Are you a fan of Douglas Adams, Philip Dick or Kurt Vonnegut? A devotee of fantasy novels but bored with the hideously archaic notion of good battling evil? Want a tour of 1990's Japan minus the stilted tone of a travel brochure? Interested in getting a humorous, totally unpretentious, slightly schizoid look at the phenomenal headache of modern life in general?
Then it may be well worth your while to hear the popular, internationally acclaimed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami speak at 2 p.m. today in the Wren Room of Sanborn House.
Murakami's work has met with both negative criticism and acclaim in his native Japan. While the younger generation has embraced him as one of their own, stuffier voices in the Japanese literary scene have decried his work with its mix of East-West sensibility as somehow "not the work of a truly Japanese writer,"according to a 1992 interview in the New York Times Book Review.
Blase and bewildered in turns, Murakami's narrators are typically thoughtful, earnest loners with slightly eccentric girlfriends. At times a reader can almost come to resent how well Murakami milks the common aches and joys of the modern young adult for his novels. His style is often delightfully unorthodox, but there is an underlying simplicity that gives it a poignancy a mere exercise in technique could never hold.
Time flows in a variety of directions, different dimensions fade in and out of each other and, oddly, on-the-mark references to Franz Kafka, Winnie-the-Pooh, Boy George, and Clint Eastwood can all fly by in 10 pages of his highly readable prose.
Murakami speaks of trying to use the Japanese language innovatively. Many feel that his work breaks through a certain conceit of cultural isolation and inaccessibility by ignoring constraints of nationality.
The words of this 45-year-old author gently turn increasingly fragile traditional worlds upside down and inside out.
Both of Murakami's parents were teachers of Japanese literature. Haruki, their only child, was born in traditional Kyoto but raised in the perhaps less orthodox city of Kobe. He failed to be sufficiently enthralled by the works of his venerated literary predecessors and preferred American fiction.
Although from his teens Murakami immersed himself in popular American culture, he points out that he loved, rather than worshipped, its icons.
As a student at Waseda University Murakami studied Greek drama. After graduating, he managed his own jazz club in Tokyo and began writing his first short published pieces at home at the kitchen table in the early morning hours.
In 1979, at the age of 29, Murakami published his first novel, "Hear the Wind Sing." With the success of his third novel, "A Wild Sheep Chase" in 1982, Murakami began to write full time. In 1985 "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" won the prestigious Tanizaki Prize.
Both volumes of Murakami's novel "Norwegian Wood" sold more than two million copies in 1987. His work has earned world-wide recognition and has been translated into more than 14 languages.
Initially attracted to Princeton University through his interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald, Murakami studied as a fellow there from 1991 to 1992.
Since coming to the United States, Murakami has since been profiled in a number of American periodicals, including Esquire and Publisher's Weekly. His stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. Murakami and his wife, Yoko Takahashi, now live in Cambridge, Mass.
Murakami will give a short talk and answer questions about his work. His appearance was sponsored by the Asian studies department and the Dartmouth Japan Society.
Works by Murakami available in English include "Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World," his collections of short stories, "The Elephant Vanishes" and "A Wild Sheep Chase" and its companion book, his most recent, "Dance, Dance, Dance." Copies of these works are currently available at The Dartmouth Bookstore.
