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)