NP - Murakami

[Ghetta Life]

http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/the-lone-wolf/2006/06/21/1150845234882.html

Yet Murakami has always distanced himself from the Japanese tradition of the 
writer as social admonisher: "I thought of myself as just a fiction writer."

Murakami's resistance to literary cliques has led him to be seen as thumbing 
his nose at Japan and its literature. He refuses to fulfil the typical 
public duties of writers - participating in talk shows, judging panels and 
literary festivals - and declines all requests for television and telephone 
interviews.

As dreamy and introverted as his disaffected protagonists, Murakami has no 
literary friends and never attends parties. He has spent large stretches of 
his adult life in Europe and America; we meet, in Murakami's unassuming 
Ayoama office, during his brief return to Tokyo from Harvard, where he holds 
a writer's fellowship. "I have no models in Japanese literature. I created 
my own style, my own way. They don't appreciate this."

As a teenager, Murakami kicked against the reading tastes of his parents - 
both lecturers in Japanese literature - by consuming pulpy American mystery 
novels in English. He read "to get away from Japanese society". Murakami's 
idols remain American writers - Fitzgerald, Carver, Chandler and Vonnegut.

His offhand prose, studded with references to American low culture, 
contrasts with the formal elegance of Japan's literary lodestars - Yukio 
Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe and Junichiro Tanizaki. The heroes of his 
surrealistic, genre-bending novels are more likely to eat spaghetti, listen 
to Radiohead and read Len Deighton than drink sake or quote Oe. They are 
under-employed drifters, without children or long-term partners, who refuse 
to genuflect to the Japanese group ethos of the family and the corporation.

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