Word: novelistic
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...second-rate writers, third-rate politicians: no matter what he's discussing, Haruki Murakami appears strangely, almost disconcertingly placid. During nearly three hours of conversation, emotion flickers across the face of the most popular Japanese writer since Yukio Mishima precisely once. After a wry put-down of a rival novelist, his eyes sparkle with mischief and his lips curl into a smile. But Murakami's words-both written and spoken-are a different matter. Listen to them carefully and you soon realize he is brimming with passion. As American novelist Jay McInerney puts it, Murakami captures "the common ache...
...Murakami tells it, his emergence as a novelist was a mystical experience-an artistic epiphany. It came in 1977, he says, as he sat in Tokyo's Jingu Stadium watching his favorite baseball team, the Yakult Swallows. When batter Dave Hilton hit a double, Murakami, then 28, says he heard a voice telling him to begin his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing. "That was one of the happiest experiences of my life," he recalls. "Perhaps the happiest." A decade later came the momentous publication of Norwegian Wood. Until then, the psychomysteries that formed the bulk of Murakami's work...
...Overseas, Murakami is more revered than ever. In Taiwan, a newspaper recently predicted that his face could one day grace a Japanese banknote, like the Meiji-era novelist Natsume Soseki, whose image appears on 1,000-yen notes. To such devotees, Murakami is not just another obscure Japanese writer. He is a great writer who just happens to be Japanese...
...least one cough, choke or hack marring the experience. By doing away with smoke and most of its carcinogens, the Vapir ensures those nettlesome signs of impending lung cancer won’t get in the way of a good time. In the words of the 19th-century novelist Victor Hugo, which appear on the very first page of the Vapir’s user’s manual, “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come...
It’s heartening to see a major novelist like Ondaatje devote so much time and labor to promoting another’s work. Ondaatje, who typically spends four years or more on a novel, clearly identifies with Murch’s technical obsessiveness, which often keeps him in the cutting room for dozens of hours to produce one or two minutes of film. But more impressive than Murch’s work ethic is his creative power to shape a film in new directions not always intended by the director. In the double-murder scene in The Godfather...