Haruki Murakami has been one of my best-beloved writers ever since I found his work in the '90s. His short stories got to me before the novels, although the early novels were as interesting as the stories. That such literature is available to me in translation, and translation that is so obviously done with great care as any other work of art, is a delight.
South of the Border, West of the Sun was my first Murakami novel. The story of a man who longed for siblings, who didn't marry the first girl he loved, who settled for what his father-in-law wants, is a haunting story with soft jazz always playing in the background. There was the hint of otherworldliness, of magic realism, but the illusions were clearly meant to be illusions, and fleeting.
Then I found A Wild Sheep Chase. It's third in a Murakami's Trilogy of a Rat, but the only one I've read in that sequence. And was it ever wild. An unnamed young man helps produce ad agency newsletters. A photograph of wild sheep accidentally appears in one and he's off to chase down what and why. There is a Sheep Professor and a man named the Rat he encounters at various stops on the journey. I had no idea at the time what most of the novel meant but it was enchanting to read nonetheless, like an Alice in Wonderland for grownups willing to just go wherever the pages lead, the way Alice travels after going down the rabbit hole.
And then, the stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman only made my attachment to this postmodern, magic realist, jazz- and cat-loving author's works stronger. His stories feature lonely, isolated characters. But they are not pitiful. They are pensive. They look at the little things. They tell stories.
Then there are what I call the latest big, swoony books, Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84. I doubt they would have had much impact on me if I wasn't already a fangirl, much in the way that DeLillo's Underworld may not have had the big impact for readers who had not read any earlier works, especially White Noise and Libra. (Although really, there are few pieces of writing as beautiful and brilliant in modern literature as that set piece at the baseball game where The Shot Heard Round the World was hit by Bobby Thomson -- see below.)
Murakami's latest novel, The Faded [or Colorless] Tsukuru Tasaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage, sold a million copies a week in Japan when it was first published this summer; it will be translated into English and be published by Knopf next year. He also has recently published a collection of short stories by writers he admires, such as Alice Munro, that he translated into Japanese and included a story of his own: Samsa in Love.
In October, the new Nobel Laureate for Literature will be named and once again, Murakami's name is being mentioned. Other possibilities seem less likely to me for different reasons. Joyce Carol Oates. Seriously? And Alice Munro. While I adore her stories, I don't know that her body of work would be considered one of the ages. Then again, it's not like other Nobel winners have really earned the prize based on THAT criteria alone. And, while we're at it, how many literary experts work at Ladbrokes?
Another author whose translated works I've fell for at first read is Norwegian Per Petterson. Out Shooting Horses is a brilliant novel that brings together the joy of being young, the ability to look back at those youthful days with a clear eye, growing old not so much with grace but as with tenacity, and coming to grips with the sins of a past that included a world at war.
For someone who has admired most translated work I've read, I don't read enough. Bolano is still on my to-be-discovered shelf and I've got a lot of Javier Marias's works, including The Infatuations, to savor. Who else should this OCD/ADD of a reader glom onto? The Complete Review is a wonderful resource for translated fiction, but what I also trust the opinions of so many of you. What do you say?
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