How to evaluate Haruki Murakami's novels

Advantages: amazing atmosphere rendering ability and imagination, good cold humor, meticulous presentation and state outline, excellent brushwork, keen and horrible persistence.

Disadvantages: Not as good as short stories in controlling long stories. In fact, many long stories are pieced together by short stories.

Being too popular is not an obstacle for him. Jin Yong, Dumas, Dream of Red Mansions and Shakespeare are so popular, does it hinder their greatness?

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Haruki Murakami is not very Japanese. When it comes to "gentle breeze", Gu Qirun Ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari and Yukio Mishima all have a stronger flavor than him. Haruki Murakami is a very American novelist, and his translation accent is recognized. Lifestyle: I worked in a jazz bar during my college years, and started writing novels and translating at the age of 29. He is a famous runner. Very American. He graduated from college very late. He must be 26 years old. In Vampire in Taxi, he once laughed at himself for "going to college for seven years". He has been mixing jazz bars during his college years. Later, when he married his wife, he borrowed 5 million yen to open a bar until he was 30. During that time, he lived a variety of all-night lives. This period of life is described in Listening to the Wind, Pinball in 1973, and Adventure of Looking for Sheep. In the south of the border and west of the sun, the hero just runs a jazz bar.

Author: Zhang Jiawei

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Source: Zhihu.

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Haruki Murakami worships American writers and mentions Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler and Raymond Carver many times. In fact, in my opinion, this is also the three objects of his tribute, the influence of his early style.

Haruki Murakami mentioned Fitzgerald more than once in his works. In Listening to the Wind, Fitzgerald is listed as a comparative object when talking about his fictional "hatfield" and his fighting posture. In Norwegian Wood, Watanabe and Yongze have listed Fitzgerald as a classic.

Many parts of Haruki Murakami's Listening to the Wind can be regarded as a tribute to Fitzgerald, especially the part where he leaves the jazz bar at the end, gets on a long-distance bus and watches the lights go out on the coast. "Everything is gone, no one can catch it", which is definitely similar to the classic beach monologue at the end of The Great Gatsby. Haruki Murakami has been repeating a theme of Fitzgerald in the first half of Listening to the Wind, Pinball in 1973, and Adventures of Looking for Sheep. Fitzgerald is bidding farewell to his south, Haruki Murakami is bidding farewell to his seaside hometown (the sea of burial in Looking for Sheep, the pinball machine in Spaceship), the "1920s" and past memories.

Haruki Murakami wrote Listening to the Wind on 1979 and Pinball on 1980. As mentioned above, they are still young and fresh, but they have begun to be alert to being sucked into the darkness by the past time. Short stories in the same period, spaghetti in 198 1 year, and on a sunny morning in April, I met 100% girls, all of whom were very sophisticated.

1982 "The Last Lawn in the Afternoon" has revealed some gloom, and the investigation of aunt's nonexistent daughter's room is filled with a gloomy smell. 1983 "burning barn", he began to point out that "dark violence devours people who are not noticed by the world." That is, this year, The Adventures of Looking for Sheep was published. And when you think about it, The Burning Barn can also remind the girls who "disappear" in the dance.

Then, he began to change from watching and sending to acting-in my opinion, Xue Dad, who wrote youth novels first and then became acting, was a bit self-deprecating.

Haruki Murakami said that he likes Raymond Chandler. He said that he had read the long farewell no less than ten times. I personally translated this book into Japanese in 2006.

In fact, there is an obvious detail compared with Dancing and Farewell. In the classic black humor passage in Dance, the protagonist is taken by the police "fisherman" and "literature" for questioning, which can be compared with the plot in "Long Farewell". When Terry Lenox just disappeared, two policemen came to Marlowe's house and knocked at the door-it was simply a tribute passage.

In Dancing and Farewell, Wu Yetian and Terry Lenox, who are equally rich but equally tired, like to have nothing to do, and come to the protagonist to drink and complain and smell things like them.

Haruki Murakami himself said that after writing Pinball in 1973, he had a choice. Then there is The Adventure of Looking for Sheep. In my opinion, it's a bit, from Fitzgerald to Chandler. Listening to the Wind and Pinball in 1973 are similar in style, fresh and melancholy, with a little artistic conception of "the other shore is empty" which he later signed, but most of them are still struggling with the lost time. Beautiful and elegant school. In "Looking for Sheep" and "Dancing", the protagonists took action and began to have the meaning of detective novels, and all kinds of Haruki Murakami-style imagination, black humor and metaphors came out. The protagonists in Looking for Sheep and Dancing Machine are not fuel-efficient lamps. They are cold and humorous, wandering around, fighting against collisions, and have Chandler's Marlowe flavor. If you look at the English version of Haruki Murakami's novels, it is particularly obvious compared with Chandler.

In fact, Lin's translation is really out of tune, which is here. At this stage, Haruki Murakami's short paragraphs decrease, while his monologues or long paragraphs describing his surroundings increase. So it seems that Lin's translation is slightly sticky, flexible and capable, and there are fewer cold jokes.

