by Joyce Lee
Being called the literary flagman of the 80’s, Murakami Haruki has led a great boom both in Japan and Taiwan. Asking Haruki fans why they like his works so much, we hear words like alienation, sense of loss, nihilistic, ma terialization, and so on. We can even get a very Haruki-style answer—-we don’t need any meaning after reading his novels. The most obvious characteristic of Haruki’s novels is the accumulation of nouns and the description of trifles. All of Haruki’s novels are written in the first person point of view. Most of the time we don’t know the name of the main character, but we always know what kind of clothes he wears, what kind of car he drives, and what kind of food he likes to eat. By means of piling up the brands of products, Haruki constructs a material world which does not feel unfamiliar. Living i n a modern city, all of us cannot escape from the flood of names of products. It is not difficult for us to accept a character who wears Levi’s jeans, drives a Volkswagen, and likes to cook spaghetti and drink beer. But how can this be true?How can a 49-year-old Japanese man’s work inspire the same feeling among young people living in Taiwan in 1998? Anyone who reads Haruki’s novels will find that there are many elements from the 60’s and 70’s. In his first novel Listen to the Song of Wind (聽風的歌), he repeatedly mentions the year 1968 and the death of President Kennedy. His second novel is called The Pinball Machine of 1973 (1973年的彈珠玩具). He always includes musicians’ names, like the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Miles Davis, and Don Maclean. Haruki’s novels are filled with nostalgia—-nostalgia for his youth, nostalgia for the 60’s and 70’s. Born in 1949, Haruki spent his youth in a wild and idealistic age. Similar to the situation in the United States and France, there were m any student movements in Japan in the 60’s and 70’s. It is not necessary to discuss whether or not Haruki gave himself to the student movement, but there is no doubt that this background had a great influence upon him. Even the nihilism revealed in his works can be traced back to the trend of thought at that time. The world which Haruki creates is a closed region. All the characters in his novels speak in the same tone. It seems that there are no others, only Haruki himself is murmuring. To read Haruki’s novels, we should adjus t ourselves to a particular mood. The wide acceptance of his self-centered works seems to reveal that we all need a place to escape to–a place where we would not feel unfamiliar, a place where we don’t have communication problems. This is a temporary re fusal of the outer world. Talking about Haruki seriously seems a little stupid because many people will say that the main pleasure of reading his novels is indulging in his senselessness. Well, that’s the point. Haruki will grimace at me if he knows that I analyze his works so seriously. Just buy some beer, put on some Ray Charles, the Moody Blues, or Bob Dylan, and it would be perfect to have the smell of spaghetti. Then you can start to read Murakami Haruki, and—-welcome to Haruki’s world ! a
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May 2024
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