NP - Murakami

[jd]

He works very closely with his translator.  The person who translated
Wind Up Bird Chronicle is his favorite, I think his earlier books were
translated by someone he wasn't so much of a fan of and didn't have as
much contact with.

I don't think he's bad but I think he's lacking and it's pretty much
from the horse's mouth that he's writing off the cuff and his vagaries
simply are, in fact, vagaries.  So in short, like I said before, he's
better than a lot of the slush coming out these days, but he doesn't
use his skill to go all the way to make something really great.  IMHO.

He's very personable however.  At MIT he showed up carrying his suit,
which he didn't wear because the air conditioner was broken, and
instead wore a tshirt that said PICKLE, with a pickle on it.  He's a
funny, personable guy.

A good example of the "vagaries" is how he works spaghetti into a lot
of his books.  Someone, at the MIT event, asked him if spaghetti was
sort of a theme for him.  Instead of going into this long diatribe
about the symbolism of pasta & etc he simply said that, well, he liked
to eat spaghetti while he was writing.  So it shows up in his writing
a lot.  A lot of his "themes" seem to have about as much depth as
that.

On 6/27/06, Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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>