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Two Books from Haruki Murakami
In A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) the main character and narrator lives a mediocre existence. He is passionless; seemingly unaffected by his wife's betrayal and subsequent divorce, and only attracted to his current girlfriend because he finds her ears to be "marvels of creation" that can incite irresistible desire in any man who sees them. This shallow view of life is further emphasized by the fact that, throughout the book, no characters are referred to by proper names.
When the "Rat," a nomadic friend of the narrator, sends him a photograph of some sheep from Hokkaido, a chain of events is set in motion. The sheep picture comes to the attention of a shadowy figure simply known as the "Boss" -- a mythically powerful underworld kingpin -- who has a dire need to get a hold of one of the sheep in the photo. The Boss sends a messenger to the narrator making it clear that unless he finds that sheep, he will face financial ruin, if not worse.
What follows is a surreal journey from Tokyo to Sapporo and points north, including a hotel that could be right out of a Kubrick film and creature known as the Sheep-Man, who is worthy of David Lynch. In the course of this journey, and in the face of extraordinary events, our narrator confronts his superficial world view and the affect it has had on his life.
Set six years later, Dance, Dance, Dance (1994) is murder mystery, but one in which the clues are revealed by chance rather than dogged investigation - often by a seemingly random psychic encounter. Our narrator has resumed a normal life as a freelance copywriter. He refers to this as "shoveling cultural snow" -- doing the thoughtless and thankless work that needs to be done to clear the path. He is fairly well disengaged from humanity, spending a lot of time alone doing absolutely nothing. Yet, in the midst of this anti-social life, he finds that his long missing girlfriend, the one with the amazing ears -- is calling to him as if in a dream, and she is weeping.
Once again, a chain of events is set in motion. He travels back to the strange hotel to find it modernized and corporate. He has another encounter with the Sheep-Man who tells him to "keep dancing." In the course of story he encounters, and finds sympathy for, a disaffected adolescent girl from a dysfunctional family, and an old high-school acquaintance who has become a famous movie star. Through his relationship with these characters he solves the mystery of his missing girlfriend, not through directed investigation but just by staying engaged with life and society -- by keeping up the "dance."
As a Westerner reading these novels, I was struck by how different the Japan portrayed here is from the hyper-efficient, sanitized, sexless and safe Japan of common impression. This is late twentieth-century post-modern Japan. References to Western pop culture are incessant. Call girls abound. Characters find themselves entangled in confusing, neurotic relationships worthy of HBO original programming. And nobody is practicing Kendo.
These books are hard-boiled -- that is to say, they are written in the hard-boiled style defined in the mid-twentieth century by U.S. mystery writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet. There is a stark contrast between the blunt, gritty realism of hard-boiled style and the surreal, supernatural events that occur. This causes the stories to seem solidly planted in the real world, despite the occasional bizarre episodes.
There are certain shortcomings; the camera's eye perspective of the hard-boiled school lends itself to a bit too much dwelling on the details of setting. This is primarily in evidence at the beginning of A Wild Sheep Chase. And one suspects something is lost in the translation from the original Japanese. For example, this passage from Dance, Dance, Dance:
"... and if you consider the telephone as an object, it has this truly weird form. Ordinarily, you never notice it, but if you stare at it long enough, the sheer oddity of its form hits home. The phone either looks like it's dying to say something, or else it's resenting that it's trapped inside its form. Pure idea vested with a clunky body. That's the telephone."
There is a certain vagueness that may not be intentional. One is left with the feeling that "form" doesn't quite convey the same meaning it did in the original language.
Reading Murakami has been described feeling like you've just awakened from a deep sleep and you aren't sure if you're still dreaming. These are fascinating, engrossing books that will leave you full of ideas and impressions to dwell on for a long time to come.
You can purchase A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance,Dance,Dance from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
is The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, to me, its kind of Murakami's best integration of all of the themes he brings up in his other books (esp. ddd & hard-boiled wonderland), and it is absolutely wonderful.
Sometimes the translation is as much art as the writing itself.
My wife and I get a kick out of the horrid Japanese->English butchering that passes for subtitling these days.
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To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
I discovered Murakami through A Wild Sheep Chase last November. Within three months I'd read every book that had been translated to English.
I'm not a science fiction fan, but his books are just barely science fiction. They usually leave me feeling depressed (like the stereotypical main characters of his books... always a depressed, solitary male) but they're amazingly well written.
Sheep Chase is great for a quick introduction, but once you've read that, I highly reccomend reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It's 600 dense pages, so chunk out some time, but it's absolutely worth it.
