New Haruki Murakami Novel

[Captain Japan]

Strange Trip
Newsweek via MSNBC

A great novel with talking cats and fish raining from the sky.
Jan. 24 issue - Reading Haruki Murakami's latest novel, "Kafka on the Shore," is a little like listening to a kid make up a story at a campfire. The kind in which one thing leads to another with no apparent logic, where the monsters come over the side of the ship and fight the pirates but don't get to kidnap the princess because she's already escaped in the spaceship, and on and on. Murakami's novel begins with a 15-year-old boy running away from home in Tokyo. Then we meet an old man who can talk to cats but has trouble communicating with humans. Before long we run into Johnnie Walker, the gent from the Scotch ads, who's decapitating cats and stealing their souls. Leeches and fish rain from the sky. Later Colonel Sanders puts in an appearance as a pimp and a sort of spiritual middleman. None of this will faze Murakami's fans, who are used to his odd tales of goofy quests featuring mysterious sheep or characters who spend most of the story at the bottom of a deep hole. A Murakami novel takes some getting used to, but this time it's well worth the trouble. "Kafka" is this Japanese author's weirdest novel yet. It's also one of his best.

[tatsujin]

A mate of mine gave me a present of a limited edition signed copy of this today. I'm a huge fan of Murakami but didn't even know this was coming out - guess I've had my head buried in the sand a little to much lately...

Looking forward to tucking into it

[Taro Toporific]

[Steve Bildermann]

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle : A Novel
HARUKI MURAKAMI

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/02/12/140153.php

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle starts off simply enough, when Toru Okada and his wife Kumiko lose their cat, and turns into a masterful novel, spanning philosophy, Japanese history, and metaphysics, among other things.

Toru Okada - or "Mr Wind-Up Bird", as his teenage neighbour May Kasahara calls him - has recently been unemployed, and tends the home while his wife Kumiko goes to work. Then elements of the surreal start creeping into his life. Two mystical sisters with the improbable names of Malta and Creta Kano appear and predict his future. A mysterious woman makes explicit phone calls. And somehow all this is connected to Okada's nemesis Noboru Wataya, and to the history of Japan and Manchukuo, its puppet state in northern China.

*** Warning. I loved the original in Japanese and detested the translation in English which is a butchers job. I hear there is now a better translation out there so check carefully.

[AssKissinger]

Of course I couldn't come anywhere near reading it in Japanese but I loved this book.

*** Warning. I loved the original in Japanese and detested the translation in Englishwhich is a butchers job. I hear there is now a better translation out there so check carefully.

Is your Japanese that good Steve? Damn!

[Steve Bildermann]

Is your Japanese that good Steve

Well it used to be.

I had lofty ambitions to tackling books by Kenzaburo Oe but regrettably 1998 was the last year I can remember actually being mentally stably enough to read for longer than 15 minutes.

It was during the summer of that year I woke up in a hotel room and didn't even know my name (I had to look at the name stitched inside my suit jacket to figure out who I was - thank god I had enough sense to know my name was 'pure worsted wool )

It's been downhill since then.

Now I'm reduced to doing tachi yomi on the Japanese weeklies at the local conbini during the night shift. Doesn't take much to read and understand the kanji saying that Elvis is living with Princess Di in Suginami ku with aliens.

[AssKissinger]

I know Kenny. I read 'A Personal Matter'. Booger and I discussed that book on some thread. Actually, Booger was the first to call him 'Kenny'. How old were you when you started studying Japanese? Did you live here as a child or are you just a brainiac? If you're a brainiac that's probably why you flipped out.

[Steve Bildermann]

How old were you when you started studying Japanese?

Well formally I started at good ole Naganuma in Shibuya when I was 23. I was in a five man class that stayed together for the next four years. Talk about war buddies! We practically lived together day and night. We were so 'kanji headed' There was the East German Ambassador, a native American Indian who had been born in Japan, a religious nut from North Dakota, another Brit who loved milk and sugar in his green tea and moi. We broke (and still hold I believe) the school record for absolute beginner to graduation. We had a get together about five years ago in Hong Kong. I'm the only one still in Japan but we all spend the three days speaking entirely in Japanese and it seemed perfectly natural. Weird doesn't begin to cover it.

[Charles]

*** Warning. I loved the original in Japanese and detested the translation in English which is a butchers job. I hear there is now a better translation out there so check carefully.

Now you have opened up a huge can of worms.

