Haruki Murakami, one of the guardians of the Demon Heroes

Haruki Murakami (1949), Japanese novelist and translator of American literature. He began writing at the age of 29, and his first work "Song of Listening to the Wind" won the Japanese Group Portrait Newcomer Award, and in 1987, his fifth novel "Norwegian Wood" sold 4 million copies in Japan, causing widespread "Murakami phenomenon".

Haruki Murakami's works show a light tone of writing style influenced by European and American writers, and rarely have the gloomy and heavy atmosphere of Japanese post-war writing. He is known as the first true "post-World War II writer" and is known as the standard-bearer of Japanese literature in the 1980s.

Haruki Murakami was born in Fushimi Ward, Kyoto City, as the only child in his family, with an introverted personality.

Both parents were junior high school Japanese teachers, and my mother became a full-time housewife after marriage. His parents' discipline of Haruki was open-minded and strict, and he encouraged reading, so Haruki was very young and could read his favorite books and was eager to read.

When he was 12 years old, his family moved to nearby Ashiya City, Hyogo Prefecture, where he subscribed to two sets of books on the world of literature and cultivated Haruki's love for Western literature.

His father tutored Haruki in Japanese from an early age, hoping to cultivate his interest in Japanese classical literature, but he never had the interest to do so. Haruki Murakami once said, "Throughout my formatting, I was never deeply moved by Japanese novels. 」

Haruki Murakami hates books, and when he was in junior high school, he was often beaten by teachers for not doing his work, but a set of "The History of the World Realm" published by the Central Public Opinion Press can be read repeatedly.

He admits that he has a stubborn rebellious factor in his heart, and he can't accept everything that others give: "What you don't want to learn, what you don't interest in, you don't learn anything." 」

After entering Kobe High School, it became even worse. Playing mahjong almost every day, messing with girls, smoking, and kicking classes all come, but the grades can always be maintained at a certain level.

When he was in high school, he often published articles in the school magazine, liked to read second-hand cheap novels in European and American original languages, translated his favorite American thriller novels one by one, and immersed himself in the experience of reading translations.

He was not very patient with the step-by-step teaching method, so his English grades were always mediocre, and he later wrote in an article: "If the English teacher at the time knew that I was doing a lot of translation work now, I might not understand it!"

He also became fascinated by American music, having heard Artebrekey and the Jazz Courier Orchestra, and after a live concert tape in 1964, he saved his lunch money to buy jazz records. From the age of 13 to the present, I have always had the habit of collecting records.

After graduating from high school, Murakami failed to apply for the law department. I have been a repeat examinee for a year. In 1967, in the library, "a drowsy dozing off and wasting a year in a senseless manner," he was moved to read Truman Kapoty's short story "The Headless Hawk" in an English-language reference book, and was more certain that he liked literature rather than law.

Later, Murakami was admitted to the Faculty of Drama, Faculty of Letters, Waseda University in Tokyo, and at first lived in a student dormitory run by a foundation, Wakei Juku, which was later written by Murakami in "Norwegian Wood". After living for half a year, I moved to a small apartment. Enjoy the freedom of personal privacy.

Late 1960s. Murakami, who was part of Japan's radical student movement, barely attended classes, saying, "When I was in high school, I didn't study; I really didn't read. He hung out in speakeasies, got drunk, went on self-guided hikes, and when he was tired, he slept on the streets and accepted the beggars of strangers (an experience that would later be written in The Norwegian Woods).

After the school started in 1968, Murakami met Yoko Takahashi, who was in the same class. At that time, Yoko still had a relationship, but it was not long before the rise of the Japanese student movement (the period of the whole gongdou) that the two began to go out and go in pairs.

In 1971, 22-year-old Murakami and Yoko decided to stay for the rest of their lives, and the man's parents did not approve of Murakami's hasty next step in life before completing his studies. However, Yoko's father was unexpectedly accommodating, and his father-in-law only asked, "Do you love Yoko?" prompted Murakami to take another year off from school despite his family's objections (it took him seven years to complete his university credits) and Yoko to register and marry at the district office, and then move in with Yoko's father.

The couple worked in a record store during the day and a café at night. Three years later, with 2.5 million yen in cash and 2.5 million yen in bank loans, he opened a jazz café "PeterCat" named after Murakami's pets on the first basement floor of the south exit of Kokubunji Station in the western suburbs of Tokyo. Sells coffee during the day and turns into a bar at night.

During this period, Murakami ran a jazz shop to observe the people, and at the same time read books, reading all the novels he could find.

In 1975, Murakami finally got a university degree with his thesis "The View of Travel in American Cinema", and the business of the jazz shop went from strength to strength.

Moved to the city center in 1977, the interior of the store brings out the theme of cats to the fullest, and there are even magazines from cat lovers who come to interview them.

