[AssKissinger]

I don't know if this has been linked to before but this is an excellent interview

http://www.salon.com/books/int/1997/12/cov_si_16int.html

Charles, you might find this excerpt interesting...

Did you interview cult members?

I'm doing it right now. I'm feeling very sorry for them. Those people are young, mostly in their 20s. They're very serious people, idealistic. They were thinking so seriously about the world and value systems. I was born in 1949 and I was in the university in the late '60s, a time of revolution and counterculture. We used to be idealistic, our generation, but it's gone. And the bubble economy came. Those young people are kind of the same, idealistic, and they are not able to belong to the system. Nobody accepts them, and that's why they went to the cult. They were saying that money doesn't mean anything to them. They want something more precious, a more valuable thing. A spiritual thing. It's not a bad idea. It's not wrong. But nobody can offer them what they want, only cult people can do that. They don't have a checking system, to decide what is right and what is wrong. We haven't given them those judging systems. I suppose that we authors have a responsibility for that. If I give you the right story, that story will give you a judging system, to tell what is wrong and what is right. To me, a story means to put your feet in someone else's shoes. There are so many kinds of shoes, and when you put your feet in them you look at the world through other people's eyes. You learn something about the world through good stories, serious stories. But those people weren't given good stories. When Asahara, the Aum guru, gave them his story, they were so tied up by the power of his story. Asahara, he's got some kind of power that's turned to evil, but it's a powerful story he gave them. I feel sorry about that. What I'm saying is that we should have given them the good story.

The whole interview is worth reading.

[Charles]

Yeah, that's an interesting interview, especially juxtaposed against that Slashdot article that UG posted. It always amazes me how differently writers think about their books than readers (especially clueless slashdot users) think about the books.

That remark about idealistic young Aum members reminds me of an encounter I had with an exchange student here at my local university. We were chatting at the weekly language exchange meeting, he asked me about religion. I told him I was a buddhist, and he got this really crazy look in his eyes, and shouted, "Buddhism is EVIL. Only AUM SHINRIKYO is capable of fighting for the common man!" I think that's the only time I ever saw a nihonjin get really worked up about something. I asked him, what about the sarin incident, wasn't that pretty evil, is that the way to fight for the common man? He said, "well, yeah that was evil, but except for that.." Umm.. yeah right.

[torasan]

Two (old) books from Haruki Murakami reviewed on Slashdot

I think Murakami is way over-rated in the West, he is the poster boy for Western views of modern J Lit. But the only really good thing he ever wrote is Norwei no Mori. The other stuff will never last.

Norwei no Mori is Japan. He nailed it there. He should have stayed on that course, in my opinion, but he went in another direction. His other stuff I consider just manga lite, but obviously, I am way minority on this, because the Western reviewers love the guy.

I wonder if this says more about THEM than it does about Haruki.

[gomichild]

I like his books. He tells an interesting yarn.

[Charles]

I think Murakami is way over-rated in the West, he is the poster boy for Western views of modern J Lit. But the only really good thing he ever wrote is Norwei no Mori. The other stuff will never last.

Norwei no Mori is Japan. He nailed it there. He should have stayed on that course, in my opinion, but he went in another direction. His other stuff I consider just manga lite, but obviously, I am way minority on this, because the Western reviewers love the guy.

I wonder if this says more about THEM than it does about Haruki.

I have to agree, Murakami is way overrated. I think about the only good things he ever wrote were "The Elephant Vanishes" and "TV People," and those were just short stories (REALLY short stories). I just like the books because they're written in such simple language, they're easy to read in Japanese.

I wish I could find a really really old article from the NYTimes I read when I was just starting to study Japanese. It was a rather startling article about how Japan was the ultimate Rohrschach Test. The writer published it as his first assignment upon arrival at the Tokyo desk. I thought the writer was astonishingly honest in revealing he was completely out of his depth in Japan, and his articles would say more about Western perceptions of Japan than about Japan itself.

[gomichild]

But is it a matter of being overrated or simply that his work is accessible?

[torasan]

But is it a matter of being overrated or simply that his work is accessible?

Very good point, gomichild!

Yes, I take it back, how do I know if he is over-rated? That was a huge generalization.

You hit the nail on the head: he is accessible. So then, fame follows on that account. And healthy book sales.

Very good point.