"The Elephant Vanishes", available in English as a Vintage International paperback, is a collection of short stories into which you can immediately jump.
[Warning: Plot description but no spoiler included.]
My favorite story from the collection is "The 100% Perfect Girl," in which he passes (you guessed it) the 100% perfect girl on the street and, only after losing her, figures out exactly what he would have stopped and told her. This substory comprises the bulk this short short story and describes the story of two young lovers and their 100% perfect love potentially being lost to foolishness.
Murakami is best known for
- Norweigan Wood
. From the Amazon.com description: "In 1987, when Norwegian Wood was first published in Japan, it promptly sold more than 4 million copies and transformed Haruki Murakami into a pop-culture icon. The horrified author fled his native land for Europe and the United States, returning only in 1995, by which time the celebrity spotlight had found some fresher targets." I have not read it so I will not comment (nor karma-whore, as it were) further.I've always been told that Dick's defining characteristic is a bitterness along with "European" sad endings. How does this guy rate on that? I admit, I skipped the review because I hate spoilers and such.
Even better, how does this guy rate against Heinlein and Asimov?
BlackGriffen
The Elephant Vanishes, a collection of short stories. Bite-sized wierdness, and a good overview of Murakami's range. Plus, it includes one of my all-time favorite opening lines (from memory):
"One day the dancing dwarf came to me in a dream."
Ill definitely be checking this author out - P.K. Dick is my favorite author. For those who don't know, Philip wrote the stories upon which "Blade Runner", "Total Recall" and "Minority Report" were based. And those are his weakest works in my opinion.
Jeremy
Murakami usually deals with normal life stories, science fiction, or simply fiction is not his area of expertise.
His masterpiece is Norwegian Woods, which tells the story of a young man, in the mid of the japanese 68. We can say that there are a lot of biographical points in the book: the music, the environment, probabily the personal experiences.
I can tell you, Norwegian Woods is one exceptional, emotional book. It's not science fiction, but still, one of the best books I've ever read.
Murakami has also witnessed two of the recent tragedies of modern Japan: the sarin gas attack in the subway and the Kobe earthquake.
In the book (Underground) about the sarin (nerve) gas attack from a religious sect, Murakami acts as a journalist, interviewing survivors and members of the sect, trying to find a logic in what happened.
The Kobe earthquake is handled differently: it is a collection of short stories, mainly of people marginally touched by the earthquake, and how it affected their lives. You can find fictional stories, where the earthquake is caused by a huge worm living underground, to more personal, intimate stories.
Anyway, Murakami is an excellent writer, you should read at least one of his books.
But seriously, I read Wild Sheep Chase a few months ago and really enjoyed it, though the end got a little sloppy IMHO. After reading it you may never look at sheep the same way again...
:)
And remember, most of his books are available at your public library, so dont slashdot all the used copies of them at amazon
If anyone wants a sample, there's a Murakami short story over at the New Yorker.
I don't know where he got the impression that Japan is sexless. All you have to do is look at some hentai. Some of it is tame, some of it is pretty...odd, but it is definitely no sexless.
Hentai and anime aside, you could read James Clavell's Sho-gun. Granted, it is written by a westerner, but it is still entertaining and portrays the lives of the ancient Japanese aristocracy.
barista
In college, I decided to use those two years of required foreign language and read a few books. My two favorites were Le Petit Prince and L'étranger. What other non-English classics should I take a look at? Be it that Slashdot is an international crowd, I'm sure that there are a few good suggestions out there.
Isn't titling your book "A Wild Sheep Chase" when you are writing in the genre of PK Dick a little over the board? How about writing a romance taking place on the plantation in the civil war era? I'll call it... "Not Here With The Wind".
How's the grammar? I'd be afraid to read anything originally in japanese. It's hard enough to read a bug report or a manual by someone who's native language is japanese (not their fault and completely understandable but still none to easy to read!).
I made a vow to myself to achieve a level of literacy in Japanese to at least be able to read my favorite Murakami novels. That was in 1995 when I was 17...
Only now can I honestly say I've attained that goal, after having finally passed the JLPT Level 1 (the much-feared "ikkyuu") and reading "Hituji wo meguru bouken" right-to-left twice.
Murakami's prose is abstract and intense, even in translation. However, in my estimation it is well worth giving his works a shot in the original Japanese, if you're up to the challenge. If you can honestly say you've read his novels, then you're well-prepared to use Japanese in most any professional situation.
Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite authors of all time. I think everyone should read Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Honestly, I don't really like the comparison to Dick. They are both very good writers, but I think their styles are quite different. If they have anything in common it is more in the type of characters they choose, but not the situations or writing styles. However, if relating the two will make more people read Murakami, then thats alright with me.
