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Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became a Novelist
- curiousjorge 11y agoI confused him with Ryū Murakami, another novelist but very different style.
- ekianjo 11y agoRyu Murakami is the better one of the two. Haruki s books make it easy to fall asleep.
- curiousjorge 11y agointeresting you say that because I found Ryu unbearably boring and bland. Maybe it was poor english translation but I couldn't make it past the first hundred pages of Almost Transparent Blue.
- ekianjo 11y agoI haven't read all of Ryu's novels so I cannot comment on all of his work. I have tried to read several of Murakami's novels and stopped half way because I found it way too boring. I guess it's just not for me. I can't fathom why he is so popular, honestly.
- waspleg 11y agoThis is an interesting read. Thanks for sharing it.
- Shaniqua 11y agoIt reads like Chekhov's short stories: kind of dreamy and full of epiphanies.
- everly 11y agoIf you've not read any of Murakami's fiction and are interested, check out "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World". I think most HN readers would enjoy it.
- evjan 11y agoI haven't read that particular one, but probably have it in a bookshelf somewhere. My wife is a big Murakami fan and I've read almost all of them. I will make that the next one on my fiction reading list, thanks! I particularly enjoyed A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, whereas my wife loves Kafka on the Shore (which I didn't like). Funny that...
- evjan 11y agoAlso, I finished 1Q84 recently. It took me 3 years, mainly because it was pretty dull and I read other stuff at the same time.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Steko 11y agoThat's my favorite for sure, Wild Sheep Chase and short stories would be my next reccomendation.
- adslcx 11y agoThat's also my favorite
- puzzlingcaptcha 11y agoNewYorker also has a bunch of enjoyable shorts available: http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/haruki-murakami http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/haruki-murakami
- jordigh 11y agoIt took me close to three years to finish it. I would get distracted, put it down, and pick it up again much later, months later. The surrealness of the story reminds me a lot of other Japanese media that I never really fully understand. I chalked it up to the usual "the Japanese are truly mad" maxim, but after finishing the book, I suppose my opinion changed a little. The book is almost exclusively inspired by Western stories, music, and tropes. It has shades of Alice in Wonderland, cyberpunk, casual sexual themes, jazz and rock and roll. What makes the book look so foreign to me is that those stories are getting retold all mish-mashed together in a dream-like state with a dash of Japanese tropes. In the end I enjoyed it, but I don't think I really understood it, and I don't think I can explain why I enjoyed it. Can anyone explain it to me?
- evjan 11y agoThis epiphany he writes about sounds almost religious in nature. Did he really not consider writing before that? Does his memory fail him, is this a memory construct that makes for a good story but doesn’t hint at what really happened? I’ve never experienced anything like this myself. I often tell people, when asked about why I do what I do, that I knew I wanted to be a software developer at the age of 10. But it wasn’t a sudden realisation. It came to me after getting an Amiga 500, playing games and then realising I could make my own games. I vividly remember a summer trip to my aunt’s place in Norway where I brought a book on BASIC and devoured a tutorial on how to make a hotel booking system. I was utterly enthralled and thought “maybe one day I can make hotel booking systems for a living”. From then on there was little doubt I would do this. Except of course when I turned 13 and got into playing rock music on my guitar. I spent the next 7 years feeling lost, because I really wanted to be a musician but the career opportunities seemed unfeasible. It wasn’t until after a brief stint as a data entry clerk in the UK that I came to the conclusion that I needed to get my shit together and go to uni. So I studied Computer Science and here I am at the ripe age of 35 with 10 years of software development experience, thinking I always knew I wanted to do this. But I didn’t, and writing this made me realise that.
- antome 11y agoQuite right. As with the "Draw the rest of the owl" idiom, it often looks like people just "realise" what they want to do, then suddenly become that thing. Whereas anyone with remotely complex thoughts and dreams, will generally be taking plenty of steps and introspecting along the way.
- jasim 11y agoIt seems that the magical realism that make his work potent also runs through his self-narrative. As is always the case in honest fiction, the line between the words and the wordsmith is quite blurry.
