I'm not sure when I first read Haruki Murakami, but he's remained for decades a valued friend on my bookshelf. And so recently in a Barnes & Noble, the display of his latest offering to the American market: Novelist As a Vocation, was a must-buy. A collection of essays about his 40+ years as a writer that began on a 1978 afternoon while watching a baseball game between the Yakult Swallows and the visiting Hiroshima Carp, Yakult's Dave Hilton's bat cracked a soaring hit to the outfield for a clean double. At that instant, Murakami was seized by the thought: I think I can write a novel. Until then, nothing in life suggested this, And so Murakami insists an alien, other power gave him license to write.
These essays have no secrets to a successful literary career, other than the verities of hard work and discipline paying off. Murakami shows a dedication to writing not unlike a monk meditating in the Zen temple at four o'clock every morning. And physical fitness counts: He doesn't accept less than running for an hour each day--far beyond other writers, especially those in their 70s. Such a Spartan regime won't inspire many.
If Murakami's fiction has always been comfortably infused with the Western pop culture he enjoyed in his pre-writer days, like listening to the Beatles on his transistor radio, or hard-boiled fiction paperbacks from the likes of American James M. Cain, it certainly kept Murakami from ever hewing to any traditional Japanese serious literature template. So I wasn't completely surprised that in Japan regard for his work is decidedly mixed, enough so he refused to be any "joiner" of the literary establishment.
Thus, it was only when Murakami-san left Japan to live and teach overseas (Tufts, Princeton) that he put together ingredients for international success. He would finally establish a North American/European presence, using NYC as a beachhead. His earlier work translating Raymond Carver into Japanese serendipitously led him to personally land Carver's agent/editor/publisher combination (Binky Urban/Gary Fisketjon/Knopf). The rest is history.
Throughout this collection of essays, I looked for a handle on why Murakami's, at times, surreal prose style is so difficult to put aside. The closest I came to an answer had to do with all his years running a jazz bar. "Jazz was my main inspiration." Some sense of rhythm and chords are what he brought to words and lines. That and, of course, improvisation, the mainstay of all jazz, makes for word "magic."
Novelist As a Vocation by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, Vintage International, New York, 210 pp. ISBN 978-1-101-97453-7.
Image credit: penguinerandomhouse.com
Read Charlie Dickinson's story collection The Cat at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable formats:
.mobi (Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
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