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Japan Education

Japanese Writing After Murakami (the-tls.co.uk) 66

Posted by msmash from the After-Murakami dept.
Roland Kelts, writing for The Times Literary Supplement: At fifty-one, Hideo Furukawa is among the generation of Japanese writers I'll call "A. M.," for "After Murakami." Haruki Murakami is Japan's most internationally renowned living author. His work has been translated into over fifty languages, his books sell in the millions, and there is annual speculation about his winning the Nobel Prize. Over four decades, he has become one of the most famous living Japanese people on the planet. It's impossible to overestimate the depth of his influence on contemporary Japanese literature and culture, but it is possible to characterize it.

The American poet Louise Gluck once said that younger writers couldn't appreciate the shadow cast over her generation by T. S. Eliot. Murakami in Japan is something like that. Yet unlike Eliot in English-speaking nations, Murakami in Japan has been a liberator, casting rays of light instead of a pall, breathing gusts of fresh air into Japan's literary landscape. Now on the verge of seventy, he generates little of Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" among his younger peers. For them he has opened three key doors: to licentious play with the Japanese language; to the binary worlds of life in today's Japanese culture, a hybrid of East and West; and to a mode of personal behaviour -- cool, disciplined, solitary -- in stark contrast to the cliques and clubs of Japan's past literati.

Japan's current literary and cultural scene takes in "light novels," brisk narratives that lean heavily on sentimentality and romance and often feature visuals drawn from manga-style aesthetics, and dystopian post-apocalyptic stories of intimate violence, such as Natsuo Kirino's suspense thrillers, Out and Grotesque. Post-Fukushima narratives in film and fiction explore a Japan whose tightly managed surfaces disfigure the animal spirits of its citizens; and many of the strongest voices and characters in this recent trend have been female.
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Japanese Writing After Murakami

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  • What does this have to do with nerd news?

    and starting with talking of after Haruki Murakami? He's still alive and writing? let's wait until he's dead to talk of A.M.!!!??

    and yeah, I read Japanese literature. This doesn't belong on slashdot.

    Kore wa tada no bakadesu!

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Desler ( 1608317 )

        Except topics like this have been posted to Slashdot for nearly 2 decades. Get over yourself.

      • His books are heavily influenced by Kafka, which is a problem because Kafka isn't very good. It got so bad, that I re-wrote the end of Metamorphosis for fun. Wasn't hard to make it better.

    • What does this have to do with nerd news?

      The Hentai versions of Murakami's works are definitely "Nudes for Nerds" . . .

    • Re:eh? how is this slashdot subject? (Score:4, Informative)

      by shanen ( 462549 ) on Sunday June 24, 2018 @05:29PM (#56839406) Homepage Journal

      What does this have to do with nerd news?

      Science fiction often inspires technical trends, and many of Murakami's books are in SF areas. Therefore it is reasonably relevant on Slashdot.

      Having said that, and having read quite a bit of Japanese literature (mostly in translation), I'm not sure I would credit Murakami with being that influential. Admired and respected, yes, but I'm not seeing that many similarities between what he does and what the other authors write. The I novels are largely unchanged from Soseki's day, even though the backgrounds are modern.

      Then again, I've only read one book by Kirino... But maybe there was some confusion with the OTHER Murakami (Ryu). Definitely seems to me to be more influential in that style. The more famous Murakami (Haruki) tends to remind me of Lewis Carroll in many places.

  • "and many of the strongest voices and characters in this recent trend have been female"

    But of course they have. TFS was interesting right up to its latest phrase. Then the SJW hammer struck.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Desler ( 1608317 )

      Awww. We'll all shed crocodile tears for you snowflake.

    • I am surprised that the mention of a respected male author using strong female characters to tell his stories has triggered your anti-SJW impulses. You should be too.

      Strong women neither break your leg nor pick your pocket. Watch a Russ Meyer film and relax.*

      That said, I assumed Murakami was a text input method when I read the headline.

      *Trigger warning: women depicted may do much worse than break legs and pick pockets.

      • I've both watched movies and read books featuring strong female characters, and enjoyed reading/watching them. What annoys me is the recent "in-your-face", "you HAVE to acknowledge this!" trend.

        A good book or movie doesn't need to yell "IT HAZ STRONG FEMALES", it just works. To me, whether the main character is male, female, child, white, black, homosexual, genderfluid or any combination of the above. When there's emphasis on such traits or however you want to call it, I react.

        I read a good book recently, "

  • I enjoyed his books (Score:3)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Sunday June 24, 2018 @04:51PM (#56839278) Homepage Journal
    I particularly liked his "Voices from the Hellmouth" series. I haven't read his "post Fukushima" narratives but I am sure they are equally as good.

  • I Read IQ84 (Score:3)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Monday June 25, 2018 @01:24AM (#56840548)

    And it was the worst book (well, set of 3) I've ever finished. Starts of well, but he has no idea where to go with it and it dribbles out in a pile of wasted ideas and characters that go nowhere. Classic example of a mainstream writer thinking that fantasy must be easy because there's no rules and then demonstrating that it isn't and there are.

    • No I'm pretty sure that's just how modern Japanese writing works.

    • >Classic example of a mainstream writer thinking that fantasy must be easy because there's no rules and then demonstrating that it isn't and there are.

      Fantasy is the type of suspension of disbelief and the latter is a handicap, not a creative advantage.

      There are no wild cards in art and literature, there are no carte blanches. You have to earn it by your skills of doing the same thing that has been done by thousands before you in a different way.

    • I don't know if you read them in Japanese or translated but I found that his longer books (1Q84, Kafka On the Shore, WInd-up Bird chronicles) had too much repetition in it. I'm wondering if this isn't because in Japan these books are published at different dates (1Q84 part 3 was published almost a year after the first two parts) and this helps the recollection of the story. The translations are usually in one piece so I'm often thinking "haven't I read this piece 10 times before". A good example in 1Q84 is

  • TSIA. Look, I come to /. for TECH related news. I don't want a general news aggregator, there's already far too much heat to light here already.

    On a side note, only a poet could make a statement so sweepingly & simultaneously narcissistic and oblivious as "The American poet Louise Gluck once said that younger writers couldn't appreciate the shadow cast over her generation by T. S. Eliot."

  • Most famous Japanese known world-wide? (Score:3)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Monday June 25, 2018 @08:19AM (#56841698)

    That title is held by Hayao Miyazaki.

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