About the Author; Further Drawings & Peer Feedback

Themes; after the workshop on mind-mapping out themes and ideas from single words, I decided to start mixing some of Murakami’s motifs together. I feel very much at the minute the work is becoming a little stagnant and repetitive. There are too many melancholy women that aren’t saying enough about Murakami or his work.

Further reading; I began reading some of Murakami's book 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman' for more inspiration; a collection of short stories to expand my familiarity with his work. While reading this I noticed that some of his stories were a little more upbeat and playful in their realms of surrealism. This gave me hope that I might be able to reflect his atmospheric writing without merely drawing sad women!

Further expansion of motifs; stepping away from melancholy women I decided to pull out some quotes from Murakami's work and illustrate them using a mixture of motifs from his books - I want to push past the obvious.  However I still feel these drawings might not be saying enough. I don’t want to create just another series of portraits of Murakami’s characters, or a mismatch of aspects of his works. His novels were very revolutionary in the way they disregarded traditional Japanese culture and literature and embraced and captured the 1960s era of rebellion and free love. I want to bring this into my work but am struggling a little in terms of how I do this.

Feedback

About the Author; Initial Task & Drawings

Digital doodles; as an extension of my summer work I tried out doing some monochrome digital drawing of some of the female characters in Murakami's book. While this isn't pushing boundaries particularly in terms of concept I wanted to try out a different media.

Thoughts; grayscale limitations made me think about weight of line and stylisation. Thought these images are nice, I don't feel this style would be appropriate in communicating the more mature and sophisticated atmosphere Murakami creates in his literature.

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Task; today’s task pushed me slightly out of my comfort zone in terms of how I would normally go about making work. The more abstract tasks of communicating through typography and abstract mark making wasn’t a way I would normally think about tackling a brief.

Experience; the subversion of colour task was an interesting concept, when drawing such melancholy subject matter the habit of going for stereo-typically ‘sad’ colours such as blue is a little cliche. Subverting this colour to pink actually gave the character a much more fragile and venerable aura – something possibly worth exploring.

About The Author; Summer Work

Research; quick web search for bio related information on Murakami as a person. Felt I could learn more// have a more personal experience if I read his works to really gauge how I felt about him and how I wanted that to be portrayed in my work.

Norwegian Wood; the novel that projected Murakami into the spotlight//kick started his career as an acclaimed author. What struck me about this piece was the way Murakami managed to ground the slightly surreal and romanticised in reality. The tragic melancholy apparent in the characters felt authentic though the situations often felt as though they were shown through rose tinted spectacles. Similar mood also present in The Wind up Bird chronicles; possible motif? 

Interests so far; The authenticity of his tone of voice// his mixture of the authentic and the surreal. Engaging stories and characters. Strong sense of atmosphere.

Possible problems; I have felt a slight worry that at this point, however, I’m merely repeating myself. Sad women are a motif through many of Murakami’s works and I don’t want my work to be made of just that; feeling very two dimensional and not very indepth//really saying anything about Murakami’s work other than ‘sad women in sad colours’. At the moment it all feels very obvious - something I want to be able to push past, though I know these are just initial drawings and it’s good to get these obvious ideas out of the way.

Future steps; push past the obvious; stop repeating sad women

Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer (Documentary & Notes)

Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer

NOTES

-Run from the 'Japanese condition'

-Mystic elements (talking cats)

-Very private man

-Music and girls common motifs in work

-"Life is what you make it" (What translator//biographer said Murakami's work was about)

-It was the 1960s during his transition into adulthood; the age of rebellion

-Spent all of 1967 in the library, enjoyed reading American literature rather than Japanese (James Joyce, Fitzgerald, Kafka)

-Autobiographical aspects to Norwegian Wood such as Toru's apartment building//halls and him working in a record store. Also said that Toru 'reflects his own sentiments'

-He has 'things he has deep inside that he wants to keep untouched by the outside world' see's them as 'assets he relies on for writing'; one of the reason's he keeps his life so personal, see's himself 'as an asset'

-Took out a loan, opened a club, listened to jazz all day, fell in love with jazz in 1964

-Used to play keyboard, said he wrote just as he played music

-The thought that he could write came to him while he was watching a baseball game; epiphany 

-"His readers were young people…the urban youth"

-A Wild Sheep Chase, again, grounded in locational truth from his own life

-Wrote more seriously after A Wild Sheep Chase

-Runs lots of marathons, lives a healthy lifestyle, stopped smoking "If he's in it for the long haul he has to do it right"

-Big on translating other works from English to Japanese such as The Great Gatsby 

-"Writing is unhealthy" - Murakami

- While writing The Wind Up Bird Chronicles he heard his hometown had been hit by an Earthquake that killed many people, two weeks later Tokyo train lines were attacked with poisonous gas bombs by a religious cult

-Before 1995 Japan had felt safe (Murakami 46 years old) but after that felt he had a 'responsibility as a writer' and 'wanted to do something for his people' 

-Came back to Japan after living in America

-Feels strongly about acknowledging crimes committed by the Japanese during the War in relation to experiments, massacres and attacks on the Chinese; learn from the past don't deny it

"Getting into things that are spiritual without the spiritual nonsense, very down to earth spirituality" (translator on Murakami's work)

