"Pico Iyer - Tales of the Living Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Essays about Haruki Murakami)
Pico Iyer - Tales of the Living Dead
Pico
Iyer
Tales
of the Living Dead
November 3 1997, Time
A surreal novel portrays Japan as a
postmodern wasteland of crooked deals and listless souls
In their very different
ways, each of the Big Three of modern Japanese literature--Yukio Mishima,
Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki--devoted himself to commemorating
aspects of an older, purer Japan they all felt would wither after their
country's defeat in World War II. That left their postwar successors, most
notably Haruki Murakami, to record the ghosts and vacant lots of a land whose
spirit seemed to have vanished, leaving a soulless, synthetic wasteland of
Dunkin' Donuts parlors, automated fashion victims and cinder-block abortion
clinics.
Murakami--a cool
48-year-old who once ran a jazz bar, has translated John Irving, Truman Capote
and Raymond Carver into Japanese and recently taught at Princeton--has been
perfectly positioned to serve as the voice of hip, Westernized Japan. His
Norwegian Wood (note the Beatles reference) sold more than 2 million
copies around the globe. Yet none of his earlier books prepare one for his
massive new The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Knopf; 611 pages; $25.95), which
digs relentlessly into the buried secrets of Japan's recent past to explain the
weightless, desultory disconnections of a virtual society where nothing feels
real and nobody really feels.
Flowing easily through a
series of hauntingly imagined passages, the story is told by Toru Okada, a guy
in his 30s, out of a job, cheerfully bewildered and wandering around in a
"yellow Van Halen promotional T-shirt." One day, as he's cooking spaghetti, his
life suddenly falls through a rabbit hole of sorts. Spooky strangers call up
with cryptic messages, women named Nutmeg and Malta enfold him in weird schemes,
his wife disappears, and another woman appears in her clothes and in his bed.
Reality plays like a TV program--but one showing on a channel Toru doesn't
get.
As surreal life fades
into waking dream (brilliantly translated into the latest vernacular by Jay
Rubin), Murakami delivers a synoptic reading of all the ills of modern Japan,
from crooked real estate deals to two-dimensional media men to a wonderfully
true, Sprite-drinking 16-year-old girl who works in a rural wig factory. And as
Okada floats through his planless days, he experiences every postmodern malady,
from unwanted phone-sex calls to--the ultimate heartbreak--an E-mail
"conversation" with his lost wife. These contemporary scenes of listlessness and
drift are thrown into the strongest relief by gripping, graphic accounts of
atrocities during the war. In Murakami's terms, a world of intense jazz has
given over to one of easy listening.
It does not require much
reflection to reveal that almost every image in the book's 600 pages--a dry
well, a haunted house, a faceless man, a dead-end street--stands in some way for
a hollowed-out Japan whose motto might be, "I don't think, therefore I am."
Again and again, characters say, "I was like a walking corpse" or "I was now a
vacant house" or "I felt as if I had turned into a bowl of cold porridge."
Murakami's storytelling ease and the pellucid, uncluttered backdrop he lays down
allow moments to flare up memorably. Yet the overall effect of his grand but
somewhat abstract novel is to give us X ray after X ray into the benumbed soul
of a wannabe Prozac Nation.
Pico Iyer - Tales of the Living Dead
Pico
Iyer
Tales
of the Living Dead
November 3 1997, Time
A surreal novel portrays Japan as a
postmodern wasteland of crooked deals and listless souls
In their very different
ways, each of the Big Three of modern Japanese literature--Yukio Mishima,
Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki--devoted himself to commemorating
aspects of an older, purer Japan they all felt would wither after their
country's defeat in World War II. That left their postwar successors, most
notably Haruki Murakami, to record the ghosts and vacant lots of a land whose
spirit seemed to have vanished, leaving a soulless, synthetic wasteland of
Dunkin' Donuts parlors, automated fashion victims and cinder-block abortion
clinics.
Murakami--a cool
48-year-old who once ran a jazz bar, has translated John Irving, Truman Capote
and Raymond Carver into Japanese and recently taught at Princeton--has been
perfectly positioned to serve as the voice of hip, Westernized Japan. His
Norwegian Wood (note the Beatles reference) sold more than 2 million
copies around the globe. Yet none of his earlier books prepare one for his
massive new The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Knopf; 611 pages; $25.95), which
digs relentlessly into the buried secrets of Japan's recent past to explain the
weightless, desultory disconnections of a virtual society where nothing feels
real and nobody really feels.
Flowing easily through a
series of hauntingly imagined passages, the story is told by Toru Okada, a guy
in his 30s, out of a job, cheerfully bewildered and wandering around in a
"yellow Van Halen promotional T-shirt." One day, as he's cooking spaghetti, his
life suddenly falls through a rabbit hole of sorts. Spooky strangers call up
with cryptic messages, women named Nutmeg and Malta enfold him in weird schemes,
his wife disappears, and another woman appears in her clothes and in his bed.
Reality plays like a TV program--but one showing on a channel Toru doesn't
get.
As surreal life fades
into waking dream (brilliantly translated into the latest vernacular by Jay
Rubin), Murakami delivers a synoptic reading of all the ills of modern Japan,
from crooked real estate deals to two-dimensional media men to a wonderfully
true, Sprite-drinking 16-year-old girl who works in a rural wig factory. And as
Okada floats through his planless days, he experiences every postmodern malady,
from unwanted phone-sex calls to--the ultimate heartbreak--an E-mail
"conversation" with his lost wife. These contemporary scenes of listlessness and
drift are thrown into the strongest relief by gripping, graphic accounts of
atrocities during the war. In Murakami's terms, a world of intense jazz has
given over to one of easy listening.
It does not require much
reflection to reveal that almost every image in the book's 600 pages--a dry
well, a haunted house, a faceless man, a dead-end street--stands in some way for
a hollowed-out Japan whose motto might be, "I don't think, therefore I am."
Again and again, characters say, "I was like a walking corpse" or "I was now a
vacant house" or "I felt as if I had turned into a bowl of cold porridge."
Murakami's storytelling ease and the pellucid, uncluttered backdrop he lays down
allow moments to flare up memorably. Yet the overall effect of his grand but
somewhat abstract novel is to give us X ray after X ray into the benumbed soul
of a wannabe Prozac Nation.
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