I never realized there were any Japanese cyberpunk authors until I read it. Most cyberpunk seems to be a glossy update to good old fashioned Orientalism. Anyway, the guy is a great author.
I love his novels, but the publishers of his earlier work TOTALLY did him a disservice with the tiles they chose. "Solar Lottery", "Clans of the Alphane Moon", "Martian Time-Slip"- these all sound like REALLY cheesy, juvenile sci-fi novels. When in fact they are very deep, and creepy literature. The later novels finally got titles that hinted at the true weirdness inside, though.
it's the duality that intrigues me. not just duality, but the dark, shadowly nether-realm of duality. almost like a dream. the two halves of 'hard-boiled wonderland' are twisted about each other with the perfection of a double helix in repose.
and the solitary narrator--always solitary--who almost slips through life with a calm and tranquility only possible in dreams. chotto... hen desu ne.. but in a good way.
my only regret is never making it to the dunkin' donuts in sapporo.
his two worst books!
Give 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles' a read, if you want a really great book. It's dense, filled with interesting characters, and it's full of those fun moments where you just kind of sit back, shake your head, and go 'what the fuck... ?'
It really is a great read.
His more recent books (Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart) are also -incredibly- well written. These two, and Wind-up Bird, are 3 of my top 5 favorite books. These two are both a lot more *real* than his other works (not nearly as crazy as 'HardBoiled Wonderland at the End of the World'), and it's really easy to identify with the characters.
Obviously, I'm no book reviewer, but.. if Murakami interests you, the three books to check out (imo) are 'Norwegian Wood,' 'Sputnik Sweetheart,' and 'Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.'
[rant]
post-modern?
what is that? 99.5% of the time when people uses the phrase "post-modern", they have no clue what they are talking about, which is really annoying because it will ruin a perfectly good review like this. let us analyze this a bit in detail:
linguistically speaking, post-modern is oxymoron. modern: Of or relating to recent times or the present. post modern would refer to the future, hence making absolutely no sense if you are talking about a "current-era".
in the arts, we have "post-modernism", which would make a *little* more sense. misnomer aside, it refers to the succession of "modernism," however -- we are sure as heck not talking about avant-garde arts. and as far as i know Japan's art culture has never really had a significant "post-modernism" era.
so... geez people. stop using that phrase!
[/rant]
and oh yeah, japan is nothing like you see on animes; "japan has no homeless people" is a flat lie. and the place looks, in general, much more run-down than you would imagine. Still better than Miami, though.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I'm glad to hear of this author and will check his work out, but how can you append "with a sense of humor" to "a Japanese version of PKD"? Humor was a huge component of PKD's writing style. Ever read Ubik or the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch?
If you're looking for some modern Japanese Literature, check out Yukio Mishima. He was crazy - he tried to start an armed rebellion against the government in the 1970's, and, when he failed, he committed seppuku. (The messy, supposedly "honorable" way to commit suicide practiced by Samurai - where you slit your own stomach open.)
Anyway, he wrote some pretty good books. Check em' out.
After A Wild Sheep Chase was required summer reading for me (over 9 years ago - this review is a little late) I also became a big Murakami fan, and went on a reading kick of his books. And I experienced the exact same effect - I got depressed. Good writing and excellent translations, but they made me feel lousy.
This is true of so many excellent books (and music, and films, etc.) but still many love them. I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned here, but I'm not quite sure what it is.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Funny how Haruki Murakami is mentioned on /. of all places. I would have never considered him to be a sci fi author.
Recently, I have read two stories by Murakami--"Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" which was translated and published in last month's issue of GQ, and "Airplane" which was translated and published in last week's New Yorker. Airplane was definitely not a science fiction book, but I could see some would consider Super Frog to be a sci fi short story. I would consider it a modern fantasy though.
Whereas Phillip K. Dick usually would tell us wary stories as to how we should be careful with our use of tech, Murakami is more about telling us how we should be considerate to others. In "Airplane", it is about how a man who has weird "moments"(can't think of a better word right now) and his woman, and in Super Frog, it is about a man who is considered brave not because of brute strength, but the selfless determination of an ordinary man to help others.
I definitely recommend "Super Frog Saves Tokyo" to everyone who is interested in Haruki Murakami. It was only a few pages long, but in light of Sept. 11, I'd say Super Frog is an interesting and fantastic read. =)
That was a pretty poor review, if all you can say about Murakami is that his books weren't what you expected, they weren't full of stereotypical Japanese doing kendo. Don't you have any opinions on the content?
