Home Page For Japanese Literature 13 - JLC13
Link to Today’s Story
On August 9, 2009, I completed my first book for The Japanese Challenge “After Dark” by Haruki Murakami. This novel was also in fact my first venture into Japanese literature.
“After Dark” starts in a Denny’s, a comfortable familiar place in the night world of Tokyo. The characters in the story are at once beautifully individuated with just a few brush strokes.
“She reads with great concentration. Her eyes rarely move from the pages of her book….She just keeps reading her book, lighting an occasional cigarette, mechanically tipping back her coffee cup, and hoping the time moves faster”.
As the book proceeds we are drawn further into the Tokyo night world. We meet a number of interesting people along the way. Like Dickens and Balzac before him Marukami brings to light aspects of the city that fall below the radar of those safely out of the margins.
“The garbage trucks have not yet collected all of the garbage. This a giant city, after all, and it produces a prodigious amount of garbage”.
From this start 11 years ago I went on to read all his translated novels published as Kindles and a number of his Short Stories. I hope to one day join in the Celebration of his Nobel Prize.
I was delighted to find a new story,”With the Beetles” just published in The New Yorker, readable online at the link above. My main purpose today is to let my readers know about the availablity
of this story and to keep a record of my reading.
American and English pop music references abound in the work of Murakami. “With The Beetles” follows a man living in Tokyo from his final teenage years to his late thirties. It is 1965 and The Beetles are huge in Japan dominating airwaves and record sales.
His girl friend, the first, loves the Beetles though he is more into American Jazz.
One day he goes to pick her up but only her brother is home. He invites him in to wait. The longest segment of the story is devoted to their conversation. The brother has a rare problem with his memory. The conversation revolves around that, Mozart and brother’s questions about the man’s relationship to his sister.
We flash twenty years forward as we then catch up with events.
Mel u
1 comment:
One of my first Murakami books was After Dark, too. I had begun Kafka on The Shore, and I came to it with a Western mindset: one which expected clear progression of events and a tidy conclusion. When I did not find that, I turned to the shorter After Dark, and then I was hooked. I no longer expected a narrow point of view which I previously held. It was so enlightening to this reader!
When I was in Tokyo in the fall of autumn 2018, I saw Denny’s and KFC and McDonald’s on many corners. It brought to mind images from this book; such an unexpected to thing to see these (ridiculous) restaurants in a Japanese metropolis.
But, what is Murakami, what is Japan, if not delightfully unexpected? Thank you for being on this journey with me.
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