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Volume 3: A blow of destiny, the king appears Chapter 29: If I had not won the award, I might not have written a novel later

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    Haruki Murakami, one of the Demon Guardians

    Haruki Murakami (1949), Japanese novelist and American literary translator.  Literature Museum started writing at the age of 29. His first work, "Listen to the Wind", won the Japan Group Portrait Newcomer Award. In 1987, his fifth novel "Norwegian Wood" sold four million copies in Japan, widely triggering the Murakami phenomenon.

    Haruki Murakami¡¯s works show a light tone of writing style that is deeply influenced by European and American writers, and lack the gloomy and heavy writing style of post-war Japan.  He is known as the first pure post-World War II writer and hailed as Japan's literary standard-bearer in the 1980s.

    Haruki Murakami was born in Fushimi Ward, Kyoto City. He is an only son with an introverted personality.

    Both parents were middle school Japanese teachers, and my mother became a full-time housewife after marriage.  His parents were open-minded and strict in their discipline, and they encouraged reading. Therefore, Chunshu could read his favorite books at a very young age and read voraciously.

    When he was 12 years old, his family moved to Ashiya City in neighboring Hyogo Prefecture. The two sets of world literature series at home cultivated Haruki's interest in Western literature.

    His father has tutored Haruki to learn Japanese since he was a child, hoping to cultivate his interest in Japanese classical literature, but he has always lacked interest.  Haruki Murakami once said: Throughout the entire process of growing up, I have never been deeply moved by Japanese novels.

    Haruki Murakami hates studying. During his junior high school years, he was often beaten by his teachers for not studying well. However, he could read and master the complete set of "World History" published by Chuo Koronsha.

    He admits that he has a stubborn rebellious element in his heart, and he cannot accept anything given by others: he will not learn anything he does not want to learn or is not interested in, no matter what.

    After entering Kobe High School, I became more diligent. I played mahjong almost every day, hung out with girls, smoked, and skipped classes. However, my grades were always maintained at a certain level.

    When he was in high school, he often published articles in the school magazine. He liked to read cheap second-hand European and American novels in their original languages. He translated paragraphs of his favorite American thrillers and immersed himself in the experience of reading the translations.

    He is impatient with step-by-step teaching methods.  Therefore, his English scores were always mediocre. Later, he wrote in the article: If the English teacher at that time knew that I was doing a lot of translation work now, he might not be able to understand it!

    In addition, he also became fascinated by American music. He listened to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. After the live concert tape in 1964, he saved his lunch money to buy jazz records. He has been collecting them since he was 13 years old.  Record habit.

    After graduating from high school, Murakami failed to apply for the law department and spent a year as a re-examination candidate.  In 1967, while dozing off in the library and wasting a year in vain, he read Truman Capote's short story "The Headless Hawk" in an English reference book and became very popular.  move.  I am also more certain that what I like is literature rather than law.

    Later, Murakami re-took the entrance examination and was admitted to the Department of Drama, Faculty of Literature, Waseda University, Tokyo. He first lived in a student dormitory and a private school run by a corporate foundation (this dormitory was later written by Murakami in "Norwegian Wood"). After living there for half a year, he moved to a dormitory.  In a small apartment, you can enjoy personal freedom.

    In the late 1960s, Murakami, who was part of Japan¡¯s radical student movement generation, almost didn¡¯t go to class.  He said: In high school, I didn¡¯t study; in college, I really didn¡¯t study.  He hung out in underground jazz bars, drank until he was very drunk, and also went on self-guided hiking trips. When he was tired, he slept on the streets and accepted charity from strangers (this experience was later written into "Norwegian Wood").

    After the start of school in 1968.  Murakami met Yoko Takahashi, who was in the same class.  At that time, Yoko was still dating, but soon after the Japanese student movement (during the period of the Communist Party of China) emerged, the two began to be in a relationship.

    In 1971, 22-year-old Murakami and Yoko decided to stay together for life. The boy¡¯s parents did not approve of Murakami taking the next step in life hastily before completing his studies.  But Yoko's father is surprisingly accommodating and sensible.  The father-in-law only asked one question: Do you love Yangzi?  In October of the same year, despite the opposition of his family, Murakami took another year off from school (it later took him seven years to complete college credits) and went to the district office to register for marriage with Yoko, and then moved in with Yoko's father.

    The couple made a living by working in a record store during the day and working in a cafe at night.  Three years later, another 2.5 million yen in cash and a bank loan of 2.5 million yen will be obtained.  Petercat, a jazz cafe named after Murakami's pet, has been opened on the first basement floor of the south entrance of Kokubunji Station in the western suburbs of Tokyo.  It sells coffee during the day and turns into a bar at night.

    During this period.  While running a jazz shop and observing people, Murakami read and read all the novels he could find.

    In 1975, Murakami finally got a college degree with his thesis "The View of Travel in American Films", and the jazz shop's business was getting better and better.

    Relocated to the city center in 1977, the store¡¯s decoration fully utilized the cat theme, and even got an exclusive interview from a cat lover magazine.

