Terminei ontem um livro do Murakami chamado The Elephant Vanishes.Caminhando por NY no fim de semana passado, um amigo me disse que eu iria gostar de ler esse cara. Enquanto caminhávamos, pela Broadway ou sei lá, meu camarada me contava um pouco da biografia do Murakami. Escritor cultuado no Japão que viveu, até a década de 1980 - na verdade até os 70 -, de um bar de Jazz. Meu amigo me dizia que suas estórias eram urbanas e fantásticas a ponto do peregrino da garrafa de Johnnie Walker saltar da garrafa e começar a conversar com o protagonista da estória num bar. Nesse ambiente que mistura uisque, maços de Malboros red, Big Macs, e Japão, na mesma hora fomos os tres, pois contavamos com a ilustre presença de Gabriel, a uma livraria tratar de encontrar o tal Murakami.
Não me arrependi. São dezessete contos. E o mais interessante é que a primeira leitura, os contos parecem não ter um fim próprio, mas com a leitura dos seguintes as coisas vão se encaixando e um conto acaba se prolongando em outro. Evidentemente que tem um pouco de Paul Auster nessa estória, e das estórias que vão entrando noutras estórias. A primeira por exemplo, é a de um camarada desempregado que é interrompido por um telefonema de telemarketing no meio da manhã. No telefonema a voz feminina diz que precisa de apenas 10 minutos: "All I want is 10 minutes of your time. Ten minutes to come to an understanding." Ele então indaga assustado, "Come to an understanding?" No que voz diz enigmaticamente, "Of your feelings." O pior é que como advogado desempregado, vivendo de uma espécie de seguro-desemprego, o cara, com tempo de sobra, tinha como missão do dia buscar o gato de sua mulher perdido na vizinhança, para o qual ele não dá a minima pelota. Essas e outras estórias que mesclam cotidiano e absurdo dão um ar ligeiramente divertido, mas não cômico - o que é ótimo. Além disso, para complementar a caracterização desses ambientes e personagens disparatados, mas incomodamente reais, alguns nomes, como o do gato da primeira estória, Noburu Watanabe, - que também é o nome do cunhado do protagonista da primeira estória - reaparece na última estória que é exatamente sobre o desparecimento de um elefante e de seu criador de um zoológico. Watanabe é na verdade o zoólogo da seção de mamíferos e tratador do elefantes, que desaparece junto com o animal.
Sutilezas à parte, muito boa a capacidade desse cidadão em reinventar o cotidiano, e entre o primeiro e o último conto escondem-se umas preciosidades, as quais narra com uma capacidade coloquial fora do comum. Em Lederhosen, Murakami conta a estória de uma mulher que descobre que não gosta do marido e pede divórcio. A mulher parece com a esposa da primeira estória, mas não dá para dizer com certeza que sim - nem que não. Tem ainda o The little green monster, onde uma mulher encontra com um montro verde que tenta seduzi-la dentro de sua própria casa. No meio da estória, o leitor tem a impressão que o montro já não eh tão assustador assim - e até duvida-se se ele é um monstro mesmo ou um homem íntimo a ela.
Ja tenho outros dele na fila, mas por agora volto aos meus Irmãos Karamazov, uma leitura viciante e cheia de chaves para a própria biografia do autor.
