"As a spokesman for disaffected youth of the post-1960s, Murakami Haruki has become one of the most important voices in contemporary Japanese literature, and he has gained a following in the United ...States through translations of his works. In Dances with Sheep, Matthew Strecher examines Murakami’s fiction—and, to a lesser extent, his nonfiction—for its most prevalent structures and themes. Strecher also delves into the paradoxes in Murakami’s writings that confront critics and casual readers alike. Murakami writes of “serious” themes yet expresses them in a relatively uncomplicated style that appeals to high school students as well as scholars; and his fictional work appears to celebrate the pastiche of postmodern expression, yet he rejects the effects of the postmodern on contemporary culture as dangerous. Strecher’s methodology is both historical and cultural as he utilizes four distinct yet interwoven approaches to analyze Murakami’s major works: the writer’s “formulaic” structure with serious themes; his play with magical realism; the intense psychological underpinnings of his literary landscape; and his critique of language and its capacity to represent realities, past and present. Dances with Sheep links each of these approaches with Murakami’s critical focus on the fate of individual identity in contemporary Japan. The result is that the simplicity of the Murakami hero, marked by lethargy and nostalgia, emerges as emblematic of contemporary humankind, bereft of identity, direction, and meaning. Murakami’s fiction is reconstructed in Dances with Sheep as a warning against the dehumanizing effects of late-model capitalism, the homogenization of the marketplace, and the elimination of effective counterculture in Japan."
Haruki Murakami Strecher, Matthew C; Thomas, Paul L
2016, 2016-03-22, Letnik:
7
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Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has achieved incredible popularity in his native country and world-wide as well as rising critical acclaim. Murakami, in addition to receiving most of the major ...literary awards in Japan, has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. Yet, his relationship with the Japanese literary community proper (known as the Bundan) has not been a particularly friendly one.One of Murakami's central and enduring themes is a persistent warning not to suppress our fundamental desires in favor of the demands of society at large. Murakami's writing over his career reveals numerous recurring motifs, but his message has also evolved, creating a catalogue of works that reveals Murakami to be a challenging author. Many of those challenges lie in Murakami's blurring of genre as well as his rich blending of Japanese and Western mythologies and styles-all while continuing to offer narratives that attract and captivate a wide range of readers. Murakami is, as Oe Kenzaburo once contended, not a "Japanese writer" so much as a global one, and as such, he merits a central place in the classroom in order to confront readers and students, but to be challenged as well.Reading, teaching, and studying Murakami serves well the goal of rethinking this world. It will open new lines of inquiry into what constitutes national literatures, and how some authors, in the era of blurred national and cultural boundaries, seek now to transcend those boundaries and pursue a truly global mode of expression.
Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. Despite Murakami’s critical and commercial success, particularly in the United States, his role ...as a mediator between Japanese and American literature and culture is seldom discussed. Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami’s fiction, Rebecca Suter complicates our understanding of the author’s oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific. Suter concentrates on Murakami’s short stories—less known in the West but equally worthy of critical attention—as sites of some of the author’s bolder experiments in manipulating literary (and everyday) language, honing cross-cultural allusions, and crafting metafictional techniques. This study scrutinizes Murakami’s fictional worlds and their extraliterary contexts through a range of discursive lenses: modernity and postmodernity, universalism and particularism, imperialism and nationalism, Orientalism and globalization. By casting new light on the style and substance of Murakami’s prose, Suter situates the author and his works within the sphere of contemporary Japanese literature and finds him a prominent place within the broader sweep of the global literary scene.
The novel Kafka on the Shore is one of the most enigmatic works of contemporary writer Haruki Murakami. Since its very release, critics and scholars have been sharing their impressions and ...interpretations on various aspects of the book, one of them being the abundant references to Western elements (myths, songs, writers, icons and so forth). The present paper is the final draft of the postdoctoral research ‘Murakami on the shore: the dialogue with the West in the construction of the novel’, developed from July 2015 to June 2016. It aims at rethinking (as well as questioning) the way the study of the relation between Japan and the West can be addressed in the novel. The research, conducted as a bibliographical investigation, used key concepts like cultural identity (Hall, 2006) and border-blurring (Auestad, 2008). It defies the tendency of studying cosmopolitan authors like Haruki Murakami from the perspective of East-West duality, and defends that such analysis ought to consider East and West as complementary, almost inextricable, not regarding them as opposite or impermeable, and never as a limitation to the author himself.
El volumen Primera persona del singular –aparecido en 2020– acoge ocho relatos breves de Murakami que permiten descubrir temas ya tratados en su repertorio: desconcierto vital, episodios desairados ...de una juventud infeliz, la irrupción de lo fantástico, la impostura. Comprobar cómo se plasman los temas planteados y el formato textual seleccionado es el objetivo de este trabajo. Además de constatar su vínculo con las obras anteriores, importa al mismo tiempo reconocer qué nuevo aporte ofrece este conjunto cuentístico, por lo que se ha atendido a reseñar los nuevos territorios que se recorren. Destaca señaladamente aquí el tono desde el que se narra, ahora ya el de la edad avanzada. Encontramos así que reflexiona sobre la vecindad de la muerte inexorable, que también presenta códigos de principios morales, todo siempre desde la perspectiva de una primera persona del singular desde la cual Murakami parece darnos a un tiempo pistas personales y otras ficticias, con la apariencia de verdad que le ofrece el género japonés de Novelas del yo, al que de algún modo se remite.
The concert "Listen to Haruki Murakami" was created in 2015 and toured in Singapore and Seoul, Korea, as a Japan Foundation project. Japanese author Murakami Haruki is well-known for his frequent ...references to music in his works; however, there had been no officially permitted concert before this project, which integrated and interweaved the texts and songs used in his works. In this essay, the author, who had been the chief officer in charge of this concert, reflects on the process of creating this concert in chronological order and describes challenges and difficulties she had faced from an insider’s point of view. More specifically, this essay covers the questions of (a) how the basic concept was created to interweave music and texts, (b) how songs were selected from Murakami’s novels, (c) how Murakami’s texts, including the Japanese originals, English translation, and Korean translation, were selected for the concert, and (d) how the concert script was finalized through collaboration with those involved in this project.
We attempted to trace the technological evolution of the tri-pack three-color separation photographic film “Sakura Tripack Film'' from the product development to the product withdrawal. This film was ...used in the “Rokuoh-sha style Natural Color Printing Method,'' a multilayer color printing method announced by Konishiroku Co., Ltd.(currently Konica Minolta Co., Ltd.)in 1940. After this film was released in June 1941, the improved type was released in June 1942. It is known that sales of this film ended around 1944, but many of the products have already been lost, and the image quality and specifications are unknown. The research material “2,000 specimens of Dr. Egashira'' were investi- gated in this study, which was prepared by the developer Haruki Egashira and was preserved at the Tokyo Polytech- nic University. As the result, it is found that the difference in specifications between the initial products and the im- proved products and the image quality of both products.
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