Word: murakami
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...strong sense of otherness has always been in Murakami's nature. It began with his early preference for foreign novels (to the chagrin, one presumes, of his parents, who were both teachers of Japanese literature). It continues to this day in the deliberate distance he keeps from Japan's literary community, and in his abstemious mode of living. "Writers and artists are supposed to live a very unhealthy, bohemian kind of life," says Murakami. "But I just wanted to do it differently." So he rises at 4 a.m. to write for hours before swimming or running, training for marathons...
...themes and his audience have also kept him young. Ian Buruma writes that Murakami's fiction expresses "a general breaking away from family dependence, and the often lonely, fragmentary attempts by young people to choose their own way of living." You can tell that Murakami is quietly pleased by the kind of age-group such work attracts. "The sons and daughters of my friends are reading my books, and they call and ask if they can meet me," he says, bemused. "And they're surprised to discover the author is the same age as their parents...
...approaches his 60th year, something is changing in Murakami's heart. His status as a truly global writer is assured - over 100,000 copies of the English version of his most recent novel, After Dark, have been printed since its release in May - but with the world conquered, and precocious undergraduates from Sydney to San Francisco at his feet, the postmodernist master dismisses the foreign adulation with a tired hand, and finds himself returning to the world of his parents and his birth. Despite the title - and a cameo appearance by Colonel Sanders of KFC fame - 2002's Kafka...
...studied disconnection from the world that has made Murakami's early work so beloved of the fashionable literati - and the lonely young - has receded. In fact, responsibility is his animating principle these days. "I have a gift to write about these things," Murakami says of 1997's Underground, his oral history of the Tokyo subway gas attacks and a book he sees as a career turning point. "At the same time, I have a responsibility." Though he says he doesn't want to talk about Japanese politics, he returns to the subject again and again throughout a 212-hour conversation...
...Quite what his readers will think of Murakami's foray into the morass of contemporary Japanese politics remains to be seen. In his literature, and his life, he has made detachment an almost heroic pose. Murakami maintains that he hasn't changed. "I'm just the same way as before - independent," he says. "I am Japanese but still, I'll be myself." It is not an entirely convincing statement - but then there is nothing wrong with a politicized, compassionate and explicitly Japanese Murakami, especially if he puts his uncompromising self at the service of enlightened causes...