At the age of 29, a ball game became the trigger that changed the fate of Haruki Murakami, who said in a speech at the University of Berkeley:

“

"In April 1978, one day I suddenly wanted to write a novel, and that afternoon I was watching baseball, sitting in the outfield, drinking beer, and my favorite team was Yakult, and that day I was playing against Hiroshima. The first batter of the Yakult team in the first inning was an American, David Hilton, I remember very well that he was the batting king of the year, in short, the first shot was hit by him to the left field, and the second base hit. That's when I had the idea: I could write a novel. 」”

After the game, Murakami went to the stationery store to buy pens and paper, and began to write his first novel, "Song of the Wind".

Every day after the jazz shop closes, Murakami works in the kitchen for one or two hours at night to write novels, but due to the limited writing time, the first novel has a very short sentence and chapter.

The novel took about six months for Murakami to complete, and Murakami submitted his work to the literary magazine "Group Portrait" in the first literary contest for new writers, and won the 1979 Group Portrait Newcomer Award.

Murakami often says. If I hadn't won the prize, I probably wouldn't have written a novel later.

Later, at the invitation of the publishing house, Murakami first handed over some short stories, translations and essays, and the following year completed his second novel, "Pinball Toys of 1973", followed by "Songs to Listen to the Wind", describing the later experiences of the protagonists.

In 1981, the Murakami couple sold their jazz shop that they had been running for many years and moved to Funabashi City to concentrate on writing, and their third novel, "The Adventure of Sheep Hunting". Inspired by Murakami Ryu, Murakami tried to write a novel with a coherent narrative. The main characters are still "me" and "mouse" from the first two works.

During this time, Murakami began to live a regular life of writing. There was plenty of time to concentrate, so the sentences of the third novel became longer and the story coherent, and Murakami's own style in this novel changed considerably.

In 1985, he published his novel The End of the World and the Cold Strangeland, which took eight months to complete. In one fell swoop, he won the Japanese literary award "Junichiro Tanizaki Award". He was Japan's first post-World War II youth laureate.

Since 1986, he has lived in Europe with his wife for three years. In the middle of the term, he completed "Norwegian Wood", the number one selling novel in the history of modern Japanese literature. The book sold 4.4 million copies, making Murakami's popularity peak in the late 80s, and establishing him as the "standard-bearer of literature in the 80s". He is also known as the writer who can best grasp the consciousness of urban people, self-isolation and loss.

The high level of attention and success of "Norwegian Wood" did not make him feel sad or happy, prompting him to discourage him from living in Japan for a long time after returning from his three years of European travel.

In 1991, at the invitation of an American friend, Murakami lived at Princeton University as a visiting scholar and writer-in-residence, and in the following year he became a visiting lecturer in the "Japanese Literature" course in the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures (1992).

While living in the United States, he began writing a trilogy of novels called "The Clockwork Bird Chronicles" and returned to Japan in early 1995.

Nine months after the sarin gas incident in the Tokyo subway in 1995, Haruki Murakami interviewed more than 62 of the 1,000 victims and witnesses of the Aum Shinrikyo incident, in view of the fact that media reports often ignored the subjectivity of the "individual witnesses" in the incident.

For the first time, he tried to record the literary work "The Subway Incident", which provides a profound and detailed account of the witnesses' experiences on the day, their on-the-spot reactions, and the impact of the Aum incident on their values.

A year later, the sequel, "The Place of Restraint," began with a visit that balanced the position of the first report with the possible motives of the perpetrators, and recounted a lengthy account of interviews with eight Aum Shinrikyo believers.

The two works are valuable works that explore the impact of the Aum incident on Japanese national consciousness from the perspective of reporting literature.

Haruki Murakami is known for his daily jogging training, marathon running, jazz and rock music, and the famous American writer Fitzgerald. He has traveled to the European continent and South America, Mexico, China, Mongolia, and has also driven across the continental United States. Travelogue accounts and essays on travel and sojourn essays can be found in books such as "Border, Near", "Finally Sad Foreign Chinese", "Drumming in the Distance", "Rainy Day, Hot Day" and other books.

Haruki Murakami's writing style is deeply influenced by European and American cultures, and he is also good at translating European and American literature.

Most of Murakami's works published in Taiwan have been translated by Lai Mingzhu, while Lin Shaohua has been responsible for most of the translations of Murakami's works published in China in recent years, and the two translators' different styles have successfully established the popularity and status of Murakami's novels in the Chinese-speaking world.

In 2003, the English translation of his novel Kafka by the Sea (2005) ranked first in the New York Times Top 10 Best Books of the Year category, and in 2006, he also won the Franz Kafka Prize and the FrankOConnor International Short Story Award.

Today, he is considered one of Japan's most promising writers to win the next Nobel Prize in Literature.

Since the second half of 2006, Haruki Murakami has been invited by the University of Hawaii to teach literature as a visiting professor. He claimed that his ultimate goal was to write a book like the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which later became 1Q84.

When he received the Jerusalem Literary Prize in 2009, he said, "Between a huge solid wall and the eggs that hit it, I will always be on the side of the eggs". (To be continued......)