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September 23, 1999 |
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ironminds.com |
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Novelist Haruki Murakami bridges the distance between inner
and outer Japanese landscapes with American flair.
Haruki Murakami’s first job was managing an American-style
jazz bar, so it’s not a complete surprise when Japan’s
premier contemporary novelist reveals to me several tiers
of LPs by way of an introduction. We’re on the second
floor of his writing studio in Tokyo’s tony Aoyama neighborhood.
Outside the streets are ablaze with sun and heat, but in here,
everything’s cool.
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My eyes widen at the wall of albums, and Murakami nods. “That’s
only half of them,” he says, a fraction of a grin on his
lips.
At 50, Haruki-san (as he’s called by his duo of tea-serving
assistants) could be something of an elder-statesman of Japan’s
literary scene. Before Banana Yoshimoto or Amy Yamada were blips
on the unborn Amazon-dot-com, Murakami was unveiling his vision
of an urbanized, phantasmagorical and disturbingly lonely Japan
that bore little resemblance to the land of geisha-girl infantalization
and samurai nobility — the fairy-tale world that is still
so dear to Americans in search of Eastern fantasies. |
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Here was a writer who knew his way around pop icons, who adopted
American voices to tell Japanese stories, who employed streetwise
locutions and fast-food monikers in dreamlike tales. |
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His insights into the real undertows of a modern corporate society
made him hip and famous; published in 1987, his third novel,
Norwegian Wood, sold four million copies. |
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His magnum opus, 1997’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, was
reviewed in the awed tones reserved for a new Pynchon or DeLillo.
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continue reading at |
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http://www.ironminds.com/ironminds
/issues/990923/conversation.shtml |
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