Salon.com > Haruki Murakami

Nobel Prize for literature: This year’s favorites

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 21:05:00 +0000

Who will win the Nobel Prize for literature? According to British gambling outfit Ladbrokes, the odds favor Haruki Murakami, the Japanese author of "1Q84," "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and "Norwegian Wood." Other top picks include the Hungarian essayist Peter Nadas ("The End of a Family Story," "A Book of Memories") and Irish playwright and novelist William Trevor ("Autumn Sunshine," "The Story of Lucy Gault"), who have each garnered international attention and boast a long list of literary awards. (Odds listed below, via Ladbrokes):

“Norwegian Wood”: A rapturous tale of doomed love

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:17:00 +0000

Young love in all its agonies is something we've all experienced, and I'm pretty sure it's something we all remember at a visceral level, whether we're 14 or 95 or somewhere in between. Yet it's a notoriously difficult set of emotions and sensations to capture in novels or plays or films, at least not without resorting to the worst kinds of clichés. (I'm looking at you through my Magic Mirror, Stephenie Meyer! Not that the "Twilight" books and movies are the worst offenders -- not by a long shot.) What's so great about writer-director Tran Anh Hung's slow-building, gorgeous adaptation of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood" is that by the time it was over I felt completely transported into a rapturous, swoony state of early-20s romance, that condition where you feel right at the edge of heartbreak and insanity, your brain and skin and nerve endings possessed by the yearning for another person. (And yes, you get to hear the title song twice, once in a sweetly hilarious Anglo-Japanese acoustic version, and once for real.)

“1Q84″: Love in an alternate universe

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 23:00:00 +0000

"1Q84," Haruki Murakami's new meganovel (it was published in three volumes in his native Japan), begins with a young woman in business attire on her way to an appointment in Tokyo. Her taxi gets stuck in a traffic jam on an elevated highway, and the cabbie suggests that if she's really anxious to arrive on time, she might want to climb down a nearby utility access ladder and jump on the subway. So climb down she does, finding her way out of a neglected storage area and off to her appointment -- which turns out to entail killing a man with a very slender, very discreet silver needle to the back of the neck.

The woman, Aomame, has done this sort of job before, and her life continues more or less as usual, until she notices that policemen's uniforms are somewhat different, and that they're carrying more serious handguns than she remembers. She asks a friend when these changes took place and is told it happened a couple of years earlier, after a big shootout with a radical group up in the mountains. A faithful newspaper reader, Aomame has no recollection of such an event. Not long after that, she looks up into the night sky to see two moons: the accustomed one and "a small, green, misshapen" one next to it.