Haruki Murakami?

Question

What do you think?

Answer 1

I love him. I just finished Norwegian Wood, it was excellent. He has a sensuousness to his writing. It's powerful without having to bulldoze you into it. Did I mention I love him?

Answer 2

It is interesting that people see him as dark, whereas I think he is actually fairly lighthearted, though there are dark elements in his works.

He is an interesting author and easy-to-read. His early works in particular are constituted by what I consider to be a disguised hedonism. While the protagonists appear as if they reject such things as materialism and a self-centered life, everything they do belies that. They are all financially comfortable, usually with no real or regular job. They have usually been recently abandoned by a lover. While they claim that this has caused them pain, that pain is not particularly prominent and it often finds relief in the various sexual escapades that invariably litter the novels. In the end the protagonists end up going deeper and deeper into their own world and distancing themselves further and further from the outside world and the people who inhabit it (Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a prime example of this).

But this may make it sound like I don't like his work, which is not true. He creates a very compelling voice and tone for his characters and it is very easy to get carried along by the pleasant yet unpredictable narrative that he builds.

If you like that sort of fiction, I think he is well worth checking out.

Answer 3

Hey Thin Kaboudit,
I have only read three of his works and they all are highly original. My favorite two are "Dance, dance, dance" and the short stories in "After the quake"
Murakami does a good job in depicting today's obsessions with materialism and he is very original when he brings impossible and fantastic elements to "reality"
Which are your favorite works by him?

Answer 4

Just reading his titles is a turnoff to me. I like humorous and lighthearted
stories and He seems to dwell in the darker,base side of life. He seems to like dream worlds. Take a look at these opinions of his works.
Quotes

What others have to
say about Murakami Haruki:

"And yet, despite his disclaimers, despite his three-year self-imposed exile in the Mediterranean, despite -- or because of -- his alienation from rootless, monied Tokyo, Murakami is very much a writer of modern Japan, nostalgic for missing idealism, aghast at sudden wealth. For in his Japan, the old has been destroyed, an ugly and meaningless hodgepodge has taken its place, and nobody knows what comes next." - Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post (25.12.1989)


"(His) bold willingness to go straight-over-the-top has always been a signal indication of his genius (.....) A phenomenon in Japan, Murakami is a world-class writer who has both eyes open and takes big risks. A gifted translator, he has introduced Fitzgerald, Carver, Irving and Theroux to the Japanese audience. Murakami himself deserves similar attention from this side of the Pacific." - Bruce Sterling, The Washington Post (11.8.1991)


"There are no kimonos, bonsai plants or tatami mats in Murakami's novels. His work (...) is shot through with a reverence for Western culture, particularly American pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Except for references to place names and certain foods, Murakami's protagonists might as well be living in Santa Monica (.....) Products of an affluent, educated culture, they exhibit a curiously American style of ennui and are always bemoaning their shallow, materialistic lives." - Lewis Beale, The Los Angeles Times (8.12.1991)


"Whereas the characters in early-twentieth-century Japanese fiction could and usually did choose traditional Japanese ways, Murakami knows that no such choice is possible now. Japan has come too far. If a conflict still exists, his characters are not engaged in or even aware of it. So enmeshed are they in the forms of Western, and particularly American, culture that they accept these forms as integral to contemporary Japanese life. Nonetheless, their essential Japaneseness is never truly lost in spite of what the works appear to say." - Celeste Loughman, World Literature Today (Winter/1997)


"The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has built an international following because his stories move so effortlessly between the surface reality of materialistic yuppie life and the horrors of a sensitized imagination. His tools are a flatly realistic prose (influenced by Raymond Carver, whom Mr. Murakami has extensively translated) and what you might call a psychological metaphysics. His first-person narrators are at once reliable and half-crazy." - Philip Weiss, The New York Observer (1.2.1999)


"The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is one of the most compellingly original voices in world literature. (...) Murakami is, in many ways, the shape of 21st-century fiction to come. Using the narrative mechanisms of Hollywood noir, he explores, in a surreal way, the metaphysical anxieties of our age while retaining a mordant grasp of its mass-consumed realities. His fiction belongs to no genre but has the addictive fluency of the best genre fiction." - Scott Reyburn, New Statesman (15.11.1999)


"(T)here is a basic plot-line in almost all his novels that is a bit jading." - Ian Hacking, London Review of Books

Answer 5

what is the question?