Yeah, what else do I blog about lately.
This giant book, however, grew from the tiniest of seeds. According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories, “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning,” which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.”
via nytimes
AHHH. YOU DON’T KNOW HOW EXCITED THIS MAKES ME. ALL CAPS EXCITED. SERIOUS EXCITEMENT, FOLKS.
One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a “girl,” properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there’s a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert. Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl - one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you’re drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I’ll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose. But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can’t recall the shape of hers - or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It’s weird. “Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl,” I tell someone. “Yeah?” he says. “Good-looking?” “Not really.” “Your favorite type, then?” “I don’t know. I can’t seem to remember anything about her - the shape of her eyes or the size of her breasts.” “Strange.” “Yeah. Strange.” “So anyhow,” he says, already bored, “what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?” “Nah. Just passed her on the street.” She’s walking east to west, and I west to east. It’s a really nice April morning. Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and - what I’d really like to do - explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock build when peace filled the world. After talking, we’d have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed. Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart. Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards. How can I approach her? What should I say? “Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?” Ridiculous. I’d sound like an insurance salesman. “Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?” No, this is just as ridiculous. I’m not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who’s going to buy a line like that? Maybe the simple truth would do. “Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me.” No, she wouldn’t believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you’re not the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I’d probably go to pieces. I’d never recover from the shock. I’m thirty-two, and that’s what growing older is all about. We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can’t bring myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she holds a crisp white envelope lacking only a stamp. So: She’s written somebody a letter, maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The envelope could contain every secret she’s ever had. I take a few more strides and turn: She’s lost in the crowd. Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical. Oh, well. It would have started “Once upon a time” and ended “A sad story, don’t you think?” Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened. One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street. “This is amazing,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you’re the 100% perfect girl for me.” “And you,” she said to him, “are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I’d pictured you in every detail. It’s like a dream.” They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It’s a miracle, a cosmic miracle. As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily? And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, “Let’s test ourselves - just once. If we really are each other’s 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we’ll marry then and there. What do you think?” “Yes,” she said, “that is exactly what we should do.” And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west. The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other’s 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully. One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season’s terrible inluenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D. H. Lawrence’s piggy bank. They were two bright, determined young people, however, and through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love. Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty. One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, but along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in their chest. And they knew: She is the 100% perfect girl for me. He is the 100% perfect boy for me. But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fouteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever. A sad story, don’t you think? Yes, that’s it, that is what I should have said to her.
Haruki Murakami: How a Japanese writer conquered the world
At midnight in London, and the same time next week in America, bookshops will open their doors to sell Haruki Murakami’s latest novel to eager fans. This is not Harry Potter, it’s a 1,600-page translation from Japanese. So why the excitement?
When Haruki Murakami’s new book, 1Q84, was released in Japanese two years ago, most of the print-run sold out in just one day - the country’s largest bookshop, Kinokuniya, sold more than one per minute. A million copies went in the first month.
In France, publishers printed 70,000 copies in August but had to reprint within a week. The book is already on the top 20 list of online booksellers Amazon.com - hence the plans for midnight openings in the UK and across the US from New York to Seattle.
“The last time we did this was for Harry Potter,” says Miriam Robinson of Foyles, just one of the bookshops in London opening at midnight for the launch. “It’s hard to find a book that merits that kind of an event.”
This is the kind of hype that usually surrounds serialised teen literature, says Paul Bogaards of Knopf, the book’s US publishers. It is entirely unprecedented in the case of a work translated into English.
The novel has been worked on by two English translators to speed up publication. At 1,600 pages, the book- which will come out in two parts in the UK - is not to be taken lightly.
The book is set in an alternate 1984 - the title plays on the Japanese pronunciation of Q, which is the same as of the number nine. Its two main characters, a male novelist and a female serial killer, exist in parallel universes but are searching for each other as the novel winds its way between their worlds.
Classic Murakami themes are here in the new novel - love and loneliness, alternative and surreal worlds, enigmatic characters and people who seem impassive but are stirred by deep emotions. Not for the first time, questions are raised about free will and cult religion.
