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New from Haruki Murakami: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

Haruki Murakami (村上春樹, Murakami Haruki, born January 12, 1949) is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator. His work has been described by the Virginia Quarterly Review as “easily accessible, yet profoundly complex.”

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 an Osaka merchant. Both taught Japanese literature.

Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading a range of works by American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, 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 theater arts 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. Shortly before finishing his studies, Murakami opened the jazz bar “Peter Cat” in Kokubunji, Tokyo[1], which he ran from 1974 until 1982. Many of his novels have musical themes and titles referring to a particular song, including Dance, Dance, Dance (from The Steve Miller Band), 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 wrote his first fiction when he was 29. He said he was suddenly and inexplicably inspired to write his first novel (Hear the Wind Sing, 1979) while watching a baseball game. In 1978, Murakami was in Jingu Stadium watching a game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp when Dave Hilton, an American, came to bat. According to an oft-repeated story, in the instant that Hilton hit a double, Murakami suddenly realized he could write a novel. He went home and began writing that night. 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 with Hear the Wind Sing 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 unpublished in English translation outside Japan, where an English edition with extensive translation notes was published as part of a series intended for English students. 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.”

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 a daring marketing ploy that worked in two separate volumes, sold together, so that the number of books sold was actually doubled, since the entire book was released in two separate books, creating the million-copy bestseller hype. One book had a green cover, the other a red one. In 1986, Murakami left Japan, traveled throughout Europe, and settled in the United States.

Murakami was a writing fellow at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, and at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. During this time he wrote Dance, Dance, Dance and South of the Border, West of the Sun.

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 war crimes in Manchuria (Manchukuo). The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is frequently cited by critics as Murakami’s best work[citation needed]. It won him the Yomiuri Prize, awarded to him by one of his harshest former critics, Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.

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.

In 2006, Murakami became the sixth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize from the Czech Republic for his novel Umibe no Kafka (Kafka on the Shore). Murakami told reporters, “In a way, reading Franz Kafka’s works served as a starting point for me as a novelist.” The two recipients of the Kafka prize before Murakami in 2004 and 2005 also won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Murakami, too, has been touted as a possible nominee for the prize.

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, was released in May 2007. In late 2005, Murakami published a collection of short stories titled Tōkyō KitanshÅ« (東京奇譚集, translates loosely as “Mysteries of Tokyo”). A collection of the English versions of 24 short stories, titled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, was published in August 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 KitanshÅ«).

Murakami has recently published an anthology called Birthday Stories, which collects short stories on the theme of birthdays by Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Claire Keegan, Andrea Lee, Daniel Lyons, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux, and William Trevor, as well as a specially written story by Murakami himself.

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 work-dominated mentality. His writing criticizes the decrease in human values and a loss of connection between people in Japan’s capitalist society.

In 2006, Murakami became the sixth winner of the Franz Kafka Prize, which has been awarded in past years to Nobel Prize In Literature winners Harold Pinter and Elfriede Jelinek. Murakami himself has been considered a possible laureate. If Murakami receives the Prize, he would become the third Japanese Literature Prize laureate, after Kawabata Yasunari and Kenzaburo Oe.

Murakami was awarded the 2007 Kiriyama Prize for Fiction for his collection of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman but, according to the Kiryama Official Website, Murakami “declined to accept the award for reasons of personal principle”.

Works:

• 1979 – 風の歌を聴け – Kaze no uta o kike – Hear the Wind Sing
• 1980 – 1973年のピンボール – 1973-nen no pinbōru – Pinball, 1973
• 1982 – 羊をめぐる冒険- Hitsuji o meguru bōken – A Wild Sheep Chase
• 1985 – 世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド – Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando – Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
• 1987 – ノルウェイの森 – Noruwei no mori – Norwegian Wood
• 1988 – ダンス・ダンス・ダンス – Dansu dansu dansu – Dance Dance Dance
• 1992 – 国境の南、太陽の西 – Kokkyō no minami, taiyō no nishi – South of the Border, West of the Sun
• 1992-1995 – ねじまき鳥クロニクル – Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
• 1999 – スプートニクの恋人 – SupÅ«toniku no koibito – Sputnik Sweetheart
• 2002 – 海辺のカフカ – Umibe no Kafuka – Kafka on the Shore
• 2004 – アフターダーク – Afutā Dāku – After Dark
• 2005 – 東京奇譚集 – Tōkyō KitanshÅ« – Tokyo Mysterious Story Collection

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(Text based on the wikipedia entry for Haruki Murakami. Used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.)

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New from Haruki Murakami: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.