Nota: Depois de caminharmos um dia inteiro, ficamos tambem olhando para aquele bando de desocupados no Central Park. Eu cheguei a conclusão empiric-teratológica: O Central Park é igual ao Campo de Santana ou a Quinta da Boa Vista, só que maior. A mesma gente esquisita, só que falando inglês. Os mesmos bichos escrotos sujos e urbanos, num cotias, noutro esquilos. Enfim
In the parlance of America's urban youth, to say something is "buttah" means that the thing referred to--a tennis shoe, for example--possesses inordinate cool. In Japan, however, butter and other milk products carry an altogether different connotation. Cows and goats are not abundant in Japan, and dairy products are usually associated with Western culture. Some Japanese even believe that Westerners smell milky, cheesy, and buttery. The Japanese word batakusai literally means "stinking of butter," and its modern-day, often negative, usage can be roughly translated as "stinking of Westernness." Batakusai is a term that has often been used in Japan to describe the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Unlike the fiction of most of Japan's revered literary figures, Murakami's does not focus on the distinctiveness of Japanese language and customs. In fact, his fiction is entirely devoid of the most obvious references to "Japaneseness." His protagonists are more likely to prefer spaghetti to ramen, salty dogs to sake, or pulp fiction to haiku. Moreover, they are usually solitary, withdrawn people who stand out in the group-conscious society of Japan. Perhaps even more damaging in the eyes of Murakami's detractors is the fact that of all the authors he has cited as his influences, most are Westerners: Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Raymond Chandler, Gay Talese, and Stephen King, among others. Nevertheless, Murakami considers himself a Japanese writer. "In a very different sense from [Yukio] Mishima, I am after something Japanese," Murakami told Jay McInerney for the New York Times Book Review (September 27, 1992). "What I wanted was first to depict Japanese society through that aspect of it that could just as well take place in New York or San Francisco. You might call it the Japanese nature that remains only after you have thrown out, one after another, all those parts that are altogether too 'Japanese.' That is what I really want to express." Though traditionally minded Japanese critics tend to rail at Murakami's fiction, younger people, not only in Japan but also in Taiwan and Hong Kong, devour his writings. His novels, which include A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, and Dance, Dance, Dance, have sold millions of copies in Japan alone, and their translations have attracted a sizable international following. (His most recent novel, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," is scheduled to be published in the United States in October 1997.) Many commentators consider him one of the most important 20th-century writers in Japan, comparable in influence, if not in style, to Junichiro Tanizaki, Yusanari Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima. "He devised a narrative style entirely new to Japan: a mixture of science fiction, hard-boiled cool, and metaphysics--Arthur C. Clarke tipping his hat to Nietzsche in Japanese," Ian Buruma wrote in the New Yorker (December 23, 1996). An only child, Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, in Kyoto, Japan, and was raised in Ashiya, a suburb of the commercial port city of Kobe. Both his parents taught Japanese literature at the high school level. Murakami did not adopt their reading preferences--a decision he has described as an act of rebellion; instead, he read mostly science fiction and hard-boiled detective novels by such American authors as Ed McBain, Mickey Spillane, and Raymond Chandler. Indeed, cloistered in his room, the solitary and withdrawn Murakami read Chandler's The Long Goodbye a dozen times. "I was impressed by the way that his protagonists live by themselves and are very independent. They're lonely but they're looking for a decent life," he told Jay McInerney. Like many Japanese teenagers, Murakami consumed not only American books but also American music and television shows. "American culture was so vibrant back then, and I was very influenced by its music, television shows, cars, clothes, everything," he told McInerney. "That doesn't mean that the Japanese worshiped America, it means that we just loved that culture. It was so shiny and bright that sometimes it seemed like a fantasy world." So intense were his images of American culture that he has described his fantasies of American life as a sort of "virtual reality." "I liked making up this reality inside myself," he told Ian Buruma. "It was easy for me, since I was an only child." In 1968, Murakami entered the prestigious Waseda University, in Tokyo, where he shed his regional accent and studied scriptwriting and Greek drama. At the time, Marxist and countercultural student movements rocked most Japanese universities. Murakami initially sympathized with the student