Haruki Murakami readers - a decent profile in today's NYT

[swag]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/books/14mura.html?



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"Kafka on the Shore" tells two alternating and ultimately converging stories. Mr. Murakami said he had become bored writing about urban dwellers in their 20's and 30's, and so in "Kafka" he decided to create two different types: a 15-year-old boy named Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home to rural western Japan; and a mentally defective man in his 60's, Satoru Nakata, who has the ability to talk to cats.

The novel has Mr. Murakami's signature surrealism, as fish rain from the sky, and characters named Johnnie Walker, a cat killer, and Colonel Sanders, a pimp, play critical roles.

Like his other novels this one is filled with references to American culture, but Mr. Murakami said he regarded Coca-Cola and Colonel Sanders, for instance, as worldwide references. "References such as Colonel Sanders or Johnnie Walker are in a way Western and everybody tends to fix their eyes on that," he said. "But as for the essence of a story, my stories have strong Japanese or Oriental elements. I think the structure of my stories is different from so-called Western stories."

His storytelling, he said, "does not develop logically from A to B to C to D, but I don't intentionally break up or reverse episodes the way postmodernists do. For me, it is a natural development, but it is not logical."

Mr. Murakami's attachment to American literature is longstanding. As a high school student in Kobe, in western Japan, he read, in the original, Kurt Vonnegut, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote and Raymond Chandler. Like many Japanese of his generation, he became passionate about jazz and rock.

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[Robeson]

1. Thanks for posting....

...I bookmarked it and will read it later...:thumbsup:

[swag]

2. Kick for PM Murakami readers, if exist