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For two decades, the idea of Haruki Murakami's books for millions of readers and some critics always seems somewhat unstable, a dilemma that is halfway between devotion and incomprehension. Is the Japanese novelist a minimalist writer, capable of creating moments of beauty that are a little vague but perhaps ephemeral and not entirely true? Or is he an author who gets to the deep essence of human experience with a few tools refined to the maximum? Is it an aestheticized and moderately exotic consumer product or is it someone capable of touching the soul of its readers, of moving them in an unforgettable way? Murakami (Fushimi-Ku, Japan, 1947) is the winner of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, awarded in Oviedo this morning. The recognition encourages reconsideration of his career, not only for its merits but for its ability to reflect the world that reads his books obsessively, in search of something unspeakable.

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Literature.

The death of the commander, I by Murakami: pieces of a puzzle that will have to fit together

  • Writing: LUIS ALEMANY Madrid

The death of the commander, I by Murakami: pieces of a puzzle that will have to fit together

Publishing sector.

When Murakami wasn't a blues

  • Writing: MATÍAS NÉSPOLO Barcelona

When Murakami wasn't a blues

First, a historical and sociological explanation: Murakami himself has narrated that his decision to write novels was a kind of epiphany that surprised him while watching a baseball game, well into adult life. The baseball thing is not an anecdote: the sport, an import of the winners of World War II that ignited in Japan, is a clue to understand Murakami, born in the postwar period and raised in aesthetic sympathy to the former enemies of the empire. When that baseball game, the writer was dedicated to rock and, above all, jazz, sold records, went out at night, was interested in African-American culture, translated literature into the English language... He was, according to his own account, a gangly and coiled but lonely boy, a young man who fit poorly both in the industrial reconstruction of Japan and in the tormented, theatrical and casticist culture of his time, that of Mishima and his followers.

So a first key to understanding Murakami is that of dialogue between Japan and the West. For many of his readers, the first lines with which they discovered his work were those of the opening of Tokyo Blues, in which a Japanese translator landed in Berlin and found the melody of Norwegian wood by the Beatles in the background music of the plane. And then, the song, perhaps the most evocative and simple of the repertoire of Lennon and McCartney, awakened his memories of a friendship and love fatally conditioned by mental illness and lost in adulthood.

References to Western popular culture like that abound in Murakami's books like flashes in cold, granite interiors. His characters listen to the Beatles and Italian opera records, play Uncle Vanya, drive Saabs, read Freud, are called Kafka and become obsessed with impressionist painting... They are adulterers, individualists, loners and suicides who challenge Japan's moral order. However, that dialogue with the West is not as simple as imitating a fan. In The Death of the Commander, for example, there was an enduring tension between traditional Japanese art and surrealist art and a desire to delve into his country's traditional culture, nature, and architecture.

In Murakami's books there is also a part of mystery, of magical realism that somehow connects with the historical literature of his country. Chronicle of the bird that winds up the world entered the world of dreams through an abandoned house. In 1Q84 a woman became pregnant because another character had had an erotic dream, so the scene seemed a Japanese transposition of the miracle of Mary's fertilization. But, in parallel, the story of 1Q84 dealt with the world of sects that tormented the Japanese in the 90s, almost with a journalistic and obviously urban approach.

Because Murakami is, essentially, a writer of cities, of lonely urbanites who flee through crowds and yearn to connect with someone. In After Dark, the composition was that of a collage: hotel managers by the hour, Chinese students in crisis, teenagers hypersexualized for fear of loneliness. Murakami's books of short stories, which perhaps best contain his essence, are full of characters like this, on the run, seemingly devastated inside but still determined to find something that makes life worthwhile. From one of those stories came out two years ago the film Drive my car, winner of the Oscar for best foreign language film of 2020. Again, a Beatles title.

Of Murakami there is also a rather pop legend: his fondness for running marathons and t-shirts, his elusive character, his environment as of metabolist architecture of the 70s, the queues of fans who exhaust millionaire editions at each release ... It is noise not entirely relevant: Murakami, in the end, deals with the mystery of artistic emotion, of having or not having, of feeling or not feeling.

  • Japan
  • literature
  • Princess of Asturias Awards
  • Articles Luis Alemany

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