“There really isn’t anyone like him right now, he is completely different,” says Dan Pryce, a member of the sales staff at Waterstone’s bookshop in central London, who has been reading the new book in spare moments, in the shop’s basement.
“I like the way he never really explains what is happening, he just presents storylines and just lets them flow. Also, there is no real resolution at the end of the book, which leaves you wanting more.
“He does inspire devotion. He goes on and on about his routine and how it bores him to death but he still does it. He is an utter enigma, he is really strange. I think that’s what people like about him.”
Nostalgia
To date Murakami’s work has been translated into 42 languages and appeared on best-selling lists across the world, from South Korea to Australia, Italy, Germany and China.
But Japanese fiction isn’t traditionally popular in the West, according to one of the novel’s English translators, Harvard professor Jay Rubin. The post-war novelist Yukio Mishima achieved wide acclaim, but nothing on this scale.
Murakami hit the literary mainstream in Japan in 1987 with his fifth book, Norwegian Wood. Named after a Beatles song, it was a nostalgic love story about a group of young people living in a sanatorium in the hills outside Kyoto.
It became a cult classic among young Japanese, selling more than four million copies in Japan alone.
“Norwegian Wood was sort of an experiment for him in writing a novel that was completely realistic,” says Philip Gabriel of Arizona University, the other translator who worked on IQ84. It was a commercially-minded novel which avoided the surreal oddities that characterise his earlier and later work.
The early novels were not well-received by Japanese critics. “He wrote in a style that the literary establishment found startling and puzzling,” says Gabriel.
His scorn for Japanese literary tradition, his conversational writing style, and constant references to Western culture were seen as an assault on Japanese literary conventions. Writers such as Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, initially branded him as a lightweight pop talent.
But as Philip Gabriel puts it: “His early works capture the spirit of his generation - the lack of focus and ennui of the post-Student Movement age.”
Though Murakami’s books are set in Japan, his subjects of loneliness, boredom and loss, have significance for readers anywhere.
“You don’t go to Murakami for views of society but of the human brain,” says Jay Rubin.
Anna Zielinska-Elliott, Murakami’s Polish translator, who teaches Japanese literature at Boston University, says Polish readers of Norwegian Wood started out looking for “some sort of Japanese myth” but quickly began to appreciate him in a different way.
“If you look at the titles of reviews of his work in the early years, some have some mentions of cherry blossoms and other Japanese stereotypes and gradually over time they disappear.
“He was the first Japanese author who broke through these Orientalist expectations that the readers have. They stopped perceiving him as a Japanese author.”
Murakami had a hard time getting Norwegian Wood translated into English, the full translation appearing only in 2000. But his books have now sold 2.5 million copies in the US alone.
Virtual recluse
In Japan, Murakami was adamant not to release any of the details of IQ84 before it launched, only the title and release date. But fans have been posting their own English translations on the internet for a while, prompting the publishers to release the first chapter on the Murakami Facebook page.
According to Knopf, pre-sales of hard copies in the US overwhelmingly outnumber digital pre-sales by 70% to 30%. The inverse is typical for most books, showing how keen Murakami’s readers are to hold the physical volume in their hand.
Murakami’s status as a virtual recluse has no doubt helped to build his cult following. His opinion on public affairs is constantly sought by the media, yet he gives few interviews.
In June, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, he spoke out against nuclear power, and his words were reported widely in the Japanese media.
His main channel for communicating his opinion on the state of the world, remains his books.
His last long-form novel, Kafka on the Shore, was released six years ago with a print run of 30,000 books in the US. 1Q84’s first print run is three times that, at 95,000.
Philip Gabriel sees him as the quintessential modern writer, one who speaks to a truly globalised world.
“Some novels are too tied in with the shared culture of a nation to be easily appreciated in translation. Murakami’s are mostly the opposite.”
Artist Micah Lidberg’s interpretation of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. Excited to see the submissions for this contest. :)
