Haruki Murakami: A Search for Meaning (Novels & Writing Style)

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Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto 1949 after  WW2 that devastated Japan. But Kyoto remained   relatively unscathed partly due its historic  value and partly because it had no military   significance. He grew up in a house with two  literature teachers as parents. And in a city   where people think they’re special because  the city was Japan’s continuous capital   for 1100 years. In Japan Kyoto people are  considered pompous and mostly uptight and   strict which meant the little Haruki couldn't  wait to get out of the stifling atmosphere.   Growing up, he read a lot of western  literature, mainly American, Russian   and French. He studied drama in Waseda  University in Tokyo. After graduation he   opened a Jazz bar in Tokyo with his wife  Yoko and they decided not to have kids. In 1978 during a baseball game a divine message  came to him and told him to be a writer.   A year later he published his  first novel, Hear the Wind Sing.   It’s about a memory of a wild summer in  1970s with all the strange things like   a girl without a little finger. In 1980 he  published his second novel, Pinball, 1973   about a man’s obsession with…? You guessed  it. A pinball. A real boy and his toy. In   1982 he published his longer novel, A Wild Sheep  Chase which propelled him as a serious novelist.   It’s kind of detective story in the underground  world to find a sheep with a birthmark. These   first three novels are often referred to as Rat  trilogy due to the character Rat appearing in all. In 1985 he wrote Hard-Boiled Wonderland and  the End of the World, a parallel narrative that   takes the bizarre and surreal to an extreme,  well End of the World kind of extreme. His   fame was growing so he felt uncomfortable with  the attention, so in 1986 he escaped Japan for   some peace in Europe and then America. In 1987 he  published Norwegian Wood about a boy nostalgically   remembering his relationships with two different  girls. This novel made him very famous and rich.   In 1988 he wrote Dance Dance Dance,  a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase.   It’s about a man trying to return to the past but  things have moved on and only dreams remain. In   1992 he wrote South of the Border, West of the  Sun about a boy and girl who meet again after   many years and have to decide whether to rekindle  the past or continue with their current lives. In 1995 he moved back to Japan following the Kobe  Earthquake and published Wind-up Bird Chronicles.   This is a big one that deals with real social  issues like war crimes committed by the Japanese   in China but still has all the strange and  bizarre things, like a search for someone missing   or sitting in a well or a body mark that has  special power. Here real is infused with surreal.   In 1999 he wrote Sputnik Sweetheart  about a search for a missing person,   unfulfilled love, and the struggle between  individual freedom and social conformity. A lot   of the novel takes place outside Japan, namely in  Greece. In 2002 he wrote another big novel, Kafka   On The Shore about a boy named Kafka escaping  from his tyrannical father, just like the real   Franz Kafka who hated his father. Again, in this  novel, we have a character who can talk to cats.   In 2004 he wrote After Dark about nightwork,  prostitution and dreams. Well night time. In 2010 he wrote 1Q84. The title is taken  from George Orwell’s 1984. In Japanese   the letter Q and number 9 have the same  pronunciation, so you can read it as 1984.   Two parallel worlds and a religious cult and  the journey of characters to find what’s real   and what is not. In 2013 he wrote Colorless  Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.   It’s a about a man who has to confront  his past and old friends to understand   the mystery of their rejection of him.  This novel became a best seller around   the world. I personally liked this the least of  all his works. That says more about me I guess.   In 2018 he wrote Killing Commendatore. It’s  about a painter who after divorcing his wife   moves into another painter’s house, where he dives  deeper in history of Japanese invasion of China.   In a sense it is somewhat similar to  Wind-up Bird Chronicles that deals with   real socio-political issues. But has all the  surreal and bizarre, the hallmark of Murakami. He has also written 6 collections of short  stories, and 12 non-fiction books. What   I Talk About When I Talk About Running is  about his running habit. He wakes up at 4am,   like the German philosopher Immanuel Kant  and writes for hours before going for a run.   Underground another non-fiction book is  about the aftermath of the gas attack in   Tokyo underground in 1995. He interviewed  the victims and witnesses to understand   their experiences. He wanted to really  know how it felt to be there and then. Murakami has been writing for 40 years.  Non-stop. If writing is a battle, Murakami   is a very disciplined, regimented and successful  soldier. His themes are wide-ranging from suicide,   water well, death, consciousness, love,  loss of mother or lover, and life’s choices. Now I will tell you all about his writing  style and storytelling techniques. Music He writes while listening   to music so in his writing world or his imagined  world, he is like the kind of god that says let   there be music. His characters obey. During an  interview with the New Yorker in 2018 he said:   “I have learned so many things from music  about writing. I think there are three   important elements: rhythm, harmony, and free  improvisation. I learned these things from music,   not from literature. And when I started to write,  I tried to write as though I were playing music.”   