Who Will Tell The Story of Japan?

HONOLULU--Haruki Murakami has won international acclaim with his tales of talking cats and monsters that lurk below ground. The Japanese novelist claims that these strange, dark things have no place in his personal life. "When I'm not writing they are gone, totally," he assures me. "I don't even dream."

Mr. Murakami seems pleasantly detached from the obsessive worlds of his novels, where protagonists teeter on the edge, narrowly avoiding some abyss below. "Good writers always look into the darkness," he says, but some "go mad" in the process. Not so for Mr. Murakami, who peers into the underworld but always returns to flat land.

Mr. Murakami's surrealist fiction has made him not just a celebrity in Japan, but also the country's most prominent literary export today. His novels are a hit in Asia, America and beyond: "Kafka on the Shore" was apparently a best-seller in Russia. While enormously popular among readers in his home country, he is not necessarily the sweetheart of critics in the Japanese literary establishment. "They didn't appreciate my obsessions," Mr. Murakami explains, sounding amused.

There are other reasons why some in Japan would be wary of Mr. Murakami. The writer ventures where many Japanese fear to tread: exploring the nation's notorious World War II misadventures in Asia, a taboo subject in Japan and a continuous thorn in relations with neighboring China and South Korea. Mr. Murakami's widely acclaimed "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," published in the U.S. in 1997, contains long, gruesome interpretations of the past.

In his book "Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche," Mr. Murakami describes preparing to write "The Wind-Up

"Mr. Murakami seems pleasantly detached from the obsessive worlds of his novels ..."

This doesn't seem surprising. Writing is therapeutic, as well as cathartic. I wouldn't have assumed that Theodor Geisel was seeing elephants in trees or cats in hats.

2 posted on 12/10/2006 2:26:20 PM PST by NicknamedBob (Some people reach their level of incompetence when doing household chores.)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/1521072/posts
Unit 731 - Research and Bump List. Gets Disturbing, Read at Your Own Risk

3 posted on 12/10/2006 2:28:04 PM PST by Calpernia (Breederville.com)

4 posted on 12/10/2006 5:38:51 PM PST by Cacique (quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat ( Islamia Delenda Est ))

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