Today I finally managed to get a copy of Murakami's "Underground" in an English edition. I translated a bunch of it, including Murakami's final essays, for my senior thesis in Japanese, and wrote a huge essay about it. And almost ALL the stuff I wrote about is just NOT in the English edition. In particular, I recall a section where Murakami wrote about how he once saw a demonstration by Aum on the streets of Shibuya, and walked past them, averting his eyes, pretending they didn't exist, just like everyone else. Then he went on a riff about how Aum grew outside the "normal" structures of social relationships, they were unpersons to everyone, so nobody took them seriously until it was too late.
And NONE of this is in the final essay Murakami wrote, as printed in the English edition. Now I'm going to have to dig up my Japanese edition and see just what the hell happened.

[AssKissinger]

That's interesting Charles.

I read 'Underground' and I always thought there was something incomplete about it about how he concludes it.

[Charles]

That's interesting Charles.

I read 'Underground' and I always thought there was something incomplete about it about how he concludes it.

Yeah, something's definitely wrong here. The Japanese edition is 726 pages, the English edition is only 364 pages. The preface is 14 pages in Japanese, 6 pages in English. Doesn't an English translation usually turn out to have MORE pages than the equivalent Japanese text? It's not like the English edition is set in tiny type or bigger pages or anything. I'll have to do a side-by-side comparison of something short like the preface.

The final essay by Murakami is 39 pages with 7 sections in the Japanese edition, I managed to locate the essay, it's only 17 pages, and it's been relocated to the middle of the English edition. That's weird, it's really his afterword, I suspect the English afterword is new material. If the book seemed incomplete, just skip the middle essay until you read to the end of the book, then go back and read it last. Why the hell would they move Murakami's conclusion to the middle of the book?

[tatsujin]

It was during the summer of that year I woke up in a hotel room and didn't even know my name (I had to look at the name stitched inside my suit jacket to figure out who I was - thank god I had enough sense to know my name was 'pure worsted wool )

Sounds like you went through an awakening of sorts - a kanji kundalini if you like

Has anyone read and compared Norwegian Wood in Japanese and English? The reason I ask is this is my fav Murakami book of all, although I'm currently limping through Kafka on the shore and its looking very promising. I quite enjoy the dual linear nature akin to Hard Boiled Wonderland - its a tool that Murakami uses really well.

[Mulboyne]

Telegraph: The Cult of Murakami
The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is one of the most influential writers in the world. Nicholas Blincoe asks some of his fans - including Kazuo Ishiguro and David Mitchell - if they can explain why...David Mitchell...reckons that with the publication of his eighth novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami became one of the three or four best-known Japanese people in the world, yet Mitchell too wants to know more. "How does he do it?" he asks. Kazuo Ishiguro claims: "Haruki is one of the three or four most exciting and important writers working right now." But adds: "Harder to explain just why."...more...

Telegraph Review of "Kafka on the Beach"

Murakami writes cool, fluent and addictive meditations on the strangeness of ordinary life, brilliantly evoking the coexistence of the mundane and the dreamlike.
The best example is probably The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a labyrinthine novel in which the search for a lost cat leads an unemployed Tokyo man on a hallucinatory journey through his own emotional life and the Japanese army's savage wartime campaign in Manchuria. But Murakami has also written well in a more realistic mode, in Norwegian Wood – a nostalgic late-1960s coming-of-age story usually dubbed Japan's The Catcher in the Rye. And he's equally happy in between: his excellent novella South of the Border, West of the Sun is a gently uncanny, slightly pervy reinvention of Casablanca, set in a Tokyo jazz bar.
The flipside is that Murakami sometimes seems incurably adolescent. His novels are full of teenage kicks and teenage epiphanies – over first love (and first sex), over the pop songs that soundtrack his work. Grown-up life often emerges as shallow and materialistic, infected by some terrible form of loss. This is certainly true of his latest novel. Although it's a reworking of the Oedipus story, Kafka on the Shore is not a tragedy. It's more a spiritual quest, a new-age road trip, with a bit of incest and patricide thrown in.

[Mulboyne]

Patrick Ness reviews "Strangers" by Taichi Yamada

Taichi Yamada's novel has a first-person male narrator faced with inscrutable circumstances and a mysterious woman in 1980s Tokyo. If you added jazz, a cat and a well, you'd have a Haruki Murakami novel. But the truthful – and quite touching – emotionalism in Strangers belies the obvious comparison. While Yamada doesn't have Murakami's existential grace, he makes up for it with a strong sense of humanity, of what it might actually mean – personally, emotionally, psychologically – to meet your long-dead parents.