The reason Murakami is compared to PKD is that he uses the most mundane of language or situations, with a slightly shifted psychological circumstance, perhaps even apocalyptic conditions. So for example, in a Dickian twist, Murakami's "TV People" describes how one day some people come to his home to deliver a TV, they're perfectly regular in every sense but one, they're only 3/4 scale people.
I've read a lot of Murakami in the original Japanese, and it's a very interesting experience. Many writers use complex language forms but Murakami is relatively plain, it is hard to describe the subtle monotony and relentlessness of his plain language. Probably his most startling work was "Underground" which is just now available in English for the first time. It's the book where he writes the least, the book mostly transcripts of interviews with victims of the Aum Shinrikyo poison gas attack in 1995. But between the interviews is Murakami's reconstruction of the events, and essays about Japan's society and how Aum could have happened right in front of everyone's eyes.
And here's where Murakami sort of goes off the deep end. I've read a few of M's essays lately, he has taken on the role of social critic. His essays focus on "ishiki no arikata" which is loosely translated, "the way people are supposed to think about things." He made some particularly hilarious remarks denouncing recent fashion trends like "yamamba" and "ganguro" as unJapanese and would lead to the moral corruption of the nation. He sounds like he's becoming an old fart, cranking about what's gone wrong with those darn kids today. My opinion was confirmed after I read a couple of his travel books. They're all full of gripes like "I hiked around Malta, the food was greasy and the toilets were dirty. I had to have fresh sushi sent by DHL from Tokyo once a week or I'd have nothing decent to eat."
i really enjoyed murakami's "sputnik sweetheart", and "norwegian wood"...
however, my favourite japanese author is actually banana yoshimoto; "kitchen" and "lizard" are both beautiful books that i would recommend without reservation to everyone. if you have not read anything by her, or are wondering whether you would like contemporary japanese literature then "lizard" would be the perfect book to test the water, as it is actually six short stories.
finally, shusako endo's "silence" is well worth reading, but would never qualify as a light afternoon's read
as an aside... anyone based in london, uk, and know of a good course that teaches japanese? anything sponsored by the embassy perhaps? i've been looking to learn for some time. started teaching myself a while ago, but had too much work going on to pursue it properly. thx...
I've read both Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and will gladly attest to Murakami's talents. They were both very good books, well worth the reading. However, I should note that these are not (thankfully, to some degree) American or European books. Their denouements don't come along in the usual way or at a constant pace, and the stories themselves, much like the films Maborosi and Wandafuru raifu (English title: "After Life"), focus more on details and setting than moving a plot along. Not that this is a complaint; I quite enjoy such story telling.
Having not (yet) read the books reviewed here, I can't say anything about them. But I think the name Murakami, like that of Akira Kurosawa, warrants a look-see regardless.
100y and 500y in the right pocket and 10y and 50y in the left. A hand in each pocket and count them simultaneously. The presumption that the right brain and left brain keep separate tabs and you can bring together the result at the end.
Reminds me of 6800 registers...
When Murakami was young, he read a lot of pulp authors (Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, etc.), even translating the works into Japanese.
My two favorites by him are Wild Sheep Chase and Pinball, 1973 (translated into English by Kodansha, but not sold in the states, maybe Bookfinder...)
Both those books have a touch of magical realism working, but could be seen as modern takes on noir.
It is strange, as Murakami's biggest hit in Japan was Norwegian Wood, a title that, due to culture as much as anything, really captured the imagination of Japanese men and made him a superstar--but it's hard for an outside like myself to get into quite the same way.
Maybe the biggest secret to Murakami Haruki is the way pretty much all his characters are outsiders, loners, and the women they meet the same, coming as he does from a country, Japan, where the biggest focus is on the group.
Definitely recommend Wild Sheep Chase, Pinball, 1973 uses the same characters and serves as a kind of prequel.
I've only read "Sputnik Sweetheart", but his style and the resulting atmosphere reminds me much, much more of Thomas Disch than Dick.
Oh, and anyone who thinks Dick doesn't have a wicked sense of humor might want to go back and re-read his stuff.
There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line. -- Oscar Levant
I'm suprised Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World wasn't included in this review. It may not be Murakami's best work, but it is the most Sci-fi oriented and argualby the most closely related to Phillip Dick's writing.
