Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami (村上春樹 Murakami Haruki; born January 12, 1949) is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator.
He was born in Kyoto but spent most of his youth in Kobe. His father was a Buddhist priest. His mother was the daughter of a merchant from Osaka. They both taught Japanese literature.
Murakami, however, was always more interested in American literature laying the foundations for his Western style, which later distinguished him from the Japanese literary mainstream.
He studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo where he met his wife, Yoko. His first job was in a record store. After finishing his studies he opened the jazz bar "Peter Cat" in Tokyo, which he ran from 1974-1982. Hence many of his novels have musical themes, especially Dance, Dance, Dance, after the Beach Boys song of the same name, and Norwegian Wood, named after the Beatles song.
Murakami did not write any fiction at all until his early thirties. According to him, 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 finishing his days at the bar (resulting in a fragmented, jumpy text in short chapters). When he was done he blindly sent it out to the only literary contest that would accept a work of that length, and duly won first prize. Even in this first work many of the basic elements of Murakami's mature writing were 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. (His first two novels are out of print in English translation.) In 1982 he published A Wild Sheep Chase, a critical success, which made original use of magical elements and had a uniquely disconnected plot. These novels form the "Trilogy of the Rat" (they all starred the same unnamed narrator and a friend of his named "the Rat"). In 1985 he published Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a dreamlike fantasy which took the magical elements in his work to a new extreme.
He achieved his major breakthrough and national recognition in 1987 through the publication of Norwegian Wood, a nostalgic story of loss and sexual coming-of-age. Norwegian Wood sold millions of copies among Japanese youth, making Murakami something of a superstar in his native country (to his dismay). In 1986, Murakami left Japan traveling through Europe until settling in the United States.
He taught at Princeton University in Princeton, NJ and then at Tufts University in the town of Cambridge, MA. During this time he wrote Dance, Dance, Dance and South of the Border, West of the Sun.
In 1994/1995 he published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This novel seamlessly fused both his realistic and fantastic tendencies, and was his first that contained elements of physical violence. It also was more socially conscious than his previous work, dealing in part with the difficult topic of the Japanese war crimes in Manchuria (Manchukuo). The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the novel most frequently cited by critics as Murakami's greatest. For this novel he won the Yomiuri Literary Award, which was awarded to him by one of his harshest former critics, Oe Kenzaburo.
The processing of collective trauma took a central position in Murakami's writing, which had until then been more light-hearted in nature. While he was finishing 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.
Short stories are an important part of Murakami's oeuvre. Apart from Quake, many of his stories written between 1983 and 1990 have been published in English under the title 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.
His latest novels are the short, but succinct: Sputnik Sweetheart, first published in 1999, and Kafka on the Shore, from 2002, the English translation of which was published in 2005. The English version of his latest book, After Dark, is to be released in 2010.
Murakami's fiction, which is often criticised 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.
Bibliography
- Hear the Wind Sing (1979)
- 風の歌を聴け (Kaze no uta o kike)
- Pinball, 1973 (1980)
- 1973年のピンボール (1973-nen no pinbōru)
- A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) ISBN 037571894X
- 羊をめぐる冒険 (Hitsuji o meguru bōken)
- Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) ISBN 0679743464
- 世界の終わりとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド (Sekai no owari to hâdoboirudo wandārando)
- Norwegian Wood (1987) ISBN 0375704027
- ノルウェイの森 (Noruei no mori)
- Dance, Dance, Dance (1988) ISBN 0679753796
- ダンス・ダンス・ダンス (Dansu dansu dansu)
- South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992) ISBN 0679767398
- 国境の南、太陽の西 (Kokkyō no minami, taiyō no nishi)
- The Elephant Vanishes (1993) ISBN 0679750533
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994/5) ISBN 0679775439
- ねじまき鳥クロニクル (Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru)
- Underground (1997/8) ISBN 0375725806
- アンダーグラウンド (Andaguraundo)
- Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) ISBN 0375726055
- スプートニクの恋人 (Spūtoniku no koibito)
- After the Quake (2000) ISBN 0375713271
- 神の子どもたちはみな踊る (Kami no kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru)
- Kafka on the Shore (2002) ISBN 1400043662
- 海辺のカフカ (Umibe no Kafuka)
- After Dark (2004) - English version to be released in 2010
- アフターダーク (Afutādāku)
External links
