"Who do you think the best living author is?" She asks, puffing away on a bright red Nat Sherman Fantasia.
"I guess it'd be Murakami," he answers, his eyes traveling over to one of the many shelves of books and down the spine of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. "I have a really nice edition of Noreweigan Wood," he says almost sighing. "Really nice."
"Even after Kafka on the Shore?"
The mere mention of Kafka on the Shore is enough to abruptly end most conversations on Murakami it seems. It happened just today. I asked friends on Facebook who their favourite author was and one mentioned Murakami. The conversation was going along nicely until I dropped the KOTS bomb. Then it abruptly ended and I was forced to talk about Margaret Atwood's poetry. Even KOTS if better than Atwood's poetry, and it's my least favourite of Murakami's works.
He who loves Murakami enough to declare him the greatest living author is the same "he" who once had a cat that traveled around town and loved to be carried in a plastic shipping bag. I tell him about that time when I lived in New York and decided I needed to go to a Denny's after reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. There was a blizzard but I drove to New Jersey anyways and ate a Grand Slam breakfast not so far from Princeton University where Murakami had been a writing fellow and where he wrote The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.
At that time with only one of Murakami's books under my belt I was enchanted by the touches of modern life interspersed with parallel worlds. It was at once science fiction, cyberpunk, and a hard-boiled Chandleresque detective story. I didn't know enough of Murakami's works to know that the themes I so loved would be repetitive. Cats, spirits, spaghetti, love hotels, the Beatles, and of course Denny's. Denny's is mentioned so often in Murakami's work that once I'd progressed through enough them I wondered if he wasn't sponsored by the eatery. At best, Murakami should be entitled to free coffee at any Denny's for life.
I am a fan of Japanese literature in general. I read Lady Murasaki's Tale of the Genji before I knew what a big deal it was supposed to be and Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of the Five Rings is still a favourite. It was after reading Soseki's I Am a Cat that my interest in Japanese literature was reborn. I've since amassed a fairly impressive collection of Japanese authors, enough to see where one half of Murakami's style originates from.
But as of late I've found his writing to be a disappointment. After Dark was empty somehow. I read it in one sitting and was glad I'd saved my money and borrowed it off of someone. Seeing as I can buy a book just because I like the title, that in itself is the harshest criticism I could give an author. I didn't buy your book. In the case of After Dark, I never will.
Murakami's latest work 1Q84 is beyond my reading abilities in Japanese, and the English translation isn't going to be available until October. It's three volumes will be published all at once, but will it be worth it? If I were going to spend a massive amount of time reading any Japanese author's multi-volume work I'd keep reading Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Spring Snow, the first book in the SoF was so brilliantly written that I almost don't want to read any of the others to allow it's perfection to remain unmarred like when you wake up early in New York after a big snow storm and to find that despite the fact millions of people live in the city there isn't a footprint on your sidewalk yet - which is in itself a perfect analogy for the book.
Kafka on the Shore's title put forth a fact any Murakami reader knows: Murakami loves Kafka. He has even won the Kafka Prize and Hard-Boiled is heavily influenced by Kafka's The Castle. But I can't help to think that Murakami, lover of running marathons, was running a marathon when he wrote it. On a treadmill.
It is difficult when the authors we love disappoint us. It has happened to me before. I read Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet and promptly set out to read every Rushdie book I could afterwards. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is still my favourite Rushdie book. I couldn't read Satanic Verses or Midnight's Children. Grimus was particularly terrible. I feel the same about Paul Auster. The New York Trilogy was amazing. The Brooklyn Follies not so much. I met Auster shortly after reading The New York Trilogy at a poetry event of his and was even more captivated after convincing him to come out and have a drink with me and my friend who was obviously quite in love with him. He is in short, a damn interesting person. It only made it harder when I was so let down by The Brooklyn Follies.
Maybe someday I'll publish enough books to know what it feels like to have created something so great that everything else I might write or have written will pale in comparison. I hope I do. I also hope I can take a dose of my own critical medicine. But as Henry Miller once said, "you learn as much from a badly written book as a well written one", and for me the lesson I've taken from Murakami is if I find myself writing repeatedly about the same things over and over to the detriment of my craft I'll seek out a psychiatrist instead of a publisher.
