Within the past year Haruki Murakami has become one of my favorite writers. I’d like to take up a little space on this blog to tell you about him and maybe win you over on his behalf.

Murakami is a Japanese writer (his works, both fiction and nonfiction, live in the foreign fiction section here at Lemuria), who has gained a great deal of international acclaim over the years for novels like Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore.  He’s one of the only Japanese writers to gain a loyal following in the United States, and in Japan his novels have made him into something of a celebrity. Not being a fan of his fame, Murakami exiled himself for a few years and has allowed few interviews (I was only able to find five when I was researching for this blog).

Part of Murakami’s success in America may come from the fact that stylistically his novels are Western.  He explains his style choices in a 2004 interview with the Paris Review:

“When I was 29, I just started to write a novel out of the blue. I wanted to write something, but I didn’t know how.  I didn’t know how to write in Japanese—I’d read almost nothing of the works of Japanese writers—so I borrowed the style, structure, everything, from the books I had read—American books or Western books.”

Though the structure of his writing may be familiar to those of us who are fans of Western European and American literature, Murakami’s themes and stories are all his own. He has a talent for churning out fantasy/sci-fi mixed with serious philosophical and moral questionings.   I have never before encountered an author who writes so elegantly about the kinds of strange events that pop up in Murakami’s novels and short stories.  I’ve discovered dancing dwarves, psychic prostitutes, girls who willingly fall into the role of sleeping beauties, and alternate universes entered through sleep and deep wells in abandoned lots. Yet as magical as his worlds are, Murakami’s protagonists are level-headed and calmly take on their fantastical encounters with amusement and intelligence.

I never tire of the recurring themes in Murakami’s works. Whenever I’m in a reading slump, I put down everything else and dive into one of his novels.  I’ve read three of them already since January (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, After Dark and Norwegian Wood) and I have three more waiting on my shelves.

But besides being a wonderful fiction writer, Haruki Murakami is just an interesting guy, who has managed to achieve quite a lot in his lifetime.  Below I’ve listed some fun facts about Murakami, so you can get a sense of what he’s all about:

  • Before becoming a writer Murakami opened the coffeehouse/jazz bar named Peter Cat with his wife.
  • Murakami is a marathon runner and a triathlete (He has written a book on the subject of running called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running).
  • In 2006 he won the Franz Kafka prize for Kafka on the Shore.
  • In addition to being a writer Murakami works as a translator. He has translated the works of Raymond Carver, J.D. Salinger, Truman Capote and F. Scott Fitzgerald into Japanese—many of which are the first translations to ever be available in Japanese.
  • Murakami served as the writing fellow for both Princeton and Tufts University.
  • Murakami received an honorary doctorate from Princeton in 2008.
  • When he won the Jerusalem Prize in 2009, Murakami attended the ceremony (despite the public’s threats to boycott his work) and gave a speech to Israeli dignitaries criticizing Israel’s policies (concerning the recent bombing of Gaza).

Interesting guy, huh? I can’t get enough of his work and have seen information about there possibly being a new book being published in the U.S. sometime this year.  Needless to say I can’t wait.

Do you have any writers that you simply can’t enough of? If so, please share.  -Kaycie

 

You can read the entirety of the Paris Review interview I cited here.

This blog was originally published March 12, 2011.

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Click here to see all of Haruki Murakmai’s books.

Click here to see other blog posts on Murakami.

hmhm

 

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