Book Review by K.S.Loganathan
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer with a international outreach whose postmodern works have been translated in over 50 languages. This collection of his eleven essays is a memoir of his writing life giving insights into his creative writing process.
A maverick in rule-bound Japan, he married, found work and later completed his degree, contrary to the usual order of career progression . He opened a jazz cafe in downtown Tokyo which featured live music on weekends. Even now he bemoans that the regimented Japanese school education system does not leave a space for individual creativity .
One summer day in 1978 while watching a baseball game , he received an epiphany that he could write a novel. The novella ‘Hear the Wind Sing’ he wrote, went on to receive a new writers’ award that launched his vocation as a novelist. His early novels were in Japanese using a fictionalized first-person narrative , but unlike the traditional Japanese I- novel ,they were simple and compact, with a distinctive rhythm , probably the imprint of his voracious appetite for English books and western music in his youth. He was heavily influenced by Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Vonnegut and Kerouac.
He relocated abroad in the late 1980s at a time of great ferment not only in Japan with its economic bubble (sadly without cultural underpinnings ) but also in Europe with the collapse of the Soviet Union, “to put himself in an edgier environment” as he says. He also took the help of a Japanese subsidiary company in the U.S. and an agent / U.S publisher to bring out the English versions of his works . His novel ‘ Norwegian Wood’ and his articles in the ‘New Yorker ‘ helped him establish a fan base in the U.S. His books clicked with the readers in Europe at a time when there was a churn in society that he calls “soft chaos” ,when the people were facing an uncertain future with a mix of hope and anxiety.
He is proud of his identity as an ” original “Japanese writer after choosing writing as a vocation. According to him , being original means having a unique style that can be updated by oneself with time and which others can develop . To become a novelist by vocation, one has to have a ‘novelistic intelligence’, tenacity, physical fitness and the mental discipline to work steadily ,know a lot of people, and regularly churn out a fixed number of pages a day. To help in the process ,the author must be observant and collect a stockpile of material of unrelated details that can be used . A gestation period at the start, and a “settling time” before editing are essential. Murakami does not conceive of an imaginary reader or a target audience when he writes ,but he writes the way he wants to, keeping ” a stout pipeline” connection with the readers.
In his later works, Murakami used the third person narration for his longer novels as the first-person narrative could not be expanded sufficiently even with devices like other people’s stories, long letter exchanges etc. inserted within. He also began giving his characters names , allowing them to break free of the writer’s control.
The self- portrait and the insights into his writing methods in the book will help his readers understand how his convictions and processes determined the shape of his novels and established him as an outstanding Japanese literary giant.