    At the age of 29, a game??became the fuse that changed the fate of Haruki Murakami. He said in a speech at Berkeley University:

    In April 1978, one day I suddenly wanted to write a novel.  I was watching baseball that afternoon, sitting in the outfield, drinking a beer.  My favorite team is Yakult, and that day we were playing against Hiroshima.  The first bat of the Yakult team in the next inning was an American, David Hilton.  I remember clearly that he was the batting champion that year. Anyway, the first pitch he threw was a double to left field.  That's when the idea came to me: I could write a novel.

    After the game, Murakami went to a stationery store to buy pens and paper and began writing his first novel, "Song to the Wind."

    Every day after the jazz shop closed, Murakami would burn the midnight oil in the kitchen for an hour or two to write the novel. However, due to the limited writing time, the sentences and chapters of his first novel were very short.

    This novel took Murakami about six months to complete. Murakami submitted the work to the literary magazine "Group Portrait" for the first time in the new writer literary competition, and won the 1979 Group Portrait Newcomer Award.

    Murakami often said that if he had not won the award, he might not have written a novel later.

    Afterwards, at the invitation of the publishing house, Murakami first handed over some short stories, translations and essays, and the following year he completed his second novel "The Marble Toy of 1973".  Continuing from "Listening to the Song of the Wind", it describes the subsequent experiences of the protagonists.

    In 1981, the Murakami couple sold the jazz shop they had run for many years and moved to Funabashi City to concentrate on writing their third novel, "The Adventures of Sheep Hunting."  Inspired by Ryu Murakami, Murakami tried to write a novel with a coherent narrative. The main characters are still the mice and I from the first two works.

    During this period, Murakami began to lead a regular writing life and had enough time to concentrate, so the sentences in the third novel became longer.  The story is coherent, and Murakami's autobiography has undergone a considerable change in style in this novel.

    In 1985, the novel "The End of the World and the Cold Strange Land", which took eight months to complete, was published and won the Junichiro Tanizaki Award, Japan's literary award, becoming Japan's first young winner after World War II.

    Starting in 1986, he and his wife lived in Europe for three years, during which time he completed the best-selling novel "Norwegian Wood" in the history of modern Japanese literature.  The cumulative sales of the first and second volumes of the work reached 4.4 million.  Murakami's popularity reached its peak in the late 1980s, establishing his status as the standard bearer of literature in the 1980s, and being hailed as the writer who best grasped the self-isolation and loss of urban people's consciousness.

    The high attention and success brought by "Norwegian Wood" did not make him feel comfortable and happy, prompting him to give up the idea of ??living in Japan for a long time after returning from his trip to Europe in the previous three years.

    Pursuing a good writing environment, Murakami was invited by American friends to live in Princeton University in 1991 as a visiting scholar and writer-in-residence. In the following year, he served as a guest lecturer in the Japanese literature course of the Department of Oriental Languages ??and Literature of the school (1992).

    While living in the United States, he began writing the novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle trilogy, and returned to Japan to live in early 1995.

    Nine months after the 1995 sarin gas incident in the Tokyo subway, Japan.  In view of the fact that media reports mostly ignored the subjectivity of individual witnesses' experiences of the incident, Murakami interviewed more than 1,000 victims and witnesses of the Aum Shinrikyo incident, including 62 of them, in about a year.

    "The Subway Incident" is the first attempt to record documentary reportage. It records the experiences of the witnesses that day, the behavioral reactions at the scene, and the impact of the Aum Incident on values ??in a profound and detailed manner.

    The sequel "The Place of Restraint" a year later was based on the investigation of balancing the stance of the first report and understanding the possible motives of the perpetrators, and recorded a long record of personal interviews with eight Aum Shinrikyo believers.

    The two works before and after are both in the "Om Subway Incident" information for reference today.  A valuable work that explores the impact of the Aum incident on Japanese national consciousness from the perspective of reportage.

    Haruki Murakami lives a regular life and is famous for his daily jogging training, participating in marathons in various places, and his love of jazz, rock music and the famous contemporary American writer Fitzgerald.  He has traveled to continental Europe, South America, Mexico, and Mongolia, China, and has also recorded driving across the continental United States.  Details of travel narratives and sojourn essays can be found in books such as "Border, Nearby", "Finally Sad Foreign Language", "Drums in the Distance", "Rainy Day, Summer" and other books.

    Haruki Murakami¡¯s writing style is deeply influenced by European and American culture, and he is also good at translating European and American literature.

    Most of Murakami¡¯s works published in Taiwan are translated by Lai Mingzhu.  Lin Shaohua has been responsible for most of the translations of Murakami's works published in China in recent years. The two translators' different styles have successfully established the popularity and status of Murakami's novels in the Chinese-speaking world.

    Since the 1990s, English translations of Murakami¡¯s old and new works have been published one after another.  2003 novel "Kafka on the Shore" EnglishThis book (2005) ranked first among the New York Times' top ten best novels of the year; in 2006, it also won the Franz Kafka Award and the Frank O'Connor (R) International Short Story Award. Murakami's status in the European and American literary circles reached a new peak.

    Today he is considered one of Japan¡¯s most promising writers to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature.

    Since the second half of 2006, Haruki Murakami has been invited by the University of Hawaii as a visiting professor to teach literature courses.  He claimed that his ultimate goal was to write a masterpiece like the Russian writer Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov", which was later published as "1q84".

    When I received the Jerusalem Literature Prize in 2009, I said that between a huge solid wall and the egg that collides with it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.
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