protesters but later became disenchanted with the factionalism of the student groups and the careerism of many of the so-called activists, who, after graduating, took jobs in the corporate world. Alfred Birnbaum, one of Murakami's English translators, has speculated that Murakami's "hard-boiled" style stems partially from his disillusionment with fellow students who failed to live by their idealist politics. The turbulence of the era and Murakami's financial difficulties prolonged his studies until 1975, when he finally completed a thesis on "the journey motif" in American film and graduated from college. Unlike many other students, Murakami had no intention of pursuing a corporate career. Instead, he and his wife, Yoko Takahashi, a fellow Waseda student whom he married in 1971, opened their own business, the Peter Cat, in 1974. Located on the outskirts of Tokyo near a U.S. military base and operating out of a windowless underground den, the Peter Cat served as a cafe during the day and a jazz club at night. "We had to borrow a lot to open the jazz club; we had no money at all," Murakami told Peter McGill for the London Observer (October 6, 1991). "We hadn't a radio or TV, a watch or a clock--so we didn't even know what time it was! But we were happy in those days, young and independent, and no one ordered us to do anything." Murakami can pinpoint the exact moment when it dawned on him that he could become a writer: It was during an afternoon baseball game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp at Jingu Stadium in April 1978. He was sitting in the bleachers drinking beer when Dave Hilton, an American-born player, hit a double. According to Murakami, he suddenly and inexplicably realized that he could write a novel. "Yes, it is strange, isn't it?" Murakami remarked to Ian Buruma. "Baseball is an American game. Hilton was an American batter. The kind of revelation I experienced that day was not very Japanese. Revelation is not really a Japanese concept." Murakami's epiphany, though, may not be as odd as he makes it sound. He had first tried his hand at writing during his early years at Waseda and had given up because he felt he lacked the kinds of experiences a fiction writer requires. Through his work at his jazz club, he not only bolstered his already considerable knowledge of Western music but also gained exposure to the denizens of the night world. Moreover, he acquired "from hard physical work" what he described to Buruma as "moral backbone." So, for a few hours each night after closing the Peter Cat, Murakami would write. His nocturnal scribblings led to his first novel, Kaze no Uta o Kike, which was published in Japan in 1979 (and in English in 1987 as Hear the Wind Sing). In the novel, which Murakami has described as a "young-man, things-are-changing kind of novel" set during "the age of counterculture," the main character has an affair with a former schoolmate who has tracked him down by dedicating a Beach Boys song on the radio to him; throughout the relationship, he is plagued by the memory of a former girlfriend's suicide. Part anomic teenage rant, part philosophical tract, the novel introduced Japanese readers to Murakami's distinctive literary tics, one of which is his penchant for peppering his writing with Western references. In this first book, references are made to, for example, the rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival, the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The title of the novel is taken from a short story by Truman Capote. According to Buruma, Murakami started writing the book in English before switching to Japanese. "It took a very long time before I could somehow write a novel in Japanese," Murakami told Jay McInerney. "That is why I wasn't able to write a novel until I was 29. Because I had to create, all on my own, a new Japanese language for my novels. I couldn't just borrow an existing language. In that sense I think I'm an original." Traditionally minded critics did not appreciate Murakami's literary experimentations, but younger audiences found his inventive, stylish prose refreshing. In 1979, his debut novel won the Gunzo prize and sold an impressive 150,000 hardback copies. Murakami's sophomore effort, 1973-nen no Pinboru, which was published in Japan in 1980 and in English translation in 1985, under the title Pinball, 1973, added to his growing fame. In one passage, the narrator provides a clue to the meaning of the title: "On any given day, something claims our attention. Anything at all, inconsequential things. A rosebud, a misplaced hat, that sweater we liked as a child, an old Gene Pitney record. A parade of trivia with no place to go. Things that bump around in our consciousness for two or three days, then go back to wherever they came from . . . to darkness." As in his first novel, themes of alienation and self-absorption are prominent in the second. In 1981, thanks to the success of his first two books, Murakami was able to sell his jazz club and become a full-time writer. He considers his third novel, Hitsuji o Meguru Boken (1982), his