Strengths: Amazing atmosphere rendering ability and imagination, good dry humor, excellent detail presentation and state outline, keenness, and terrifying persistence.
Disadvantages: It is not as good as short stories when it comes to controlling long stories. In fact, many long stories are made up of short stories.
Being too popular is no hindrance to him. Jin Yong, Alexandre Dumas, "Dream of Red Mansions", and Shakespeare are so popular, does it hinder their greatness?
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Haruki Murakami is not very Japanese. When it comes to "Japanese style", Junichiro Taniki, Yasunari Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima all have richer flavors than him. Haruki Murakami is a very American novelist who is recognized as a translator. In terms of lifestyle, he ran a jazz bar while he was in college. He started writing novels at the age of 29, and also worked as a translator. He is a famous runner. Very American. He graduated from college very late, he must be 26 years old. In "Vampire in a Taxi", he once laughed at himself for "seven years in college." He had been playing in jazz bars during college. Later, when he married his wife, he took out a loan of 5 million yen to open a bar until he closed it at the age of 30. During that time, he lived a lot of all-nighters. This period of life has been described in "Hear the Wind Sing", "Pinball in 1973", and "The Adventures of Sheep Hunting". In "South of the Border and West of the Sun", the male protagonist simply opens a jazz bar.
Author: Zhang Jiawei
Link: /question/20529718/answer/15396246
Source: Zhihu
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Haruki Murakami admires American writers very much and has repeatedly mentioned Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler and Raymond Carver. In fact, in my opinion, these are also the three major objects he paid tribute to, the people who influenced his early style.
Haruki Murakami mentioned Fitzgerald more than once in his works. In "Hear the Wind Sing", when talking about his fictional "Hatfield" and his fighting posture, he listed Fitzgerald as a comparison. In "Norwegian Wood", Watanabe and Nagazawa have already listed Fitzgerald as a classic.
Many parts of Haruki Murakami's "Listen to the Wind Sing" can be seen as a tribute to Fitzgerald, especially leaving the jazz bar at the end and getting on the long bus to watch the lights on the coast go out. "Everything disappears once it's gone." "No one can capture" is very similar to the classic beach monologue at the end of "The Great Gatsby". In "Hear the Wind Sing", "Pinball 1973", and the first half of "The Adventures of Sheep", Haruki Murakami has been semi-repeating one of Fitzgerald's themes. Fitzgerald is saying goodbye to his South, and Haruki Murakami is saying goodbye to his seaside hometown (the filled-in sea in "Sheep Hunt", the "Spaceship" pinball machine), the "1920s" and past memories. .
Haruki Murakami wrote "Listen to the Wind Sing" in 1979 and "Pinball in 1973" in 1980. As mentioned above, we are still in a relatively young and fresh era, but we have already begun to have a vigilant feeling of being "sucked into the darkness by the past time". Short stories from the same period include "The Year of Spaghetti" and "Meeting a Perfect Girl on a Sunny Morning in April" in 1981. This approach of "personal feelings and memories" is very sophisticated.
The 1982 "The Last Lawn in the Afternoon" has already revealed some darkness, and the look at the aunt's daughter's room that does not exist is permeated with a sinister flavor. In "Barnburning" in 1983, he began to point out that "dark violence devours the unnoticed people in the world." It was also this year that "Sheep Hunting Adventures" was published. And if you think about it carefully, "Burning the Barn" can also remind you of the "disappeared" girls in "Dance Dance".
Then, he began to change from a contemplative school to an activist group - in my opinion, Xue's father in "Dance Dance", the one who first wrote youth novels and then became an activist, Taku Makimura, There's a bit of self-deprecation on his part.
Haruki Murakami said he likes Raymond Chandler. He said he read "The Long Goodbye" a dozen times. In 2006, I personally translated this book into Japanese.
Actually, comparing "Dance, Dance, Dance" and "The Long Goodbye", there is an obvious detail.
The classic black humor passage in "Dance Dance" in which the protagonist is taken for questioning by the two policemen "Fisherman" and "Literature" can be compared to the scene in "The Long Goodbye" when the two policemen broke in when Terry Lennox first disappeared. The Marlowe knock on the door - it's basically a homage.
In "Dance Dance" and "The Long Goodbye", Gotanda and Terry Lennox are equally wealthy, but equally tired of it. They like to come to the protagonist to drink and complain when they have nothing to do. It's somewhat similar.
Haruki Murakami himself said that after writing "Pinball in 1973", he had a choice. Then there is "The Adventures of Sheep". It seems to me that this is somewhat of a shift from Fitzgerald to Chandler. "Listen to the Wind Sings" is similar in style to "Pinball in 1973", fresh and melancholy, with a little bit of his later signature "emptiness on the other side" artistic conception, but mostly still against the passing of time. Clear and elegant. In "Sheep Hunt" and "Dance Dance", the protagonist takes action and begins to resemble a detective novel, and various Haruki Murakami-style imaginations, black humor and metaphors also appear. The protagonist in "Sheep Hunt" and "Dance Dance" is not a gas-efficient lamp. He has a cold sense of humor, wanders around, has confrontations and collisions, and has the flavor of Chandler's Marlowe. This feeling is especially obvious if you read the English translation of Haruki Murakami's novel and compare it with Chandler.
In fact, this is where Teacher Lin Shaohua’s translation failed to focus. At the beginning of this stage, Haruki Murakami's short paragraphs decreased, and the long paragraphs that stated monologues or described the surroundings increased. Therefore, it seems that although Lin Shaohua's translation is beautiful, it is a bit sticky, with a flexible and capable energy and the ability to tell cold jokes. Less.
Everyone knows that Haruki Murakami likes Carver. “Minimalism” is also said to be a bad topic. Think of something else.
