4 posts tagged “haruki murakami”

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Haruki Murakami

Geoff Dyer writing about Haruki Murakami's new book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running in today's International Herald Tribune:

Aspects of his training involve such extremes of self-torture that even the most tolerant reader will find them questionable, for the unpalatable truth is that Murakami listens to Eric Clapton while running.

Readers of the IHT and the New York Times will ardently hope that we will be seeing a lot more of Dyer, and a lot less of Michiko Kakutani.  Enjoy the rest of Dyer's piece here.

—David

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

Haruki Murakami

Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you're no longer talking about reality.  You might think that—by following language and a logic that appears consistent—you're able to exclude that aspect of reality, but it will always be lying in wait for you, ready to take its revenge.

Haruki Murakami, in Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

—David

After Dark

Haruki Murakami

My review of Haruki Murakami's After Dark appeared in the Asahi Shimbun today.  Here's the concluding paragraph:

After Dark begins as a version of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks," updated and shifted to Tokyo. Just as Hopper's painting was a realistic picture of a 1940s American diner, so Murakami's Denny's, with its "unremarkable but adequate lighting; expressionless decor and dinnerware; floor plan designed to the last detail by management engineers; innocuous background music at low volume," is a realistic representation of the sort of diner at which 21st-century nighthawks roost. Hopper's picture is powerful because it hints at something beyond what it depicts. This hint, however, is only effective because of the precision with which Hopper has painted his four nighthawks and their nest. Likewise, it is the precision with which Murakami presents the world we know that compels us to follow him into less familiar realms, and it is there, as with Hopper, that we begin to understand what drives nighthawks such as Mari into the night.

See what lead up to that conclusion here.

—David

I'm in Pasadena (just outside Los Angeles) on vacation, and thus have been remiss in  blockheaded blogging.  I'll try to make some small amends with a post about some of the things I've noticed, enjoyed, or shook my head at here in Southern California.

• In Southern California, people who make more than X amount of dollars a year will tell you that there is no public transportation worthy of the name, and when you point out that there actually are buses, trains, and even a subway in Los Angeles they will tell you that these buses, trains, and subways are, for various reasons, impossible to use (my favorite reason: "I'd have to walk fifteen minutes to get to the bus stop!").  People who make less than X amount of dollars a year commute to and from their jobs daily on this non-existent and impossible public transportation.  (The odd tourist—me—uses it, too.)  The city seems to be doing everything it can to make public transportation more attractive—except one big thing.  Los Angeles needs to make the cars to which its citizens are so addicted less convenient.  Higher gas prices now!  No parking on any public street!  A toll, a la London, for anyone entering Los Angeles county, and a higher toll if they're driving an SUV or similar gas-guzzler!

UPDATE: The day after I wrote the above, this appeared in the LA Times.

• ANA currently offers the best economy class service from Narita (Japan) to Los Angeles.  The seats are no more roomy or comfortable than United or American (that is to say, they are not roomy or comfortable at all), but the food is better and there are enough flight attendants assigned to cattle class that one can expect a certain amount of service.
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  But maybe the reason the flight was less unpleasant than usual was that I had with me Haruki Murakami's newest, After Dark.  Those of you who know him only from his early work will want to have another look.  Beginning with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle he became an entirely different writer, masterful and mature.  In that After Dark takes place over the course of one Tokyo night it reminded me somewhat of Stephen Dixon's Fall and Rise, though that may be a false impression.   I read  Dixon's book years ago.
• I went to Pasadena's excellent Vroman's Books to hear William Gibson speak, but, alas, I had misread the schedule.  He had been there the week before.  Instead I was offered Frank Herbert's son talking about how he hoped to make money off of his father's books.  I didn't stay.
  
• Uttered, into her cell-phone, by a woman at the pool: "I had my whole body fixed.  It cost me $300."  She may have been talking about her car.
• People in Los Angeles complain about what they think of as humidity when the humidity level climbs into the high single digits.  They clearly can't begin to imagine what I'm talking about when I mention the eighty percent humidity levels not atypical in a Japanese summer.

And with that I'm off, into the hot, dry heat of another LA day.

—David