first, because of the joy and ease he felt in writing it. The novel, for which he won the Noma Prize for new writers, impressed critics abroad when it appeared in English, in 1989, as A Wild Sheep Chase. "It was the first Japanese novel to attract widespread international attention since the 'golden age' of Kawabata, Tanizaki Junichiro, and Mishima in the 1950s and 1960s," Jay Rubin wrote in Japan Quarterly (October 1992). The novel is narrated by a young, world-weary advertising copywriter who is blackmailed by an agent of "the Boss," a sinister, right-wing politician, into searching for a supernatural sheep. "It begins as a detective novel, dips before long into screwball comedy, and, at its close--when the dead speak--becomes a tale of possession," a New Yorker (December 4, 1989) reviewer commented. "That such unruly, disjunctive elements mingle harmoniously within it is perhaps the signal feat in a highly accomplished piece of craftsmanship." Murakami has said that he himself does not know the meaning of the various strange elements in the novel--for instance, a woman with preternaturally beautiful ears, a chauffeur who talks to God, and a mind-possessing sheep--though Jay Rubin has offered a clue. "Fundamental to his work . . .is a tendency to contrast 'existence' and 'nonexistence' or 'being' and 'nonbeing,' which often results in the positing of two parallel worlds, one obviously fantastic and the other closer to recognizable reality . . .," Rubin wrote. "Murakami is talking about this world and our ultimately undefinable place in it, and for him the most congenial way to do that is to evoke the world of mermaids and unicorns and undersea volcanoes as it impinges upon a universe of McDonald's restaurants and advertising agencies." In 1985, Murakami published his fourth novel, Sekai no Owari to Hado-Boirudo Wandarando, which appeared six years later in English as The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The novel is actually two intertwined stories--"Hard-Boiled Wonderland" and "End of the World"--narrated by dual protagonists, both of whom are reminiscent of the young, aimless, and lonely narrator of A Wild Sheep Chase. One of them gets entangled in a high-tech information war in futuristic Tokyo and identifies himself as "boku" (the familiar "I" in Japanese) in the original text, while the other refers to himself as "watashi" (the formal "I" in Japanese) and struggles to remember how he became trapped in a walled town filled with mindless, shadowless people and dying unicorns. "Each narrative creates a different world, each echoing the other at first only in the tiniest of details, such as the odd presence in both of paper clips. The adventure of reading the novel is to discover how the two worlds are related," Jay Rubin wrote. The novel received the prestigious Tanizaki Prize in 1985. Murakami's fame prompted him and his wife to leave Japan in 1986. "Celebrity is a problem in Japan," he told Sarah Wright for Boston Magazine (January 1994). "Japanese do not have any agents. Too many people would call, ask for me. My wife would say, 'He is busy.' But that embarrasses male callers. I had to respond." Other aspects of the Japanese publishing world annoyed Murakami as well. "Editors represent the publishing companies, but they come to you as friends. If you say no to them, they lose face, and feel hurt. They think I'm arrogant and insensitive, and this makes life very hard for me in Japan," he explained to Buruma. "If you wish to please the editors, you will be liked and Japanese harmony will prevail, but your work will suffer. As a result, I'm an outcast in the Tokyo literary world." He and his wife sought refuge on a Greek island from 1986 to 1989, then lived briefly in Athens and Rome. Murakami's expatriate wanderings did not lessen his popularity in Japan: His fifth novel, Noruwei no Mori (1987), sold 2 million copies. Like many of his other works, the novel contains references to Western popular culture--the title itself, Norwegian Wood in English, is the title of a famous Beatles song. His most realistic work, the novel is set in Tokyo in the late 1960s and focuses on the romantic relationship between its two withdrawn protagonists--a student of Greek drama (as was Murakami) and a young woman suffering from depression. Murakami's sixth novel, Dansu-Dansu-Dansu (1988), which appeared in English translation in 1994 under the title Dance, Dance, Dance, also did well, selling over 1 million copies within six months of its publication. It is a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase and features the same cynical narrator of the earlier novel as well as another character, the Sheep Man, who materializes in the middle of the book and advises the narrator not to worry about the meaning of life but to dance. "You gotta dance. As long as the music plays. Don't even think why. Start to think, your feet stop. Dance so it all keeps spinning." The title of the novel comes from an old rock song recorded by the Dells. In 1991, Murakami moved to the United States, having accepted a position as a visiting