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[Excerpts]
JAPAN's KAFKAESQUE PROSE MASTER TAKES ON THE WORLD
By David Pilling
Financial Times (London)
September 16, 2011
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/26b247ca-defe-11e0-9af3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1YAKNEEkq
For Japan’s greatest literary sensation, Haruki Murakami is defiantly un-Japanese. The characters in his voluminous and voluminously selling novels would rather eat pizza than sushi and are more likely to wear a spaghetti-sauce-stained T-shirt than a kimono. Like their creator, they listen to jazz and read American fiction and they don’t often bow or remove their shoes. Most of his protagonists are loners, drifters, oddballs, people who operate at night or in the dark layers of a society that sees itself as comfortable and ordered. They long ago grew tired of endless economic growth -- even when that was still an option in pre-lost Japan -- and seek meaning instead in something else: in sex or in philosophy, in the occult or in French cooking.
. . .
For someone so resolutely out of sync with day-to-day Japan, it is ironic that Mr. Murakami, now a marathon-running 62-year-old, should have become his nation’s literary mascot. Kenzaburo Oe, a relentlessly serious and unfashionably political writer, may have won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, largely for the semi-autobiographical A Private Matter. But it is Mr. Murakami who has captured foreign readers’ attention -- so much so that the Nobel committee may not be able to ignore him much longer.
The latest Murakami novel to be translated, 1Q84, now promises to be his most popular yet. The mammoth three-volume work, the first two parts of which sold out in one frantic day in Japan, is published in the U.S. and U.K. next month. So keen were publishers to get the English version out quickly that they put two translators on the job. Even so, the two years it took them has proved too long for fans. Pirated translations, in English and Chinese, are swirling around the internet. On October 25, when in the U.S. Knopf publishes 1Q84 in a single 944-page volume, some bookstores plan to open until midnight to cope with demand. British readers will have a week’s head start, with parts one and two published on October 18 and part three on October 25.
1Q84, which nods to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, has many familiar Murakami themes. . . .
. . .
The themes of Mr. Murakami’s work show why he attested to having sympathy for the Aum cultists, who rejected what he saw as postwar Japan’s shallow, inhuman pursuit of wealth. His interviews with victims and perpetrators of the gas attack also made for a brilliant non-fiction account, Underground. “The cult people got out of that system and entered the right system, or a system they thought was right,” he said. “They are very pure.” An opponent of the death penalty, he was saddened by the court decision to execute some of Aum’s leaders. But in the end, he had to take the side of “our open society, our open system,” however absurd and soul-destroying he found it.
In 2009, Mr. Murakami received the Jerusalem Prize. Standing on the stage beside President Shimon Peres, he made a speech widely interpreted as a criticism of Israel’s behavior towards Palestinians. “If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg,” he said. His words could just as easily relate to the Japanese who occasionally describe themselves as being like “shell-less eggs,” an allusion to their supposedly communal society. Mr. Murakami rejects that notion. “Each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg,” he told his audience. Every one of his main characters, in their struggle to preserve their own individuality, are testimony to that.
--The writer is the FT’s Asia editor.
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