[tatsujin]

Telegraph: The Cult of Murakami
The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is one of the most influential writers in the world. Nicholas Blincoe asks some of his fans - including Kazuo Ishiguro and David Mitchell - if they can explain why...David Mitchell...reckons that with the publication of his eighth novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami became one of the three or four best-known Japanese people in the world, yet Mitchell too wants to know more. "How does he do it?" he asks. Kazuo Ishiguro claims: "Haruki is one of the three or four most exciting and important writers working right now." But adds: "Harder to explain just why."...more...


Telegraph Review of "Kafka on the Beach"

Murakami writes cool, fluent and addictive meditations on the strangeness of ordinary life, brilliantly evoking the coexistence of the mundane and the dreamlike.
The best example is probably The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a labyrinthine novel in which the search for a lost cat leads an unemployed Tokyo man on a hallucinatory journey through his own emotional life and the Japanese army's savage wartime campaign in Manchuria. But Murakami has also written well in a more realistic mode, in Norwegian Wood &#8211]

Fantastic article, thanks for the link Mulboyne

[Big Booger]

I have yet to read wind up bird chronicles... adding it to the list of to reads.. Currently I've got this book to read as well:

Foucault's Pendulum by UMBERTO ECO

All in time.

I did read, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and was so keen on it.. so I am sure his other writings will be just as good.

[AssKissinger]

I just finally got around to reading Kafka.

Really wonderful. Right on par with Wind Up imo.

[Adhesive]

I really enjoyed Kafka, but it's not my favorite Murakami book; I haven't read Sputnik Sweetheart, but if I had to rate them it would be;

Hard Boiled
Wild Sheep Chase
Kafka
Wind Up
South of the Border
Norwegian Wood
Dance,...

I'm reading through the english version of blind willow now, but I swear I've read some of these short stories before...maybe in other collections or on the web.

Anyway, I really love his work, and I wish I could read Japanese well enough to experience it in their original form. Maybe some day.

[AssKissinger]

Is that from most fave to least fave?

[Adhesive]

^ Yup.

[Captain Japan]

After Dark

Haruki Murakami's characters tend to watch their lives from up high. They want to belong. They want purpose. They want love. But they're too removed to get any of that on their own. So what Murakami gives them is a reality rattling so mysterious and illuminating that they're literally shaken back down to earth.

The sisters at the center of Murakami's latest novella, After Dark, are no exception. Over the course of a single night in Tokyo, we follow Eri and Mari as they confront their self-imposed disconnection. Eri wanders through Tokyo's underbelly, meeting a female ex-wrestler and a battered Chinese prostitute. Her sister sleeps soundly at home. Too soundly, in fact -- she's been asleep for two months. Yet, whether awake or asleep, these sisters share the same overwhelming ennui that all Murakami's characters do. And we watch and wait as he does his thing -- tilting, shifting, reorientating them....more...

[Charles]

I noticed this little quip from the review:

After Dark is not Murakami's best work...

You know, they say that about everything he ever wrote.

[Adhesive]

I read the english translation recently. I prefer his first person narrative, but I think he and Jay Rubin did a pretty good job with this one. It's a really short story, finished it in one sitting. To be honest, I read it about two weeks ago, and I've already forgotten most of it...so that's never a good thing. I still remember parts of Kafka better...in fact, now that I think about it, Kafka on the Shore was a MUCH better book than After Dark. I wouldn't suggest spending money on this one in hard back...I mean it's good that Murakami continues to write at a fairly regular pace, but I think he could stand to maybe slow down with the releases and write something a little more meaty. Maybe if people stopped buying his books just because he's Murakami it would put the pressure on him. Then again, maybe he would just stop writing all together, lol.

[Mulboyne]

Time: Japan's Prodigal Novelist Returns

Haruki Murakami doesn't much go in for metaphors, but even he wouldn't deny the aptness and symbolism of the moment when he decided he would write his first novel. It was April 1978 and Murakami was in the stands at Tokyo's Meiji-Jingu Stadium, watching a baseball game, beer in hand. He was verging on 30, and nearly a decade into running a jazz café with his wife Yoko. A journeyman American batter named Dave Hilton came to the plate for the Yakult Swallows, stroked the first pitch into left field, and safely reached second base. As he watched the batter swing at the ball, "I just felt all of a sudden that I could write," Murakami says, sitting today in his Tokyo office, a light jog away from the stadium...more...

[gomichild]

Thanks Mulboyne, interesting article.