Are you looking forward to Murakami's 1Q84? Or, if you've read it, is it worth buying?
"I guess it'd be Murakami," he answers, his eyes traveling over to one of the many shelves of books and down the spine of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. "I have a really nice edition of Noreweigan Wood," he says almost sighing. "Really nice."
"Even after Kafka on the Shore?"
The mere mention of Kafka on the Shore is enough to abruptly end most conversations on Murakami it seems. It happened just today. I asked friends on Facebook who their favourite author was and one mentioned Murakami. The conversation was going along nicely until I dropped the KOTS bomb. Then it abruptly ended and I was forced to talk about Margaret Atwood's poetry. Even KOTS if better than Atwood's poetry, and it's my least favourite of Murakami's works.
He who loves Murakami enough to declare him the greatest living author is the same "he" who once had a cat that traveled around town and loved to be carried in a plastic shipping bag. I tell him about that time when I lived in New York and decided I needed to go to a Denny's after reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. There was a blizzard but I drove to New Jersey anyways and ate a Grand Slam breakfast not so far from Princeton University where Murakami had been a writing fellow and where he wrote The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.
At that time with only one of Murakami's books under my belt I was enchanted by the touches of modern life interspersed with parallel worlds. It was at once science fiction, cyberpunk, and a hard-boiled Chandleresque detective story. I didn't know enough of Murakami's works to know that the themes I so loved would be repetitive. Cats, spirits, spaghetti, love hotels, the Beatles, and of course Denny's. Denny's is mentioned so often in Murakami's work that once I'd progressed through enough them I wondered if he wasn't sponsored by the eatery. At best, Murakami should be entitled to free coffee at any Denny's for life.
I am a fan of Japanese literature in general. I read Lady Murasaki's Tale of the Genji before I knew what a big deal it was supposed to be and Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of the Five Rings is still a favourite. It was after reading Soseki's I Am a Cat that my interest in Japanese literature was reborn. I've since amassed a fairly impressive collection of Japanese authors, enough to see where one half of Murakami's style originates from.
But as of late I've found his writing to be a disappointment. After Dark was empty somehow. I read it in one sitting and was glad I'd saved my money and borrowed it off of someone. Seeing as I can buy a book just because I like the title, that in itself is the harshest criticism I could give an author. I didn't buy your book. In the case of After Dark, I never will.
Murakami's latest work 1Q84 is beyond my reading abilities in Japanese, and the English translation isn't going to be available until October. It's three volumes will be published all at once, but will it be worth it? If I were going to spend a massive amount of time reading any Japanese author's multi-volume work I'd keep reading Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Spring Snow, the first book in the SoF was so brilliantly written that I almost don't want to read any of the others to allow it's perfection to remain unmarred like when you wake up early in New York after a big snow storm and to find that despite the fact millions of people live in the city there isn't a footprint on your sidewalk yet - which is in itself a perfect analogy for the book.
Kafka on the Shore's title put forth a fact any Murakami reader knows: Murakami loves Kafka. He has even won the Kafka Prize and Hard-Boiled is heavily influenced by Kafka's The Castle. But I can't help to think that Murakami, lover of running marathons, was running a marathon when he wrote it. On a treadmill.
It is difficult when the authors we love disappoint us. It has happened to me before. I read Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet and promptly set out to read every Rushdie book I could afterwards. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is still my favourite Rushdie book. I couldn't read Satanic Verses or Midnight's Children. Grimus was particularly terrible. I feel the same about Paul Auster. The New York Trilogy was amazing. The Brooklyn Follies not so much. I met Auster shortly after reading The New York Trilogy at a poetry event of his and was even more captivated after convincing him to come out and have a drink with me and my friend who was obviously quite in love with him. He is in short, a damn interesting person. It only made it harder when I was so let down by The Brooklyn Follies.
Maybe someday I'll publish enough books to know what it feels like to have created something so great that everything else I might write or have written will pale in comparison. I hope I do. I also hope I can take a dose of my own critical medicine. But as Henry Miller once said, "you learn as much from a badly written book as a well written one", and for me the lesson I've taken from Murakami is if I find myself writing repeatedly about the same things over and over to the detriment of my craft I'll seek out a psychiatrist instead of a publisher.
Are you looking forward to Murakami's 1Q84? Or, if you've read it, is it worth buying?
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