More on Murakami

Here's something that I found was very interesting.

WARNING: proceed only if you love Murakami :)

(1) Murakami owned a small jazz bar in Tokyo for seven years after college, an experience that he enjoyed and called upon when creating the main character of South of the Border, West of the Sun, who also owns a Tokyo jazz bar.

(2) His most often cited influences are Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan.

(3) Murakami told an interviewer from Publishers Weekly in 1991 that he considers his first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973 "weak," and was not eager to have them translated into English. The translations were published, but are not available in the U.S. Third novel A Wild Sheep Chase was "the first book where I could feel a kind of sensation, the joy of telling a story. When you read a good story, you just keep reading. When I write a good story, I just keep writing."

(4) Murakami has translated several works by American authors into Japanese, including titles by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, John Irving, and others.

(5) Daniel Handler, aka children's author Lemony Snicket, is a vocal fan of Murakami's who once wrote a review/paean to the author in the Village Voice entitled "I Love Murakami." "Haruki Murakami is our greatest living practitioner of fiction," he wrote. "....The novels aren't afraid to pull tricks usually banned from serious fiction: They are suspenseful, corny, spooky, and hilarious; they're airplane reading, but when you're through you spend the rest of the flight, the rest of the month, rethinking life."

(6) Murakami has taught at Princeton University, where he wrote most of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Tufts University. The twin disasters of a gas attack on the Tokyo subway and the Kobe earthquake in 1995 drew the author back to Japan from the United States.

Murakami mayhem

I spent the last four days in bed wheezing and reading. In between I made it a point to visit the doctor. After two days of self-medication, my body took a different turn. Anyways, I'm on the road to recovery so that's taken care of.

I'm reading Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance. Before I start, let me tell you that I'm a very staunch Murakami fan. Haruki Murakami for the uninitiated is one of the greatest living novelists. He may be of Japanese origin but he belongs to the world.

This is a very very brief biography of the man:
Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) was born in Kobe, Japan, and for many Japanese readers, he is now their country's leading fiction writer. Because his novels and short stories are increasingly translated, he is becoming better known in the United States and other countries. Murakami has translated the works of several American writers into Japanese, and during the first half of the 1990s he taught at Princeton University.


More on Murakami in the next post.

Confessions of an accidental fame junkie

Aloha!
When Columbus discovered America (Amerigo Vesapuci got there first me knows! But I have left this "fact" alone with due respect to popular misconception), he would never have realized that I would have chosen him as a starting point for my first ever blog. I'm not a blogger. I want to be famous, that's why I'm blogging! Ok, that's also not logical. So what is a hyper normal human being with her interests in books, people, psychology, human mind, superstition, abnormal news items, Japanese books in translation, quizzing, stimulating intellectual conversations, auras, Chinese food, exotic new age ideas, armchair travels, films, alternative music, intense visual imagery, writing have to say to get her blog started? I honestly don't know. But don't you think I have written enough to get started.?