I’ve spoken about Haruki Murakami, one of my favourite writers, here before (Image right by Elena Seibert). See my earlier post, which highlighted an essay of his. Well, I learned from The Writer’s Almanac that it is his birthday today. Since I’ve been thinking a lot about great writing recently, I thought I’d celebrate by noting it here to you on the blog. Do go over there and read a bit about what Garrison Keillor and his writers say about him. Extract:
It’s the birthday of a writer that The Guardian calls one of the “world’s greatest living novelists,” Haruki Murakami, born in Ashiya City, Japan (1949). His parents both taught Japanese literature, and they talked about it so much that he came to resent it, and he took to reading foreign literature instead. His favorites were 19th-century European works — stuff by Flaubert, Dickens, Chekhov, Dostoevsky. And then, he started reading American detective stories, science fiction, and later, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut — all of which had been translated into Japanese. He was so fascinated with them that he learned English well enough to read American literature in the original. He said, “It was like a door opening to another world.” He later said that “Raymond Carver was without question the most valuable teacher I have ever had, and also the greatest literary comrade.”
He studied drama in college, but didn’t care too much for schoolwork and mostly passed his time in a campus museum reading archived movie screenplays. He met his wife, worked in a record store, and before graduating he and his wife — each age 22 — had started a bar in a basement at the edge of Tokyo. They called it “Peter Cat.” It served coffee during the day, and at night it transformed into a jazz […]
By the way, if you’ve not read him before perhaps you might give him a try.
-cvj