It is well known that Haruki Murakami likes Carver. Minimalism has also been described as a bad topic. Think of something else

Carver, this is interesting. There is a very interesting trend in Cathedral and You really ran that many miles. Proceed from reality and gradually transition to an almost empty situation. This is especially true at the end of the cathedral. The blind man slowly pulls away from his sense of reality, turns his back on the guests, and everything enters his void field. In fact, at the end of Carver's article mourning his father, everyone began to read Raymond and had a similar impression.

Coltaza's short stories are similar, but he prefers to transition from one extreme to the other rather than stop in the void.

Haruki Murakami likes to describe a mysterious world, which is the most similar place between him and Carver.

In Haruki Murakami's novels, two women often appear. One is gentle, old and introverted, and the other is lively, young and often rambling. For example:

Norwegian forest: depressed Naoko, green like a deer in spring.

Dance machine: from Miki's quiet and psychic to magical snow.

A Cold Wonderland: A 29-year-old pregnant library girl and a pink girl of 17 years old.

Strange bird's record: the missing wife, God-obsessed Ala 'alame.

And so on.

The former basically represents the past times and the dead people, and is connected with darkness (for example, Meggie is connected with the shepherd, and the missing wife is connected with her terrible brothers Naoko and Muyue), which is the other side of darkness. The latter relatively represents the sunny world of life.

So I have a theory. In Pinball in 1973, twin girls basically represent lively young girls, and the gentle and introverted girl is a pinball machine. In that story, the pinball machine basically played the role of connecting young people in the early 1970s. Finally, when the protagonist sees the pinball machine and talks with it, the real core topic of the novel appears.

In the face of these two girls, the protagonist usually sleeps with the gentle, old and introverted one, not the latter one-although he has been close to Qing Zi several times. Generally speaking, Haruki Murakami seems to want to "connect with the past" through "a woman who has slept in the past".

So in "South of the Border, West of the Sun", the protagonist finally slept with Shimamoto. In Kafka by the Sea, Kafka Tamura basically had a semi-incestuous impulse.

In his novels, the relationship between women and heroes falls into two categories. In front of the mature heroine, the hero looks cute and unreliable (the moment when he confronted Yumi in Sleeping and Dancing); In front of the lively little girl, the hero seems a little nervous (when dancing and snowing). This is a good way for him to create a burden: in the relationship between two people, there is always one person who has a special plan and moves forward; The other hesitated and hesitated. The most typical is to attack the bakery again.

Another trend:

In his novels, people who really participate in the plot are basically smarter than him. Needless to say, all the girls who talk about God are smarter than him. And he is good at describing "horribly realistic villains" and their dark charm. For example, the secretary in the Adventure of Looking for Sheep, the villain in Tianya and Cold Wonderland, Kimura Tuo in Dancing and Dancing, and Niuhe in Strange Birds. Their habits, generally have such a subtext:

"Hey, everyone is mixed mouth to eat, are adults, why beat around the bush? I don't want to be hypocritical, but it's better to make things clear directly! "

Most of his novels can actually be summarized into a similar story:

An independent protagonist who is "anachronistic" and old-fashioned, misses the sandy beach scenery and old friends in his early hometown, dislikes the cold face of realism in big cities and loves to play with cold humor.

right

A dark, realistic, cunning, huge, time-consuming, with the shadow of death, land reclamation to eat all the good old things, capital-based, violent, big hide-and-seek game.

The past time and the shadow of war in Listening to the Wind, the empty time and new villa area in Pinball, the sheep in Looking for Sheep, the shadow of death in Dancing, the shadow of the rising valley in Birds and Boris Peeling Behind, and the darkness that forced Nakata to become stupid and kept invading his body in Kafka by the Sea. "

Further guess:

As we all know, the relationship between Haruki Murakami and his father is not very good. The father image in his novels often appears utilitarian, secular, huge, dark and related to war. Haruki Murakami has a much better attitude towards women, especially older women than men. In Kafka by the Sea, Kafka Tamura indirectly killed his father. I think this can be used as another metaphor for him: he is very resistant to the established and authoritarian patriarchy-"big guy".

In my opinion, the cleverest thing about Haruki Murakami is:

He is good at describing the dialogue and atmosphere of one or two people, so he freely describes "the darkness of the normal world transits to the other side of the world". So no matter how long his space is, there are very few conversations between three or more people. This is also the reason why his protagonist has to walk around in the later period: the protagonist is full of books and wants to string everything together. Besides, he is very good at using metaphors. What his metaphor needs is not accuracy, but a strong sense of picture. Therefore, his novels have a very delicate and beautiful sense of lens, "hunger is as endless as Sinai Peninsula seen in the air", "quiet as sinking into the bottom of the lake" and so on. In addition, while he keeps saying that he is ordinary, he spits maliciously (this is also a bit of a poor translation of Lin), which makes people feel that:

This withdrawn guy, occasionally sad but overall cold and humorous, nostalgic and beautiful, resists the step-by-step society, hates politics, war and huge machines, occasionally plays cute, symbolic and imaginative. He is playing hide-and-seek with a huge, slow and dark opponent. In novels, he is often suppressed by his opponents; But in some short stories, the opponents are not scary enough, and it is harmless to toss each other-so his short stories, such as midnight spider monkey, are particularly happy.