2023-05-24 18:02:07
The Time.news of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Murakami has been written for more than ten years, but has never been published. In case this injustice is not amended one day, we take advantage of it here for the Princess of Asturias award, which has had the good sense to go ahead of the Swedish Academy by awarding one of the authors who has done the most to make the public of all the world keep reading books. Beyond the undoubted quality of her work, for that alone she already deserves an award.
Haruki Murakami is the most international of Japanese writers, and surely also the least Japanese. This is the first sign that paradoxes are constant in his work, already elevated to the category of postmodern classic for his cult ‘best sellers’.
Critically acclaimed and blessed by millions of readers around the world, Murakami sells books with the same profusion as he wins international awards such as Noma, Tanizaki, Yomiuri, Franz Kafka or, now, the Princesa de Asturias, but the Nobel continues to resist him like Kundera. In Spain, he had already received the Order of Arts and Letters awarded by the Government and the 2011 Catalonia International Prize, whose endowment of 80,000 euros was donated to the victims of the devastating tsunami that devastated the northeast coast of Japan in March of that year and caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. All this despite the fact that he has come to say that he does not want awards because “that means that you are finished.”
Another contradiction as big as awarding someone who defines himself as “a normal guy who started writing from one day to the next; a passionate reader who began to tell stories ». It happened, according to Murakami himself, on April 1, 1978 at one thirty in the afternoon, when he was already 29 years old and decided to “be a writer while watching a baseball game at the Jingo stadium in Tokyo, with a beer in hand and a scorching sun. The moment Dave Hiltron made a perfect move, I knew he was going to write a novel ».
Since then, he has signed essential titles such as ‘Time.news of the bird that winds up the world’, ‘Sputnik, my love’, ‘Tokio blues. Norwegian Wood’, ‘After dark’ or ‘1Q84’, all of them published in Spain by Tusquets Editores. In his literary universe, Murakami combines reality and fantasy in a Kafkaesque way when it comes to narrating, with humor and self-confidence, the traumas of lonely characters unable to adapt to society, an allegation of rebellion in such a formalistic and gregarious country. like Japan, where, in his opinion, “it is very difficult to be an individual and people judge you according to the group, the office or the company to which you belong.”
Born in 1949 in Kyoto, but raised in other cities such as Ashiya and Kobe, Murakami was a lonely child who acquired a love of reading from his parents, who taught Japanese literature. But, unlike other Japanese authors of his generation, he grew up influenced by Western pop culture thanks to the works that fell into his hands by Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver and, above all, jazz, which he discovered when, on her 16th birthday, her parents gave her a ticket to see a concert by Art Blakeley and The Jazz Messengers in Tokyo. That is why his novels have a devilish rhythm, since for Murakami «the computer keyboard is like a piano and I improvise on it; I write my novels as if I were playing an instrument because I guess good writing is like good music.”
While studying Drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife, Yoko, he worked in a music store and, before finishing his senior year, opened a jazz club in Kokubunji, the Peter Cat, which he ran until 1981. , year from which he dedicated himself exclusively to literature. With abundant musical references in his work – without going any further, there is the Beatles’ ‘Norgewian Wood’ -, Murakami also drinks from cinema and television, in short, from contemporary culture that leads him to declare himself a fan of series like ‘Lost’ or ‘Twin Peaks’.
In addition to leaving us a prolific work of fiction, Murakami has translated his favorite authors, such as Truman Capote, John Irving and Paul Theroux, from English into Japanese, and has delved into the most painful reality of his country with his collection of short stories about the Kobe earthquake or with his book of interviews with the victims of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. As he himself says, he went from being a “detached” author to a “committed” one after spending a season in the United States in 1991. “My duty is to show young people what idealism means. Or what one day meant. It is necessary that we behave history with the generation that follows us », he explains in line with the Orwellian novel ‘1Q84’, which « deals with extreme idealism, but taking into account that no extremism is beneficial to society ».
Along with literature, his other late passion is running marathons and he is a fan of triathlons because, as he recounts in his essay ‘What do I talk about when I talk about running’, “to write you have to train.” In his opinion, running “is an activity very similar to writing a novel: both are long-distance. Working on something artistic is an unhealthy activity that the creator must compensate with a balanced and sporty life. If you are a genius, like Mozart or Pushkin, you can lead any kind of life and write; but, if not, you have to run, friend ». And it is that Murakami is the most international of Japanese writers, but probably also the least Japanese because, like the characters in his novels, he has sometimes felt “a foreigner in his own country.”
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