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2000 |
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Metropolis Magazine |
Japan's literary superstar Haruki Murakami is home for the duration
and relishing the New Japan. The novelist tells Roland Kelts
his story.
When I meet Haruki Murakami for the first time, he pops up at
the top of a staircase in his Aoyama studio with neither warning
nor explanation, like an apparition in one of his books. I have
just struggled through a mass of dense summer heat, trudging
in my suit-and-tie past the boutiques and cafes, longing for
a reprieve. Murakami is wearing a pair of canvas shorts and
an open-necked polo shirt. Soft breezes and a wall of jazz LPs
surround him, and he eyes me with calm precision, sizing me
up before either of us speaks. "Come in," he finally
says. "I've been swimming." |
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In person and in print, Murakami has become famous for this
kind of unflappable cool, for a fashionable life of travel and
designer-label tastes-in jazz, cars and clothes-and for novels
and stories that feature a hip awareness of Western cultural
icons and contemporary lingo, conveyed in a voice that feels
laid-back and effortless. When his novels first appeared in
English, Murakami's incorporation of a Western style into slickly
modern Japanese settings was mostly deemed weird, especially
to those accustomed to more solemn traditional Japanese literature.
Novels like "A Wild Sheep Chase" and "Dance,
Dance, Dance" run the voice of Raymond Chandler through
an electrified (and electrifying) aesthetic blender, mixing
hard-boiled mystery with postmodern menace, and combining absurdism
with intimacy. In 1992, once-au courant American novelist Jay
MacInerney, to whom Murakami was then being compared, conducted
an interview with him. "His motto might be 'No big deal,'"
MacInerney wrote of Murakami's everyman narrators, comparing
the "jaded equanimity" of the author's tone to that
of another American writer Murakami has translated: Raymond
Carver |
"I made up my mind then that I wouldn't follow any movement,
any ideology, any ism. They all disappointed me. I felt betrayed." |
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But the man I met and have come to know in subsequent meetings
in Tokyo and New York is warm, candid and intense-and full of
contradictions. Japan's most widely read and highly regarded
international author looks a good 15 years younger than a man
in his early 50's should, even among generally long-living,
well-preserved Japanese. His face is broad, smooth and, at first,
unnervingly impassive. His eyes are darkly still, owlish beneath
thick brows. He speaks with a deep baritone, resonant with care
and thoughtfulness, and he massages his voice with frequent
mugs of tea. In that seductive, even comforting voice, he claims
that he's "not a very good talker in any language,"
though his English is mellifluous and exacting. He is a major
novelist who is also a serious runner, having completed marathons
in New York, Boston and Sapporo. And while the author of nine
novels, 30 books of stories, essays and translations became
famous for being cool, he uses hot, passionate language to declare
that he's no longer interested in all that. He'd rather write
a great novel. |
Haruki Murakami is the most famous Japanese writer of his generation,
and he is probably the most important writer in Japan today.
In his native land he has sold millions of books, eight of which
have appeared in English, most recently "Underground,"
a series of interviews and musings about the Aum Shinrikyo poisonings
of 1995, and "Sputnik Sweetheart," a novel of misunderstood
love. His writing is translated into 16 languages; South Koreans
recently incorporated the term "Murakamiesque" into
their lexicon. He is an international man of letters, and he
is also a celebrity, albeit a very private one, in a country
where most successful authors appear on television chat shows
and in magazine gossip columns. Numerous Japanese friends had
told me, with a certain hush of awe, that he was impossible
to interview. "He's like a recluse," one of them said.
"I don't even know if he's living in Japan." |
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Continue reading at |
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http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyofeaturestories
/389/tokyofeaturestoriesinc.htm |