-"I don't think much about religion. My quest is inside my self, it's not outside, I'm looking for something in my mind very sincerely; eagerly. But I don't think it's a relgious thing. Sometimes I don't know what I'm looking for but I know something is there and I want to find out what it is. But I don't know what it is until I've found it and that is the reason why I write stories. Stories are a maze, a labyrinth, so if I can't find a through that maze, if I can't find stories then I can't find anything at all." (Murakami) 

About the Author; Summer Research (25 Pieces of Information)

HARUKI MURAKAMI

5 QUOTES//SELECTED PIECES OF WRITING

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- If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

- No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories

- But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives

- The body is not the only target of rape. Violence does not always take a visible form, and not all wounds gush blood

- Don't you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know a soul

5 MOTIFS

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- Memories

- Isolation

- Birds

- Melancholic women

- Jazz music

5 CHARACTERS

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- Naoko

- Toru Okada

- Toru Watanabe

- Midori Kobayashi

- Reiko Ishida 

5 LOCATIONS

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- The meadow at the start of Norwegian Wood

- Watanabe's college

- Naoko's apartment

- Midori's bookshop

- Mountain sanatorium near Kyoto

5 PIECES OF INFORMATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR

-

- An avid fan of Jazz, his first job was at a record store, he owns more than 6000 music records. When asked where his favourite place in the world to travel to is, he said: "First would be Boston, Massachusetts, because it’s the most convenient and satisfying city for collecting secondhand jazz records." 

- When he's in writing mode for a novel, he gets up at 4am and works for five to six hours. In the afternoon, he will run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then read a bit and listen to some music. He goes to bed at 9pm. "I keep to this routine every day without variation." He says "The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerise myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity."

- He does four or five drafts of every novel, spending six months writing the first and seven or eight months rewriting

- His first work of non-fiction, Underground (1998), was a compendium of interviews with victims of the 1995 sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system

- Murakami was born in Kyoto, grew up in Kobe, and attended Waseda University in Tokyo. His parents were teachers who taught Japanese literature and talked about it all the time, so much so that Murakami said he hated the subject and became interested in Western literature

About the Author; Summer Research (3 Authors)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

When faced with the comprehensive list of authors to choose from with this brief, I decided to choose an author I knew well, one I was semi-familiar with, and one out of the blue. Throughout the course of my initial research I narrowed down my author of choice to Haruki Murakami; the author I previously didn't know. Before this choice was made however a quick look at each of these choices was necessary. 

DOUGLAS ADAMS

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Book Cover by Jonathan Burton for  The Folio Society

Douglas Adam's is an author I was semi-familiar with when starting this brief. I'd watched The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fondly with my brother when we were younger, and my dad owns one of the first editions of the book; what drew me to him as a potential focus for this project was the vast array of visual information at my disposal. Being very imaginative with the characters and locations featured in many of his books, I knew I would have a lot to draw upon but more importantly play with. As an author he would allow me to exaggerate and create quite freely. Through initial research it was also interesting to find out his was an advocate for environmentalism and conservation, something I think to be very notable. He was also a strong atheist, which I found very interesting and a little informing when juxtaposed next to the explorations of 'the question of life' in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. After Adam's passing, Biologist Richard Dawkins wrote a dedication to him in his book 'The God Delusion' stating "Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender."

EDGAR ALLEN POE

Edgar Allen Poe & Gris Grimly

The second author I chose to research was one who's work I was very fond of during my teenage years. What really got me into Edgar Allen Poe was an illustrated book of a few of his short stories by Gris Grimly. The fusion of Poe's melancholy and slightly bizarre writings with Grimly's oddly disturbed but welcoming illustrations really struck a cord with me. Since then I've read a few of Poe's tales and poems, relishing the morbid curiosity they seem to draw out of people. 

During research I was surprised at how truly important Poe was to the literary world. Whilst I knew his works were well known, I was previously unaware that he was often regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States, generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone. These facts, along with other pieces of information available about Poe's life, and death, ensured that not only the material that I would read by Poe, but his life and who he was as a person, would also be interesting throughout this project. Aligning the true Edgar Allen Poe against the usual misinterpreted version of who he was could prove as interesting subject matter as his literary works.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Book covers for Murakami's books by Noma Bar

The final author I chose to look into was Murakami. I wanted one author to look at with completely fresh eyes, so I asked my dad for a recommendation and Murakami was chosen. Known for his typically Western story telling, a lot of Japanese traditionalists discarded Murakami's work as not being truly 'Japanese literature'. Despite this however, his work was extremely popular, especially among young adults throughout the globe. As a result of this, and his success with critics, Murakami was thrown into the public eye after releasing his breakthrough book Norwegian Wood, something he far from relished. 

A lot of his books have reoccurring themes of isolation and loneliness, as well as being slightly surreal and melancholic. What really drew me to him as a writer however was this notion of mixing together the surreal and the realistic. What Murakami seemed to be able to do was capture extremely raw and honest human emotions in a world seen through a slightly nostalgic and rose tinted viewpoint. After reading Norwegian Wood what stayed with me was the way he was able to tell a story with perfect pace, uncensored authenticity, and describe genuine human sadness in a way that felt romanticized. But it wasn't, it wasn't hyperbolic and generic it was merely truthful, and there's a beauty in that I find is rarely captured well.