Haruki Murakami and His Early Work

Haruki Murakami and His Early Work PDF Author: Masaki Mori
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793635986
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
Haruki Murakami and His Early Work first discusses Murakami Haruki’s real-life activities and interests, such as his self-identity as a Japanese novelist, his position in the Japanese literary canon, music, translation and running. In this context, three short stories as pivotal to his early writing career are examined, including “The Second Bakery Attack,” “The Elephant Vanishes,” and “TV People.” Written in an easy style to read, and with the content full of references to select contemporary popular culture and consumer products, his fiction in general tends to invite criticism of irrelevance and frivolity. Against their nonsensical, even humorous appearance, however, the book’s close analysis reveals his persistent concern with the plight of today’s humanity in postindustrial reality. Through the bewildering stories, Murakami delivers a covert critique of aspects of the sociopolitical system, including unbridled consumerism, relentless pursuit of efficiency, and electronic media saturation, that brings people into total submission without their realization of the plight in which they are placed. In this respect, these short stories rival his acclaimed novels while showing his essential concerns and literary creativity more succinctly.

Haruki Murakami and His Early Work

Haruki Murakami and His Early Work PDF Author: Masaki Mori
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793635986
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book Here

Book Description
Haruki Murakami and His Early Work first discusses Murakami Haruki’s real-life activities and interests, such as his self-identity as a Japanese novelist, his position in the Japanese literary canon, music, translation and running. In this context, three short stories as pivotal to his early writing career are examined, including “The Second Bakery Attack,” “The Elephant Vanishes,” and “TV People.” Written in an easy style to read, and with the content full of references to select contemporary popular culture and consumer products, his fiction in general tends to invite criticism of irrelevance and frivolity. Against their nonsensical, even humorous appearance, however, the book’s close analysis reveals his persistent concern with the plight of today’s humanity in postindustrial reality. Through the bewildering stories, Murakami delivers a covert critique of aspects of the sociopolitical system, including unbridled consumerism, relentless pursuit of efficiency, and electronic media saturation, that brings people into total submission without their realization of the plight in which they are placed. In this respect, these short stories rival his acclaimed novels while showing his essential concerns and literary creativity more succinctly.

1Q84

1Q84 PDF Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Bond Street Books
ISBN: 0385669445
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1342

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Book Description
The long-awaited magnum opus from Haruki Murakami, in which this revered and bestselling author gives us his hypnotically addictive, mind-bending ode to George Orwell's 1984. The year is 1984. Aomame is riding in a taxi on the expressway, in a hurry to carry out an assignment. Her work is not the kind that can be discussed in public. When they get tied up in traffic, the taxi driver suggests a bizarre 'proposal' to her. Having no other choice she agrees, but as a result of her actions she starts to feel as though she is gradually becoming detached from the real world. She has been on a top secret mission, and her next job leads her to encounter the superhuman founder of a religious cult. Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange disturbance that develops over a literary prize. While Aomame and Tengo impact on each other in various ways, at times by accident and at times intentionally, they come closer and closer to meeting. Eventually the two of them notice that they are indispensable to each other. Is it possible for them to ever meet in the real world?

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running PDF Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307373088
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
From the best-selling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and After Dark, a rich and revelatory memoir about writing and running, and the integral impact both have made on his life. In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Haruki Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he’d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a slew of critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and—even more important—on his writing. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and includes settings ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvellous lens of sport emerges a cornucopia of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs and the experience, after the age of fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running.

Killing Commendatore

Killing Commendatore PDF Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525520058
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 752

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art—from one of our greatest writers. • “Exhilarating ... magical.” —The Washington Post When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by his wife, he secludes himself in the mountain home of a world famous artist. One day, the young painter hears a noise from the attic, and upon investigation, he discovers a previously unseen painting. By unearthing this hidden work of art, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances; and to close it, he must undertake a perilous journey into a netherworld that only Haruki Murakami could conjure.

Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami

Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami PDF Author: David Karashima
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593765908
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
How did a loner destined for a niche domestic audience become one of the most famous writers alive? A "fascinating" look at the "business of bringing a best-selling novelist to a global audience" (The Atlantic)―and a “rigorous” exploration of the role of translators and editors in the creation of literary culture (The Paris Review). Thirty years ago, when Haruki Murakami’s works were first being translated, they were part of a series of pocket-size English-learning guides released only in Japan. Today his books can be read in fifty languages and have won prizes and sold millions of copies globally. How did a loner destined for a niche domestic audience become one of the most famous writers alive? This book tells one key part of the story. Its cast includes an expat trained in art history who never intended to become a translator; a Chinese American ex-academic who never planned to work as an editor; and other publishing professionals in New York, London, and Tokyo who together introduced a pop-inflected, unexpected Japanese voice to the wider literary world. David Karashima synthesizes research, correspondence, and interviews with dozens of individuals—including Murakami himself—to examine how countless behind-the-scenes choices over the course of many years worked to build an internationally celebrated author’s persona and oeuvre. His careful look inside the making of the “Murakami Industry" uncovers larger questions: What role do translators and editors play in framing their writers’ texts? What does it mean to translate and edit “for a market”? How does Japanese culture get packaged and exported for the West?

Murakami T

Murakami T PDF Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Bond Street Books
ISBN: 0385667051
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The international literary icon opens his eclectic closet: Here are photographs of Murakami’s extensive and personal T-shirt collection, accompanied by essays that reveal a side of the writer rarely seen by the public. Many of Haruki Murakami's fans know about his massive vinyl record collection (10,000 albums!) and his obsession with running, but few have heard about a more intimate passion: his T-shirt collecting. In Murakami T, the famously reclusive novelist shows us his T-shirts—from concert shirts to never-worn whiskey-themed Ts, and from beloved bookstore swag to the shirt that inspired the iconic short story "Tony Takitani." These photographs are paired with short, frank essays that include Murakami's musings on the joy of drinking Guinness in local pubs across Ireland, the pleasure of eating a burger upon arrival in the United States, and Hawaiian surf culture in the 1980s. Together, these photographs and reflections reveal much about Murakami's multifaceted and wonderfully eccentric persona.

After Dark

After Dark PDF Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370488
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
A short, sleek novel of encounters set in the witching hours of Tokyo between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters: Yuri, a fashion model sleeping her way into oblivion; and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s into lives radically alien to her own: those of a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before; a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maidstaff; and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Yuri’s slumber—mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime—will either restore or annihilate her. After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency—the interplay between self-expression and understanding, between the power of observation and the scope of compassion and love. Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World PDF Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307777693
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle comes a relentlessly inventive novel that dives deep into the very nature of consciousness. “Fantastical, mysterious, and funny . . . a fantasy world that might have been penned by Franz Kafka.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws readers into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a hyperkinetic novel that is at once hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.

Underground

Underground PDF Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375725806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
In this haunting work of journalistic investigation, Haruki Murakami tells the story of the horrific terrorist attack on Japanese soil that shook the entire world. On a clear spring day in 1995, five members of a religious cult unleashed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system. In attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakmi talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe, and in so doing lays bare the Japanese psyche. As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere.

Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood PDF Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307762718
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore: A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, “a masterly novel” (The New York Times Book Review) blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the sixties with a young man’s hopeless and heroic first love. Now with a new introduction by the author. Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman. Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.