All of Murakami's novels have a certain mystical element reminicent of Dick's later books. The world created, like Dick's, lasts largely intact from novel to novel. But what makes it interesting is that Murakami's world is a much less hostile one. Although the paranoia is justified, and the femme fatal always double crosses, you get the feeling that the main character suspected it all along and went along just for the crazy ride.
kobo abe - "woman in the dunes". existentialist tragedy that makes camus look like a comic book. avoid the movie (thankfully).
yukio mishima - "the sailor who fell from grace with the sea". mishima tried to overthrow the japanese government by force of arms in the 70's and committed suicide after failing. let's see thomas pynchon do that! alarming parable of post-war reconstruction of japan. depravity, vengence, ennui... it's all here. avoid the movie.
kenzeburo oe - nip the buds shoot the kids. oe won the 1994 nobel prize for literature. this first novel is his grittiest. it's often compared to the lord of the flies but this is only because the main characters are children faced with the difficult decisions of wartime that even adults often cannot deal with. no movie.
2 1337 4 u!
I haven't read Dance, Dance, Dance, but I did read A Wild Sheep Chase. AWSC was good, but not nearly as good as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was longer, deeper, and generally more involving. If you're going to read Murakami, that's the place to start.
Murakami's work is pretty clearly postmodernist, especially Hard-Boiled Wonderland, which is probably as close to textbook postmodernism as anything I've seen. And it's also a really good book, of course.
--Joakim Ziegler
These two are excellent books, but the first book I read by Murakami is still his best, in my opinion: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Joe-Bob gives it five stars... Go check it out!
I haven't read these two, but I would recommend "the Wind-up Bird Chronicles," "Norwegian Wood," and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland..." (as it would seem many others do). I haven't checked out any of his others (and have not yet read the new English translation of "Norwegian Wood"), but all of these strike me as great books (though "HBW..." was more difficult than the others to get through, it was certainly rewarding). I read both "WUBC" and "NW" while visiting a friend in San Francisco a couple of years ago (she had the older translation of "NW" and after reading that, I ran across "WUBC" in a 50%-off bookstore in Berkeley. They were both so good that I read them each in a bit over a day. Strangely, I also picked up a Kurt Vonnegut novel ("TimeQuake", I think) at the same bookstore and read it immediately following "WUBC" (all before heading home - what a weird vacation, since I read 4 or 5 books during those 10 days). I remember thinking that they all seemed to fit together, though it was probably just my mood (getting to the end of a long visit and ready to long journey home), and I would not really consider that to be one of the essential KV stories. PKD. Somehow I have managed to only read "Do Androids Dream..." and that was so long ago that I don't even remember what I thought of it. Must go back and explore him a bit.
I would strongly recommend that you check out Kobo Abe. Considerably different stylistically from murakami, but perhaps one of Japan's best 20thC novelists.
I'd argue that Murakami has a lot more in common with Raymond Chandler than Philip Dick.
And then, maybe Vonnegut is closer.
In any case, Murakami feels a lot less like a methanphetamine trip than PKD, and less of a bad mushroom experience than Burroughs.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Stop him before he translates again!
Rubin and Birnbaum simply have different styles. Rubin's is much more masculine (if translation can be described that way) and Birnbaum's is more lyrical. I get the distinct feeling sometimes reading Birnbaum that he isn't 100% faithful to the original text, a feeling I don't get with either Rubin or Gabriel's translations, but the book is certainly none the worse for it.
I have been pwned because my
Besides the mentioned two, anyone interested should get into:
:-)
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
The Wind-up Bird Chronicles
Norwegian Wood
The Elephant Vanishes (short stories)
Underground (non-fiction)
There are more, but those are my favorites
And now, an anecdote: I was introduced to Murakami in an English class at UC Berkeley (haven of DWM's and ethnic literature, but largely void of anything else). The professor teaching the class approached the science fiction and fantasy genres as amusing trivialities and kept attempting to lead discussions into figuring out which of many parallel universes in the books was the "real" one. The students kept trying to introduce this wanker to the postmodernist idea that none of the universes is any more real or valid than the others. So finally, the guy pulls up Hard-Boiled Wonderland and says "do you really expect me to think this is a normal Japanese salaryman living a normal life?" At which point the Japanese exchange student raises her hand for the first time in weeks and says "well yes, of course he is. Strange things happen to him, but he's a totally normal person."
It was enjoyable to see.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
The Birnbaum translation was only published as a learning aid for Japanese students learning English, and given the way it reads, I imagine it was translated with that very much in mind. The lack of subtlety is actually kind of an advantage when you're at a middling skill level in English.
As a Westerner reading these novels, I was struck by how different the Japan portrayed here is from the hyper-efficient, sanitized, sexless and safe Japan of common impression.
Japan is far from sexless, they are the most sexually repressed people on the planet, but get a japanese girl in the bedroom and she knows exactly what to do and how to do it and has no qualms about it either.
She must have been born and raised in Japan though, as to be untainted by other cultures to any great extent.
Katoktok only asking.