with other human beings.

10
Sinda Gregory You adopt an interesting version
of the hard-boiled style in your novel
Hard-Boiled Wonderland. What about the
hard-boiled style appeals to you?

• Its authenticity. But I wasn't really interested
  in writing a hard-boiled mystery I just wanted
  the hard-boiled mystery structure. I'm very
  interested in structure. I've been using other
  pop structures in my writing as well--science
  fiction structures, for example. I'm also using
  love-story or romance structures. But as far as
  my thinking about the hard-boiled style, I'm
  interested in the fact that they are very
  individualist in orientation. The figure of the
  loner. I'm interested in that because it isn't
  easy to live in Japan as an individualist or a
  loner. I'm always thinking about this. I'm a
  novelist and I'm a loner, an individualist. I
  think that's why I came to this country. It's my
  dream to write hard-boiled mysteries.

11
LM Some critics, both in the U.S. and Japan,
have said that your work is not really Japanese.
Do you yourself think of yourself as having a
distinctly Japanese sensibility--or as writing
specifically about Japanese experience versus
just writing about universal experiences?

• The opinion that my books are not really Japanese
  seems to me to be very shallow. I certainly think
  of myself as being a Japanese writer. I write
  with a different style and maybe with different
  materials, but I write in Japanese, and I'm
  writing for Japanese society and Japanese people.
  So I think people are wrong when they are always
  saying that my style is really mainly influenced
  by Western literature. As I just said, at first I
  wanted to be an international writer, but
  eventually saw that I was nothing but a Japanese
  writer. But even in the beginning I wasn't only
  borrowing Western styles and rules. I wanted to
  change Japanese literature from the inside, not
  the outside. So I basically made up my own rules.

12
Could you give us some examples of what you mean?

• Most literary purists in Japan love beautiful
  language and appreciate sensitivity rather than
  energy or power. This beauty is admired for its
  own sake, and so their styles use a lot of very
  stiff, formal metaphors that don't sound natural
  or spontaneous at all. These writing styles get
  more and more refined, to the point where they
  resemble a kind of bonsai. I don't like such
  traditional forms of writing it may sound
  beautiful, but it may not communicate. Besides,
  who knows what beauty is? So in my writing, I've
  tried to change that. I like to write more
  freely, so I use a lot of long and peculiar
  metaphors that seem fresh to me.

13
Murakamis reception in Japan

• Beginning with the publication of his first
  novel, Murakami has enjoyed literary success in
  Japan, attracting younger readers by the millions
  with his linguistic playfulness and indeterminate
  narratives. However, Murakami has also baffled
  Japan's World War II generation for many of the
  same reasons. While most professional Japanese
  critics of jun-bungaku have favorably received
  Murakami's writings, praising his fusion of
  conventional Japanese literary aesthetics with
  postmodernism, other critics have expressed
  skepticism about his "American" language
  and cinematic plotting techniques.

14
Murakami and the West

• Murakami's skillful recognition of the irony
  that pervades grave situations and his ability to
  create strong characterizations. Although his
  fiction is often noted for its distinctly
  postmodern devices, most reviewers have agreed
  that these devices are not mere gimmicks, but
  rather valuable keys to understanding his
  fiction. Several Western critics have traced
  Murakami's influences from a range of
  contemporary American writers, often speculating
  upon the role of his Japanese translations of
  their works in shaping his style and narrative
  techniques.

15
Perhaps, more universally . . .

• Other commentators have noted the "confluence" of
  Eastern and Western literary traditions in
  Murakami's writings. In addition, Murakami is
  often credited with introducing a new type of
  jun-bungaku hero, one that reflects the author's
  own politically aloof and
  cutting-edge public persona, which, critics note,
  are tendencies exhibited and emulated by
  Murakami's generation in Japan. Critics have also
  referred to Murakami as the Japanese equivalent
  of American novelist Jay McInerney or Bret Easton
  Ellis. Despite these comparisons and the rampant
  consumerism of Murakami's characters, many
  reviewers have acknowledged a psychic or
  spiritual dimension to his writings.

16
Western Influences or a Japanese Original?

• Reflecting on Murakami's body of work, Lin
  observed, Despite the discrete concerns of each
  work, he essentially writes about one thing
  there is, in his books, a familiar world full of
  the living specifics of music, weather, books,
  food, marriage, and sex and then there is
  its shadow, invariably dark and dreamlike, which
  intrudes upon the original with intent to harm.
  The intersection of the familiar and the menacing
  forms the core of Murakami's interest. Coupled
  with sheer nerve, this obsession spawns a kind of
  fantasy literature that has no real precedent."
  And Jamie James pointed out in the New York Times
  Book Review that "Western critics searching for
  parallels have variously likened Murakami to
  Raymond Carver, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo,
  Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas
  Pynchon--a roster so ill-assorted as to suggest
  that Murakami may in fact be an original."