- coldtea 11y ago>This epiphany he writes about sounds almost religious in nature. Did he really not consider writing before that? Does his memory fail him, is this a memory construct that makes for a good story but doesn’t hint at what really happened? I’ve never experienced anything like this myself. Depends on the person. Life-changing decisions do come like that to some people (usually stuff I think about for months or years I never go anywhere with, whereas decisions I take in the moment, I do carry through). >Except of course when I turned 13 and got into playing rock music on my guitar. I spent the next 7 years feeling lost, because I really wanted to be a musician but the career opportunities seemed unfeasible. It wasn’t until after a brief stint as a data entry clerk in the UK that I came to the conclusion that I needed to get my shit together and go to uni. Coincidentally Elvis Costello took the inverse path: working as a data entry clerk he decided he wouldn't take it and followed a career in rock. So, perhaps people who went to do those more unconventional things have more unconventional "deciding moments"?
- howlingfantods 11y agoAmong my group of friends, I've found that everyone's favorite Murakami book is always the first or second they read. After you read a couple, they all start sounding the same. Another angsty young man searches for a girl with serious emotional issues, and there's some metaphor heavy dream sequences and talking animals along the way. I haven't read his recent books but I've read five books of his and it was really tiresome, repetitive reading after book 2-3.
- evjan 11y agoThat's a very astute observation. I read Norwegian Wood first, but that is so different from most his other works and I didn't love it. I don't remember which one I read after that, but I got hooked around the 2nd or the 3rd. Common themes: a guy, living on his own (or with an often absent girlfriend), cooking simple dishes while drinking beer after working out. He has an ear fetish. There is a cat somewhere. Some magic realism and lots metaphors.
- cb18 11y agoCommon themes: a guy, living on his own (or with an often absent girlfriend), cooking simple dishes while drinking beer after working out. He has an ear fetish. There is a cat somewhere. Some magic realism and lots metaphors. Conspicuous absence of bar/nighclubs, jazz, records, from that list.
- oska 11y agoSmall anecdote: I was living in Taiwan in 1999 and found an English translation of Pinball, 1973 in a bookshop there. It was a Kodansha imprint, for English learners I think. Anyway, I'd already read a number of Murakami books by that time (Wild Sheep Chase, Dance, Dance, Dance and Wind-up Bird Chronicle), and enjoyed them so I snapped it up. It was an ok read but far from his best (which for me, still remains Wind-up Bird Chronicle). Later, I researched that Kodansha edition on the net and realised that it had never really been made available in English speaking countries and was fairly rare. So I put it up for sale on eBay, probably in 2000 or 2001. Thought it might attract a bit of interest but was pleasantly surprised when it attracted a lot of interest and eventually sold for something like $300. Can't remember the exact final bid but it was around that. Was happy to sell it for that and still happy now. I doubt it's appreciated in value since then but I could be wrong. Anyway, it appears from this article that Pinball, 1973 and Hear the wind sing are now finally being published in a generally distributed edition. I'm a little bit surprised because it was my understanding that Murakami thought they were early, weaker works and wasn't particularly keen for them to get new attention.
- minikomi 11y agoOh wow I think I have this! It has a glossary in the back to see what Japanese words the English came from. I really liked that idea. Also, Pinball is probably my favorite work of his because all the pieces which appear in later books - cooking, whiskey, the rat, nonplussed antagonist - appear but the book reads like a weird kind of sketch rather than a fully filled in painting.
- evjan 11y agoI wonder when somebody will put together a book called Murakami's Kitchen - The Collected Recipes From All His Books
- sacrilicious 11y agoI've read this story before, and often think about how if people don't have examples in life these 'epiphanies' are hard to come by. Non-fictional heroes may get more attention with the access to knowledge we have nowadays, but there's still the problem of focusing in and having the possibility made real in our own minds. My story: - The pretty big theater I worked for had a crackerjack unix head running a windows/exchange environment like it was no big thing, all from an iBookG3. I was in the shower, at some point in the late fall. and I thought to myself 'I'd like to have a job/get paid to "fix computers"'. I sent away for Apple's Tech Training, someone's husband was starting a consulting company, and 10 years later... well, I like what I do and am lucky to have as many advances as I've had in my short career. Workstation-level sysadmin may not be highly regarded, but at least the book I wrote wasn't by hand.
