Anyway, Murakami just really hits the spot for me! I think that my only complaint is that most of this main characters are male and many of his female characters are too aloof. I especially like what he has to say about writing. This quotation was taken from Murakami's semi-autobiographical book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:
"Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high. Most people, though, only see the surface reality of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study. If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems.
The whole process—sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you. Everybody uses their mind when they think. But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being, and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion."
After having read most of Murakami's works, I am now on a quest to find other authors that are similar in style to Murakami. Some the authors I have so discovered so far include Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), David Mitchell (number9dream), and Salvador Plascencia (People of Paper).
I have searched an assortment of websites for recommendations of authors that are similar to Haruki Murakami, and I have complied the following list. Has anyone read any of these authors, and if so, are they any good: Vikram Chandra, Witold Gombrowicz, Etgar Keret, Erlend Loe, Brian O'Nolan, Anneli Rufus, Italo Svevo, and Carlos Ruiz Zafrón. What other authors are similar to Haruki Murakami?
If you are interested in other Japanese authors, I definitely recommend the following, all of which I have read, but many of which are very different from Murakami: Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Rashomon), Natsuo Kirino (Real World), Yukio Mishima (The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea), Ryu Murakami (In the Miso Soup), Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (Naomi), and Banana Yoshimoto (Goodbye Tsugumi). Kobo Abe (The Kangaroo Notebook) and Natsume Soseki (I Am a Cat) are currently on my reading list.
Update (October 18, 2010): Here are some more Japanese authors that are often recommended if you like Japanese literature or Murakami. Unfortunately, I have not had the chance to read any of them yet: Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Le Me Go), Hitomi Kanehara (Snakes and Earrings), Yoko Ogawa (Disintegration of the Butterfly), Murasaki Shikibu (The Tale of Genji) , Koushun Takami (Battle Royale), Amy Yamada (Trash), and Taichi Yamada (In Search for a Distant Voice).
Update (December 26, 2010): I have added another author to my authors-that-are-similar-to-Murakami list: China Miéville. Although I have not read anything by him yet, he was highly recommended by Wet Asphalt for readers who like Murakami.
I LOVE MURAKAMI!!!
ReplyDeleteI like alot of his female characters, I love how alluring and beautiful they are in a tragic way often. Ok mostly in Norwegian Wood and A Wild Sheep Chase, etc. Have you read many of his books? I'm three short of having read his translated work. Looking to pick up a Japanese copy of Pinball and the other untranslated ones.
I've intended to read Garcia Marquez for some time now (The General and his Labyrinth) I've also read Ryu Murakami and I lovelovelove Yoshimoto! I started I am a Cat aswell.
I like this post! Good recommendations.
@Hiroko: I love Murakami too! I have read most of his works. I think I'm missing South of the Border West of the Sun and The Elephant Vanishes. I also haven't read After the Quake or Underground. I can't wait until 1Q84 comes out in English! Kafka on the Shore and Sputnik Sweetheart are definitely my favorites, but I also love Norwegian Wood, and I really want to see the film version.
ReplyDeleteI like a lot of his female characters, I love how alluring and beautiful they are in a tragic way often. I definitely agree that I like the tragic allure of Murakami's females, but I guess sometimes I wish he would write a novel with a female who plays more of the leading role rather than his usual male character.
It would definitely be awesome if you could find a Japanese version of his untranslated works (although I can't say that I know Japanese well enough to even attempt to read something of that level, since I really only know hiragana and some basic vocabulary so far)!
Have you read any other Japanese authors? I like Banana Yoshimoto a lot too; I even have a book of essays about women in Japanese society and media, and it has an essay about Yoshimoto. I really enjoy Japanese contemporary literature lately. It presents such a different perspective, different from a lot of Western literature.
Oh you have to read South of the Border West of the Sun! It's one of my favourites (I say this about a lot of his works though when I start talking about them). I'm also missing The Elephant Vanishes, After the Quake and Underground. And also Hard Boiled at The End of Wonderland (I think is the title). So excited for his new book too :D
ReplyDeleteSputnik Sweetheart is one of my favourites too, along with Dance Dance Dance and of course Norwegian Wood, which is coming out soon if I am not mistaken :D!!!
I see what you mean, now you mentioned it I realized they are all male lead characters. I guess he is one of those authors who sticks to what he knows, sometimes writing from a female perspective as a male doesn't always work although I know an author who does it well (Wally Lamb).
Like you I am not that fluent yet but it is an aim of mine to read a book in Japanese (I only have hiragana, katakana and a few hundred kanji down, I still struggle a lot).
I've only read the ones I said before, Ryu Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto and some Nastume Soseki. I have some Natsuo Kirino which I intend to pick up soon and Hitomi Kanehara and Amy Yamada (Daul Kim read some of her so I took an interest).