[Kuang_Grade]

On a somewhat related note...One of Murakami's short stories (google cache of New Yorker page with the story http://tinyurl.com/53slu )has been made into a film.

http://www.tonytakitani.com/e/index.html

[Mulboyne]

On a somewhat related note...One of Murakami's short stories (google cache of New Yorker page with the story http://tinyurl.com/53slu )has been made into a film.

http://www.tonytakitani.com/e/index.html

The New Yorker page doesn't seem to come up anymore but here's another link to the story:

http://magna.cs.ucla.edu/~hxwang/newyorker/blog/files/tonytakitani.html

[AssKissinger]

[SIZE="5"]Finding the universal in Japan's Haruki Murakami [/SIZE]Sun Mar 26, 5:01 PM ET



Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has been translated into three dozen languages, had cafes across continents named after his novels and even inspired a cocktail spiked with cannabis at a Moscow bar.

Even though his mother tongue dominates only one country, Murakami's sensitive tales of the absurdities and loneliness of modern life have struck a powerful global chord.

In an attempt to understand the sensation, translators of his work from 13 countries -- although not the hermetic novelist himself -- gathered in Tokyo this weekend, proof that Murakami transcends national cultures.

American novelist Richard Powers said that in the United States, Murakami "is considered among the few truly important international writers."

"How can the same writer be a runaway bestseller in Italy and Korea, a cultural phenomenon in Turkey and the object of highest literary respect in countries as different as Russia and China?" Powers asked the symposium at the University of Tokyo.

Despite the anti-Japanese backlash in communist China over war memories, Murakami speaks to a generation discovering the ups and downs of capitalism, said Lai Ming-chu, a Taiwanese who has translated more than 30 Murakami works into Chinese.

Murakami pulls fans for the opposite reason in the former Soviet Union, said Russian translator Dmitry Kovalenin: He offers a voice to a nation "submerged like the Titanic" after the communist collapse.

His fan base is so wide that both a cafe in Kiev and a cannabis-laced cocktail at a Moscow bar have been named after Murakami, Kovalenin said.

In France, "Kafka on the Shore," Murakami's story of a self-doubting boy and dim-witted old man who gravitate across Japan, has sold 48,000 copies since its release in January, even though "usually French people wouldn't buy a book with a Japanese name on the cover," said its translator, Corinne Atlan.

Later this year, Murakami will be awarded the Frank Kafka literature award in Prague whose last two recipients both won the Nobel Prize shortly afterward.

Murakami, 57, the son of a Buddhist monk in the western city of Kobe and former owner of a Tokyo jazz bar, began writing only in his 30s when, watching a baseball game, he had an epiphany that he could pursue fiction.

In a country fabled for "salaryman" company workers and groupthink, Murakami has conjured up solitary, introspective characters wrestling with their places in the world and enthralled by the discovery of the new.

His style is equally fresh, packed with references to pop culture -- from The Beatles to Kentucky Fried Chicken. His use of direct, accessible language is often likened to J.D. Salinger, whose "Catcher in the Rye" Murakami translated into Japanese.

"Norwegian Wood," Murakami's sexually frank 1987 novel of a man's fleeting romance with a traumatized young woman, made him a celebrity in Japan, leading him to temporarily resettle in the United States, where he is now again spending a year.

"His style may sound Western to a Japanese reader. But while it would seem easy to put his work into English, the difficult part is to preserve that foreignness so the core does not disappear," said Jay Rubin, the US translator of "Norwegian Wood" among other Murakami works.

For Powers, Murakami is like his characters, "neither wholly Japanese nor wholly Americanized, nor does he participate in any other group identity."

"Murakami's books understand the terrifying disorientation of late -- globalizing capitalism and our status as refugees inside it," Powers said.

Such disorientation is witnessed in Murakami's fantastical scenes. His stories include a giant frog inviting a salaryman into an epic battle and a sky that suddenly rains mackerels and leeches.

Powers said Murakami lets readers imagine "just what links might unfold between these two worlds of banal realism and underground phantasmagoria."

And in those two worlds lie characters of a deep humanity.

"Many Danish men say that when they read Murakami they feel they are the main character," said Danish translator Mette Holm.

"And I can relate to the main character as well," she said. "I enjoy his sensitivity. For me that's the reason for his popularity."

[maninjapan]

Sorry but I just stand Murakami -

have read Dance dance dance and found it boring and drivel

whilst the after the quake was just fucking obscure and bollocks.