- octatoan 11y agoWhat would be a good introduction to his work?
- whiddershins 11y agoI have this (obviously poetic) theory there are two kinds of people (just how most people gravitate towards either New York or LA, not both) ... some people prefer "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of The World," some prefer "Wind Up Bird Chronicles."
- wanderer2323 11y agoA Wild Sheep Chase
- octatoan 11y agoWhat would be a good introduction to his work?
- cmgani 11y agoThis should not be of interest to HN readers.
- wsc981 11y agoWhy shouldn't it be? In past "Ask HN" topics when people asked for book recommendations, often[0][1][2][3][4] this author's books were recommended. --- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4967473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4967473 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395576 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8717697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8717697 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7968586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7968586 [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632993
- DanBC 11y agoJust curious: What do you think would be of interest to HN readers? Why, specifically, do you think this isn't interesting?
- coldtea 11y agoHow can someone pretending to know what "should be of interest to HN readers" not know that: 1) HN readers, as a collective and as subgroups, have many and varied intellectual interests, including literature. 2) It's our voting that defines what "is of interest" to HN readers, and this had been voted to the front page and received lots of comments. So, unlike the story of Murakami, your comment couldn't be more removed to both the spirit and the mechanics of HN.
- thinkpad20 11y agoWhile not as completely out-of-the-blue, I also had a similarly sudden realization that I wanted to become a computer scientist. I was in my third year of living in Japan at the time, teaching English in a small, conservative town in which I felt isolated and out of place (despite having become mostly fluent with the language). My best friend there had left, ironically inspired by me (or so he had claimed) to leave his country and pursue his dreams abroad, in Australia. I had very little left to offer me in Japan, but I had no idea what else to do; my undergrad in physics had left me with an impressive degree but no marketable skills, certainly none that I still possessed 5 years later. I was in a grocery store in Hamamatsu, listening to one of my favorite podcasts called Skeptically Speaking (now called Science for the People). The episode[0] had a guest named Mark Stevenson, who had written a book exploring the future of various areas of science. At one point he talked about the work of Hod Lipson at Cornell, who had written a program that could investigate data and guess physical equations, and who had also created a robot that taught itself how to walk. I remember him saying that in AI, it's the hard things that are easy, and the easy hard. I remember being so fascinated by this research that I thought, how cool would it be to be involved in this kind of thing? And it was in that moment I decided quite suddenly to become a computer scientist. I went to a dollar store and bought a notebook, went home and immediately went to MIT's opencourseware site and started the watching the lectures of their introductory CS course. Seven months later, I was back in America at grad school, and a year after that I was a full time software developer. I still wonder what might have happened if I hadn't happened to listen to that podcast. [0]: http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/episodes/an-optimists-tour-of-the-future http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/episodes/an-optimists-tour...
- tjradcliffe 11y agoThese are lovely anecdotes and he's obviously an interesting and capable story-teller, but he worked very hard to make his nominal epiphany true. The trick of writing in a foreign language as a way of discovering his own voice is fascinating, but it also must have been very difficult. So a better title might be: "How I was motivated to be dedicated enough to become a novelist." And this is actually a more interesting story, at least for other artists, because the thing everyone faces at the outset is failure and lack of belief in our own work. We have to have something to keep us going. He had that single moment at a baseball game. Others have other things, but having a weird little talisman like that can be very useful in solving the ongoing problem of motivation. In my own life, at the age of 13 I ate at a Chinese restaurant for the first time (on a school trip to the 'big city' a couple of hours distant from the town I grew up in) and got a fortune cookie that read, in its entirety, "An ambition far beyond your reach". I've achieved a good deal in the forty years since then, and at times when the going has been particularly tough I've thought back to that and told myself, "Yeah, well, you were told what to expect and went ahead anyway. So don't complain, just get back to work." Would I have accomplished as much without being able to do that? Maybe, maybe not. But being able to do it made the journey easier at times. It's a silly thing--I don't believe in fate or fortunes--but sometimes silly things can be made to work for us. So I could say that was "the moment I became X", where X is any major achievement since, but "One weird trick to stay motivated and focused on your goals" would be at least as accurate.