NP - Murakami

[Joe Allonby]

Whenever I read something in translation, I wonder how much of what I'm
enjoying is actually the work of the translator. The more I learn about
Murakami, the more I know that he is the guy responsible for what I'm
reading. Sorry snobs, he rocks.

On 6/26/06, Ghetta Life <ghetta_outta at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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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