An interesting point about Carver. Both "Cathedral" and "Did I Really Run So Many Miles" have a very interesting tendency. From reality, it gradually transitions to a near-void situation. This is especially true at the end of "Cathedral". The blind man slowly loses his sense of reality and becomes the guest. Everything enters his realm of void. In fact, at the end of Carver's article in memory of his father, everyone started saying "Raymond" and had a similar feeling.
(Cortázar’s short stories are similar, but he prefers to transition from one extreme to another rather than staying in the void)
Haruki Murakami likes to describe a mysterious The empty world on the other side is what he and Carver are most similar to.
There are often two women in Haruki Murakami’s novels. One is a gentle older man who is introverted, while the other is a lively young man who is often chatty. For example:
"Norwegian Wood": Depressed Naoko, spring deer-like Midoriko.
"Dance Dance": The demure Yumiyoshi, the psychic and magical Yuki.
"The End of the World and Grim Wonderland": A 29-year-old girl with a big stomach in the library and a 17-year-old fat girl in pink.
"The Journey of Strange Birds": The missing wife, the nagging Kasahara MAY.
And so on.
The former basically represents the past era, deceased people, and is connected to darkness (for example, Yumikichi is connected to the sheep man, and the missing wife is connected to her terrible brothers, Naoko and Kizuki), which is The other side of darkness. The latter relatively represents the sunny world of life.
So I have an inference. In "Pinball 1973", the twin girls basically represent the lively young and chatty girl, while the gentle, older and introverted girl is the pinball machine. In that story, the pinball machine basically plays a role in connecting the youth in the early 1970s. Finally, when the protagonist sees and talks to the pinball machine, the real heart of the novel emerges.
When facing these two girls, the protagonist usually sleeps with the gentle, older and introverted one instead of the latter one - although there are several times when he and Midoriko are on the verge of it. In general, Haruki Murakami seems to want to use "sleeping with women from the past" to complete the "connection with the past."
So, in "South of the Border, West of the Sun", the protagonist finally slept with Shimamoto. In "Kafka on the Shore", Tamura Kafka basically made a semi-incestuous thought impulse.
In his novels, the relationship between women and male protagonists is divided into two categories. In front of a mature heroine, the male protagonist appears to be cute and unreliable (when facing Yumikichi in "Sleep" and "Dance"); in front of a lively little girl, the male protagonist appears to be unresponsive ("Dance" When facing snow inside). This is a good way for him to create baggage: in the relationship between two people, one person is always very confident and moves forward without hesitation; the other is hesitant and hesitant. The most typical one is "Attack on the Bakery Again".
Another tendency:
In his novels, the people who actually participate in the plot are basically smarter than him. The girls who answered the conversation were all smarter than him, so there is no need to mention them again. And he is good at describing "scary realistic villains" and describing their dark charm. For example, the secretary in "The Adventures of Sheep", such as the little man in "At World's End and Grim Wonderland", such as Taku Makimura in "Double Dance", such as Ushikawa in "The Journey of Strange Birds". Their style generally has this kind of subtext:
"Hey, hey, we are all just living together, we are all adults, why bother beating around the bush. I don't want to be deliberately hypocritical, but that's it. It’s better to make things clear directly!”
Most of his novels can actually be summed up as a similar story:
An “anachronistic”, old-fashioned, and nostalgic story. A protagonist who looks at the beach scenery of his hometown and old friends in his early years, does not like the cold realism of big cities, has an independent personality, and loves to play with cold humor
VS
A dark, realistic protagonist , cunning, huge, time-devouring, with the shadow of death, reclamation of the sea to eat up all the good old things, capitalistic, violent, big guys' hide-and-seek game.
(The passing time and shadow of war in "Listen to the Sing of the Wind", the empty time and the new villa area in "Pinball", the sheep in "Looking for Sheep", the implementation in "Dance Dance" There is always the shadow of death, the shadow of Wataya Noboru in "Birds" and the skinned Boris behind him, the darkness that forcibly makes Nakata stupid and always invades his body in "Kafka on the Shore", he is all such a "big guy" ")
Further conjecture:
The relationship between Haruki Murakami and his father, as we all know, is not very good. The father figures in his novels often appear utilitarian, worldly, huge, dark, and war-related. Haruki Murakami has a much better attitude towards women, especially older women, than towards men. In "Kafka on the Shore", Kafka Tamura indirectly kills his father. I think this can be used as another metaphor for him: he is very resistant to conventional, authoritarian patriarchy-the "big guy".
In my opinion, the smartest thing about Haruki Murakami:
He is good at dialogue between one or two people and very good at describing the atmosphere, so he describes "the transition of the normal world" "To the Darkness of the World Beyond" is very free-spirited. So no matter how long his chapters are, there are actually very few conversations between more than three people. This is also the reason why his protagonist has to move around in the later period: the protagonist is a book brave and has to connect everything. Moreover, he is very good at using metaphors. What his metaphor requires is not precision, but a strong sense of imagery. Therefore, his novels have a very detailed and bright lens feel, "like the endless hunger seen in the Sinai Peninsula from the air", "as quiet as sinking at the bottom of a lake", etc. In addition, while he keeps saying that he is ordinary, he also makes malicious and cute comments (this is also a point that Teacher Lin Shaohua’s translation is not very good). It is easy for people to think:
This person who lives alone has occasional problems. A little sad but generally dry and humorous, a guy who is nostalgic for beauty and resists step-by-step society, has an aversion to politics, war and huge machines, occasionally acts cute and playful with symbols, and has a wild imagination, playing hide and seek with a huge, dull and dark opponent. In longer novels, he is often depressed by his opponents; but in some very short stories, the opponents are not scary enough, and it is harmless to toss each other - so, in his very short stories, such as "Midnight Spider Monkey" Those are particularly joyful.