Also he used to run a jazz bar in Tokyo and has  a deep interest in the music as an artistic form.   There is a lot of similarity between jazz  improv and Murakami’s free flowing writing.   You will find music in nearly all of his  novels and even some of the titles come from   song titles. Norwegian Wood for  one is from a Beatles’ song. Escape Fundamentally Murakami’s writing is an escape from   Japanese group culture for a more individualised  lifestyle. In the early days in japan, he was   considered a black sheep or a punk in the literary  scene. He didn't fit in very well. He fled Japan   and went to Italy where write Norwegian wood. Most  of his characters listen or read western music and   literature. This escape is also apparent in his  settings, isolated locations in the mountains   and forests. So deep down Murakami is trying  to run away from the socio-cultural constraint   of being Japanese in a highly group-oriented  society with a strong Confucian hierarchy.   Confucius, the Ancient Chinese philosopher,  who influenced Japan, promoted social harmony   through hierarchical social institutions like  family, state and other group entities. This rigid   structure can have a deep psychological impact  in a globalised world that promises all kinds of   individual freedom. Kafka on the shore is a good  example. He runs away from his tyrannical father.   Murakami once said that he finds it therapeutic  to create characters who are different from him.   So Murakami is a man on the run from  social constraints and reality itself.   He calls Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japan-born British  author, his best friend. The irony is that   Murakami while living in Japan is running away  but Ishiguro while living in the UK is longing   for japan. I discussed this in more detail in  my video on Ishiguro, which you can watch here. East meets West He combines western writing style   with Japanese sensibilities. He speaks English  and has translated the works of F Scot Fitzgerald,   Raymond Chandler and JD Salinger. The title of  his non-fiction book What I Talk About When I Talk   About Running comes from a Raymond Carver’s short  story titled What We Talk About When We Talk About   Love. He uses the American expressiveness  to liberate his Japanese characters.   His characters are mostly Japanese but they  are very open with their feelings and thoughts. High and Low Like the Russian author,   Fyodor Dostoevsky, who combined crime genre to  tell deeper psychological stories, Murakami uses   high culture of music, opera and literature  in whacky and low-brow environments. He says:   “I think if you’re a fiction writer and you’re  too intelligent, you cannot write. But if you’re   stupid, you cannot write. You have to find a  position in between. That is very difficult.”   He has found a balance between the high-brow  and low-brow. So his readership is wide-ranging,   there is something for everyone in his novels. Free-flowing Murakami says: “I don’t research when   I write novels, because imagination is my asset,  my gift. I want to work it fully.” His writing,   characters and worlds he creates are all very  fluid. Most Japanese people don’t say what they   feel or think. Japanese writers like Yasunari  Kawabata captures this the best. So you have to   read between the lines. Murakami’s characters tell  you everything. They appear plain on the inside.   Almost inside-out. Everything’s flushed out so  that they don’t have any inner soul or personage,   it appears. In Japanese culture, there are two  selves: Hone which means the inner true self   and Tatemae which means outside the house self  or social self. Japanese are considered very   reserved and they rarely discuss their  true feelings and opinions in public.   Murakami’s characters are very feline.  Free flowing. Murakami has a cat as a pet,   so perhaps he gets his inspiration  from the pet. A cat is a free spirit. Search In Murakami’s novels there is always someone   or something missing. This search is in fact the  deeper search for meaning in life. Something lost.   For thousands of years we believed in fixed  religious worlds and social structures.   Now we feel dislodged, no longer anchored  down. Alienated from social conventions.   A century ago people took refuge in nationalism  but now deep down we don’t care about nationalism   either. But everything around us tells us to  conform and be conventional and follow rules.   Murakami invites you to be free. He  touches a chord with our own search   for something we are missing.  A meaning. A person. A purpose. How culture Aristotle came up with   a formula for storytelling in Greek tragedies.  Every tale has a beginning, middle and end,   just like life itself, you’re born, you live and  then die. Murakami’s storytelling follows this   convention for the most part. But his genius  is that he makes the journey or the process   interesting. His endings are not very  strong or memorable. But you always   know his style. His novels are a kind of lived  experiences. In that sense it’s very Japanese.   The Japanese culture emphasizes on how more  than why. Western culture is outcome driven.   While Japanese culture focuses more on etiquettes  and rules and the process. How to do something is   as important as the outcome of it. Murakami’s  storytelling is addictive because he grabs your   attention in the details. If you skim through  his novels you realize they’re quite cliched.   Always boy meets girl or vice versa. Or someone  chases or being chased. But through exquisite   details and storytelling he entertains us  to read on to find out how things are done. Cause Murakami   lacks a clear conviction. Some writers have some  deeper political or even ideological convictions   like Dickens writing about the poor or Khalid  Hosseini writing about the weak and the suffering.   