Sounds awesome, you should post an extract if you don't mind, I'd quite like to have a read. I agree with you on how it offers a different perspective, even they way it is written without 100% entirely focusing on a storyline, more so on description sometimes and specific characters and things like that (finding it difficult to explain what I mean sorry!). Yoshimoto is definitely one of my favourites, I loved Amrita (and of course all of her other books).
Interesting fact; did you know Soseki used to be on one of the Japanese notes, I thought this was interesting but he's not on it anymore.
@Hiroko: Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is really interesting, very different from most of Murakami's other novels. You should definitely read it! I would also put Norwegian Wood in a class of its own.
ReplyDeleteDo you study Japanese on your own? What kinds of resources do you use? Any specific books or websites? Are you a language major of some kind, because you seem to have so many different languages on your blog (French, Portuguese, and Japanese)?
I haven't heard of Hitomi Kanehara and Amy Yamada, so I will definitely have to check them out. Any new authors, particularly Japanese ones right now, are definitely welcome.
I will see about posting an excerpt of the essay later. I actually found the book at the library for 25 cents. It's titled Women, Media, and Consumptions in Japan by Lise Skov and Brian Moeran. The essay about Yoshimoto is titled "Yoshimoto Banana's Kitchen, or the cultural logic of Japanese consumerism" by John Whittier Treat. The other essays in the book are really interesting too.
I will make sure to pick it up next then! Definitely, although I think Norwegian Wood is also a good choice for a Murakami book to be made into a film as it would be pretty hard to convey his other works well (because of his fantasy-realism style). After Dark would make a nice short film I think.
ReplyDeleteI suppose i study on my own, I mean, I have family who live in Japan and we are Japanese so they speak it fluently, some of them it's easiest to communicate with in Japanese such as my older aunts and newer cousins (because they were raised there, etc). So in this sense I practice with my family when I can, but mostly solo learning. For resources I use some books my cousins gave to me which they use to learn English, so I use it in reverse and my mother has some books she used to use which I now have. My mother's friend (also Japanese) sends me some books too and some children's books for when you start to learn kanji as it is obviously easier to read (I recommend this). I also have a Japanese dictionary which is good for picking up more words because self teaching books can only help you so much with structure and things. I would also recommend the Japanese language one in the series of the Teach Yourself books (actual brand name), the kanji one is really good! More than anything the best thing is to have someone to practice with, it makes all the difference.
Nope, I am a maths major only, my family are Brazilian-Japanese which is why I speak those languages and I find languages beautiful so I will often try to at least get basics of some. In school we were made to learn French for three years so I guess my interest sort of comes from there too (although I didn't continue it in school).
Thanks for the information, I will try and check those out. I always find professional interpretations so... unexpected sometimes. I once had to do research for Japanese horror films and found so much of it is based from old kabuki plays.
Sorry for the massively long comment!
@Hiroko: Your background is so interesting! I wish I could fluently speak more languages besides English. I took French for five years in school, but I really can't speak it anymore. I wish I would have learned German from my grandparents when I had the chance. Languages fascinate me, but I admit that sometimes I don't have the patience to really sit down and really study them.
ReplyDeleteAnd no worries about the long comments. I've enjoyed our conversation, and comments encourage me to write more blog posts in the future.
@Hiroko: So, here is a short excerpt from the article about Yoshimoto's writing (pages 276 to 277).
ReplyDelete"It has recently been observed that most critics in Japan have either ignored Yoshimoto Banana or treated her works with a scarcely concealed contempt. The reason for this may be, it is suggested, that critics cannot discern anything in Banana's work to discuss, i.e. that they are functionally 'illiterate' when it comes to reading her (Tsuge 1994: 82-83). In hindsight, what helped to propel Kitchen to the ranks of award-winning fiction was, no doubt, its author's bankable parentage. Banana's father, Yoshimoto Takaaki, is himself a prominent and controversial poet and intellectual whose ruminations on that same Japanese 'mass culture' that his daughter may now epitomize were standard reading for intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. He still commands a large readership, although is theories are notoriously difficult to master. As Ian Buruma (1993:29) quipped of Takaaki's daughter when he reviewed Kitchen, it is 'as though there were a young German novelist called Banana Habermas'.
Increasingly, both Banana and Takaaki have raised the ire of critics alarmed by Japan's consumer culture and worried about the prospect of ever challenging its drive to commodify and reify. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (1989b:xvi) dismiss Takaai's suggestion that consumption might in fact work to undermine capitalism as an 'absurdist conviction'; and Miyoshi (1991a:236; 1991b:38) declares Banana's writings--which he admits 'sell by the millions'--as 'baby talk, uninterrupted by humor, emotion, idea, not to say irony or intelligence'. What incites such censure is surely the nervous fear that the potential of intellectual discourse on one hand, and modernism on the other, to conceptualize and critique the ways with live is now nearly impossible under the relentless onslaught of the commodity, and under the terms of the postmodern 'cultural logic' it has inspired."