fellow in East Asian studies at Princeton University, in New Jersey. "What I like about America is I'm really free here," he told the Los Angeles Times Magazine (December 8, 1991). "I'm free to do anything; I'm not a celebrity here. Nobody cares." During his year in the U.S., he discovered that the country that had inspired so many of his childhood "virtual reality" fantasies was not as exciting as he had imagined it would be. "Listening to Jim Morrison in the United States is not the same as listening to him in Japan," he told Buruma, and then added, "It's strange, but the farther I got away from Japan, the more I felt tied to it." It was thus at Princeton that Murakami began for the first time to take a serious interest in Japanese literature and history. There, he began researching his 1995 novel, Nejimaki Tori Kuronikuru (entitled "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" in English), which revolves around characters who are interconnected through a World War II event: the 1939 massacre of Japanese troops by Soviet soldiers in the Mongolian desert of Nomonhan. In 1994, Murakami visited the Nomonhan site, where spent cartridges and shards of helmets from the battle still can be found. "I felt as though I had experienced the battle myself," he told Ian Buruma. "I wondered what I would have done if I had been a Japanese living in 1939." He was interested in the story because he thought it might shed light on the Japanese psyche. The Japanese soldiers at Nomonhan had wrongly believed that they could win against superior forces simply because they had received the emperor's blessing and possessed a fanatical spirit. Some commentators have speculated that with this novel, Murakami has shifted the focus of his fiction to encompass political and social issues. "The most important thing is to face our history, and that means the history of the war," Murakami told Buruma. "People talk about the atomic bomb, but they don't want to talk about the massacres in China--I think I have a responsibility for those things," he told Harper's Bazaar (March 1993). After his year at Princeton, Murakami briefly lived in Boston before returning to Japan in 1995. The writer who once considered himself "rootless" now feels, after having traveled abroad, that he has a connection to Japan after all. "There is this feeling of togetherness, of sharing a landscape, or the imperial system, or, indeed, the love of listening to insects," he told Buruma. "This can be a dangerous, irrational force, but I feel part of it. I used to hate it, but now I want to find out what is important to me about Japan." The cult guru Shoko Asahara, who organized a gas attack on a Tokyo subway in March 1995, will be the subject of Murakami's next nonfiction book. In addition to novels, Murakami has written numerous short stories; these have been collected in eight Japanese volumes and one volume in English. Murakami has also translated several of his favorite authors into Japanese. He first translated F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1981, and since then he has translated works by Raymond Carver, Paul Theroux, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Tim O'Brien, among others. Translations allow Murakami not only to introduce some of his favorite writers to Japanese audiences but also to intimately explore other styles of writing. "You can read every detail, every page, every word," he told Publishers Weekly (September 20, 1991). "You can learn so much. It's my teacher." On most days, Murakami wakes up at five in the morning. After writing for a few hours, he likes to run and swim, his favorite sports because of their solitary nature. He spends his evenings with Yoko and goes to bed by nine. He has said that writing a novel is like a romance. "That is why I don't have affairs," he told Ian Buruma. "My books are my love affairs." He has cultivated few friendships, and since turning 20, he has become almost totally estranged from his parents. His wife is his closest companion and is one of the few people from whom he solicits advice on his writing. The couple have no children.
Suggested Reading: Christian Science Monitor p14 Mar. 30, 1989, with photo; Harper's Bazaar p128+ Mar. 1993, with photo; Japan Quarterly p490+ Oct. 1992; London Observer p59 Oct. 6, 1991, with photo; New York Times Book Review p1+ Sept. 27, 1992, with photo; New Yorker p60+ Dec. 23, 1996; Publishers Weekly p113+ Sept. 20, 1991, with photo; Washington Post C p1+ Dec. 25, 1989, with photoSelected Books: Kaze no Uta o Kike, 1979 (Hear the Wind Sing, 1987); 1973-nen no Pinboru, 1980 (Pinball, 1973, 1985); Hitsuji o Meguru Boken, 1982 (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1989); Sekai no Owari to Hado-Boirudo Wandarando, 1985 (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1991); Noruwei no Mori, 1987 (Norwegian Wood, 1989); Dansu, Dansu, Dansu, 1988 (Dance, Dance, Dance, 1994); Kokkyo no Minami, Taiyo no Nishi ("East of the Sun, West of the Moon"), 1992; Nejimaki Tori Kuronnikuru ("The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"), 1995
