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April 2001 |
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Los Angeles Magazine |
JAPANESE NOVELIST HARUKI MURAKAMI EXPLORES THE NETHER REGIONS
FROM SUBCONSCIOUS TO SUBWAY
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MANY WRITERS GET good reviews, a few produce best-sellers,
but only a handful create a cult. Japanese novelist Haruki
Murakami has done all three: He's a literary superstar whose
fans take his work personally. His most popular book, 1987's
Norwegian Wood, was Japan's equivalent of The Catcher in the
Rye or This Side of Paradise. Not only did this tale of teen
love and suicide sell millions of copies in his home country--the
figures would have Philip Roth or John Updike gasping with
envy--but its wistful nonconformity made it an anthem for
a younger generation who felt that Japan's traditional values
weren't so much wrong as irrelevant.
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At 51, Murakami is Japanese literature's biggest international
name since Yukio Mishima, and like the gay icon, proto-samurai,
and practitioner of seppuku, he has not been without controversy.
When he first hit it big in Japan with such books as 1982's
A Wild Sheep Chase--the absurdist tale of an adman seeking
a weirdly marked sheep--the literary establishment didn't
quite know what to make of him.
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Although not a flamboyant bad boy like Mishima, he was accused
of betraying the weighty novelistic heritage of Junichiro
Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, and Kenzaburo Oe, and replacing
it with a pop style steeped in the West. Which is how Murakami
was first promoted here a decade ago, as Tokyo's contribution
to global hipster fiction--an Asian answer to Tom Robbins,
if not Thomas Pynchon. |
But Murakami is no glib Japanese trendoid. While he can some
times be too cute for his own good, his best work pulls off
the same artistic feat as the Pet Shop Boys or Hong Kong filmmaker
Wong Kar-wai. He uses an ultrahip style to get at something
profoundly un, hip--the melancholy and confusion lying beneath
the neon sophistication of today's plugged, in urban life.
For all their catchiness, his books are haunted by a distinctively
modern forlornness in which movies take the place of loved
ones and pop songs express emotions we can't let ourselves
feel.
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continue reading at |
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http://www.findarticles.com/cf_lamg/m1346
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