Word: novels
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...Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1994 Critics regard this 600-page tome, penned over four years while Murakami was living in the U.S., as his best novel. It stars Murakami's signature jazz-listening loner, but is interwoven with the horrifying narrative of a soldier in World War II Manchuria - the author's first real foray into the dark realms of Japanese history...
Haruki Murakami doesn't much go in for metaphors, but even he wouldn't deny the aptness and symbolism of the moment when he decided he would write his first novel. It was April 1978 and Murakami was in the stands at Tokyo's Meiji-Jingu Stadium, watching a baseball game, beer in hand. He was verging on 30, and nearly a decade into running a jazz café with his wife Yoko. A journeyman American batter named Dave Hilton came to the plate for the Yakult Swallows, stroked the first pitch into left field, and safely reached second base...
...Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing - with its title taken from a Truman Capote short story and featuring Beach Boys lyrics on the back cover - would be published within a year of his revelation. That such a moment came while watching an American athlete play an imported game is entirely in keeping with a man whose work - at least in its early stages - was not shaped by Japanese literature, but by the secondhand foreign paperbacks he read growing up near the port of Kobe, and the jazz and rock he absorbed as a student in Tokyo. Long before...
...approaches his 60th year, something is changing in Murakami's heart. His status as a truly global writer is assured - over 100,000 copies of the English version of his most recent novel, After Dark, have been printed since its release in May - but with the world conquered, and precocious undergraduates from Sydney to San Francisco at his feet, the postmodernist master dismisses the foreign adulation with a tired hand, and finds himself returning to the world of his parents and his birth. Despite the title - and a cameo appearance by Colonel Sanders of KFC fame - 2002's Kafka...
...again and again throughout a 212-hour conversation, bushy eyebrows bobbing as he worries about "politicians who rewrite history," and the growing tendency in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Japan to forget about wartime atrocities. Japanese history has always been in the background of his works - and his best novel, 1994's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, dissected the groupthink that led Japan into a catastrophic war - but now he wants to act. "Before, I wanted to be an expatriate writer," he admits. "But I am a Japanese writer. This is my soil and these are my roots. You cannot...