Murakami doesn't seem to care about any cause  or even humans. In his novels humans and animals   are almost on equal footings. Perhaps his  lack of a clear conviction prevented him to   winning the Nobel Prize. I think Murakami is  interested in telling a good story, not promoting   social causes like class or gender inequality  or any other issues such as the environment.   He is simply trying to make sense of existence  in a complex and confusing world of ours. Small is big If you have read Murakami, you will notice that   as soon as you open a page you will feel right in  the scene. He has the ability to take you to that   moment. This stems from the fact that he focuses  on the small rather than the big picture. In 1995   after the gas attack in Tokyo, Murakami tried to  find newspaper articles about how it felt to be in   the moment inside the underground. To feel the  smell, the noise and the chaos but he couldn’t   find anything concrete, so he went and interviewed  the people who were at the scene to write his book   Underground to capture the smaller details. In his  novels, he grabs your attention by focusing on the   small. It is often the case with Murakami’s novels  you remember a particular scene like fish raining   from the sky or a man talking to cat but it’s  more difficult to remember an entire story. So   his attention to details and focus on simple and  small is very unique and fresh. If you summarize   his novels, they sound very bizarre and somewhat  dull. But it’s the focus on small things then   makes his novels so mesmerizing. You feel like  in the moment. So the small is big for Murakami. Irrationality One thing unique   about Murakami‘s novels is that characters  make decisions not only based on reasonable   rational logical way of thinking but more based  on things that are completely random. For example   in his latest novel Killing Commendatore, a  woman divorces her husband because she had an   unrelated dream. Or when the narrator decides  to quit painting, his agent doesn't ask why. In western culture the emphasis is on knowing the  reason behind every action that drives science   and technology. But in life and especially in  human psyche, things often don't make sense.   You can’t chose your family, country, language.  Even your job. You apply for 10 jobs, you get one.   What if you chose the other job? You would meet  different people and would have a different life. In Murakami’s novels a small incident, painting or  a person that you meet can change your life in a   way that you had never imagined. This randomness  is exciting. In Western crime fiction, you often   hear detectives saying they hate coincidences.  Everything has to make sense or has to happen for   a reason. But Murakami’s novels are full of magic,  unexplained randomness and that makes him unique.   Just as I discussed in my video on Dostoevsky,  human behaviour is for the most part   is irrational and often don't make  sense. And Murakami captures that. Lack of emotions: In Murakami’s novels characters don't   show their emotions. They’re mostly cool calm and  often very understanding of the other characters.   In Japan you’re not meant to show your  emotions in public. For example in his last   novel Killing Commendatore, when the man hear  his wife is having affair with somebody else,   he doesn't get angry. He just leaves the house  without showing any sort of emotion. And then   start driving around Tokyo for no reason while  listening to music. It’s very rare to find any   Murakami character who is very hot-headed  or lose temper in the presence of others. Simple is beautiful (wabi sabi) His writing style and language are   very simple. He holds your hand all the way.  If you ask a Japanese for direction in Japan,   they are most likely to walk with you  to the place or draw a map for you.   Murakami does that in his novels, so you  don't have to go back in the book to see   if you missed something. His characters, scenes  and settings are simple places. Wabi sabi is the   Japanese concept of beauty in simplicity, like  a Japanese garden that has only rock and sand. Murakami doesn't do research so that liberates  the reader to not take things seriously.   You can feel Murakami is enjoying the writing  process himself. And this in turn is passed   down to readers to enjoy reading them. It’s like  when musicians performing. If they’re having fun,   so will the audience. He says: “If you are  a reader and I’m a writer, I don’t know you,   but in the underground world of fiction there is a  secret passageway between us: we can send messages   to each other subconsciously.” Murakami dives into  his subconscious and finds things and brings them   to us in the simplest way possible. It’s through  our shared subconscious that we find his writing   so appealing because that’s also our subconscious,  lost in this bewildering and confusing world. Thank you for watching.
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Channel: Fiction Beast
Views: 2,016
Rating: 4.9574466 out of 5
Keywords: haruki murakami novels and writing style, haruki murakami, read the world, japanese literature, novels, storytelling, japanese fiction, best japanese novelist, best japanese writer, fiction beast, writing, murakami style, murakami novels, murakami haruki style, murakami analaysis, kazuo ishiguro, ishiguro and murakami, killing commendatore, kafka on the shore, haruki murakami style of writing
Id: GzcOQ8v_rNg
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Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)
Published: Tue Feb 16 2021
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