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Comments on Murakami Haruki

15 days ago

• Dariel777Angel says: Wind-Up Bird
  I have almost finished reading the wind up bird chronicles. Haruki is probably one of the best writers to explain, to phisically make the reader feel like he lives through those events. His stile is so pragmatic, yet with a slight trace of spice, which reminds me of early morning sakura blossom. Its as if you are half awake, or half asleep, very early in the morning and the morning breeze brings you this subtle feeling.
  This is the first time i have evr read a book, where the character is so real and nonexistant in the same time, that it is almost like he is not interested in the events. Even the tense moments are as if they are only a dream of a dream.
  Fascinating. Like in the early morning. You smell sakura, yet do not take the notice and go to sleep again.
  Or is it just me...?

Aug 12, 2007

• Ferdinand says: Murakami must read books
  Tags: murakami, books
  This list is from this weeks Time Magazine:
  
  By the Book: A Haruki Murakami Reader
  
  A Wild Sheep Chase, 1982
  An amateur detective on a quest for a special breed of sheep encounters a woman with strange ears and the Sheep Man. Part of a three-book series, Sheep Chase has been translated into about 17 different languages
  
  Hard boiled Wonderland and End of the World, 1985
  A sci-fi tale set in the Tokyo of the future amid a technology war. In alternating chapters, the unnamed protagonist, the sole survivor of an experiment to implant decoder chips in humans, fights to reunite his mind and shadow. Winner of the Junichiro Tanizaki award, the Japanese Pulitzer
  
  Norwegian Wood, 1987
  A runaway hit that sold in the millions globally, this book was especially popular in Asia. Two million copies were sold in Japan and 1 million in China; the book also spent 16 years on the best-seller list of Korea's top bookstores. Few writers have had such a huge pan-Asian following
  
  The Elephant Vanishes, 2001
  This collection of short stories, many packing the kookiness of Murakami's novels into less than 20 pages, was written over six years. Several stories in the book made their first appearances in magazines such as The New Yorker and Playboy. The title piece inspired a play that toured New York and London
  
  Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1994
  Critics regard this 600-page tome, penned over four years while Murakami was living in the U.S., as his best novel. It stars Murakami's signature jazz-listening loner, but is interwoven with the horrifying narrative of a soldier in World War II Manchuria — the author's first real foray into the dark realms of Japanese history
  
  Underground, 1997
  The 1995 Kobe earthquake and the sarin-gas attacks on Tokyo's subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult turned Murakami's thoughts back to Japan after almost seven years away. This non-fiction book was based on scores of interviews with former cult members and gas-attack survivors
  
  South of the Border, West of the Sun, 1992
  Like Bergman and Oe, Murakami never tires of his archetypes — in this case the lovelorn, middle-aged male loner. In this tale of lost innocence, a jazz-club owner approaching his 40s reunites with his elusive childhood sweetheart
  
  Kafka on the Shore, 2002
  One of Murakami's most complex novels, Kafka blends Western myth, Japanese magic and religious concerns — rarely touched upon in earlier books
  
  After Dark, 2004
  In this novella, Murakami's most recent book, the author drops the cool, first-person narrator of his previous work for a wide-angle look at a single night in Tokyo's neon-lit Shinjuku district
  
  
  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl e/0,9171,1651215,00.html

Feb 13, 2007

• krafty says: 1st of the series?
  Which of his books is the one before "Wild Sheep Chase"? I've read that one and "Dance Dance Dance", and my friend says there is one before them both in that story line, but I'm dumb and can't figure out which one it is or find it... please help!

Feb 11, 2007

• benji2 says: Finished: Kafka on the Shore
  It's actually taken me longer than I expected to finish "Kafka on the Shore", Murakami's latest novel. Perhaps because I have been reading three different books at the same time (including another Murakami - "Underground"). But I couldn't seem to quite get vacuumed into this book like I have with the others.
  
  Don't get me wrong, it's great stuff like all Murakami's books. And maybe that's what the niggling voices were saying to me as I picked up the book again after a week or two break. I think I now expect the bizarre and the unexplicable in a Murakami - the very act of the mundane becoming surreal has itself become a little mundane. I'm not sure whether Murakami would like this or not! hahaha. In fact, it seems to be the state of mind that characters in his novels come to in the second half of the story, when a return to mundane life would seem surreal after all the preceeding events.
  
  Well, have any of you looked out the website I posted? I'm really glad to see so many members in the group - please don't be afraid to post something ... anything!
  
  Here's an idea I got from the website. What's your favourite Murakami character, or favourite scene (or both, of course)? I'll start off ...
  
  I really loved the huge frog from one of the stories in "After the quake".
  
  Benji

Jan 25, 2007

• benji2 says: Check out the Official Murakami Haruki website
  http://www.randomhouse.com/features/mura kami/site.php?id=
  
  Heaps of stuff here on this very fancy site (glad all the money I've spent on books so far has paid for such high-tech wizardry!).

Jun 03, 2006

• benji2 says
  
  Murakami's characters seem to make no attempt to change the tide of life, or even to seek out an understanding of their almost surreal contexts. And yet, conclusions come when all is uncovered in the right order. Murakami's writing often conjures up the hollow feeling I get standing outside a convenience store on a neon-lit city night, watching people trickle past. The world has so many people, going so many different directions. The connections between us all are both magical and mundane.