{"id":42,"date":"2014-04-23T19:51:57","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T19:51:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/?p=42"},"modified":"2014-04-23T19:56:50","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T19:56:50","slug":"haruki-murakami","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/23\/haruki-murakami\/","title":{"rendered":"Haruki Murakami"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just read Haruki Murakami\u2019s Sputnik Sweetheart.<\/strong><\/em> Murakami\u2019s work fascinates me and I\u2019ve read most of his novels. His writing has always gripped me from beginning to end, and what\u2019s impressive about this is that I usually have times in any given book where I lose a little patience as a reader or feel I understand too much of what the writer\u2019s doing; my interest wanes. Not so with Murakami. Part of my fascination, I realize, is that I just can\u2019t get a grip on exactly what he\u2019s doing. I can try to explain in words his technique, but I never feel I\u2019m doing it justice. And even if I do understand\u2014in theory\u2014what he\u2019s doing, the stories take such amazing twists or he elevates his technique beyond what I\u2019m expecting, so the story always feels fresh and original and unpredictable. For example, Murakami\u2019s protagonist might discover the existence of a magical world (whether through magic realism or something more akin to outright fantasy\u2014his technique transcends traditional labels), and I will expect this to evolve into some kind of metaphor. In lesser writers, I will immediately guess what this metaphor represents, and I\u2019ll lose some interest in the story. With Murakami, however, I\u2019ll almost lose sight of the metaphor until it sneaks back up and surprises me in a most pleasant manner\u2026 and it won\u2019t end there, because suddenly the metaphor will unfold and I\u2019ll find it wasn\u2019t a simple parallel or symbol, but a whole jumble of emotions and life that he has managed to fold up into a beautiful, intricate pattern, like origami.<\/em> If you can imagine origami<\/em> being created not with blank paper, but written words, you\u2019d have a Murakami novel.<\/p>\n

He has a really cool website hosted by Random House,<\/a> although I’ve found that it doesn’t always work on smartphones or mobile devices.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost. Or at least there exists a silent place where everything can disappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And as we live our lives we discover\u2014drawing toward us the thin threads attached to each\u2014what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their lives are fleeting.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart,<\/em><\/strong> translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel<\/p>\n

\"Haruki<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just read Haruki Murakami\u2019s Sputnik Sweetheart. Murakami\u2019s work fascinates me and I\u2019ve read most of his novels. His writing …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[24,26,25],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-haruki-murakami","tag-literary-technique","tag-sputnik-sweetheart"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions\/46"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}