"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."
Este artigo faz uma investigação do comportamente em grupo e individual de um personagem japonês, cuja busca da individualidade perpassa por uma discussão do comportamento do sujeito japonêns ...contemporâneo e os desafios para se estabelecer frente aos desafios de um mundo veloz e desapegado dos afetos.
Haruki Murakami introduces a wide array of issues and topics in his fiction; his variegated characters typically enact a wide range of human attitudes and behaviours when encountering the problems of ...modern life. One recurrent theme in Murakami’s novels is memory. The novelist has a unique ability to present his characters “from the inside”, as it were, describing thus the interior mechanisms that make them who they are. His novels present an opportunity to understand the workings of memory and how people are led by its dictates. His characters often find themselves recollecting their past in order to sustain a present existence that is marred by some type of crisis. As they progress in time, protagonists experience a profound sense of disequilibrium that prompts them to return to the past in order to rebalance their self’s sense of value. In this regard, the paper investigates the dynamics of memory as well as its role in the formation of identity in Haruki Murakami’s novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2014). For this purpose, the paper draws on different theories of memory and identity in its analysis.
Haruki Murakami Strecher, Matthew C; Thomas, Paul L
2016, 2016-03-22, Letnik:
7
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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.
Published just a few years after the beginning of Japan's Lost Decade, Murakami Ryu's 1994 novel Popular Hits of the Showa Era posited that this new economic reality inflicted deep psychological ...wounds on individuals who were already deeply fractured. Within this text the invisible violence of post-Bubble Japan's social order is made explicit through a low-stakes, yet hyperviolent, guerilla war undertaken by a set of ludicrous and narcissistic characters whose increasingly deadly attacks are met with public indifference. Within the consumer-capitalist social order, personal satisfaction is the paramount goal (McGowan
2004
, 11-12). However, this system fosters the belief that it is necessary to be hostile and mistrustful of others (McGowan
2004
, 177-179). These aspects of consumer-capitalism have warped the psyches of the characters in this novel so deeply that even extreme violence is met with apathy. The deaths of others are viewed as a threat to their ego, rather than a tragedy. Rather than coalescing into a new social order in response to lives made hollow by consumer-capitalism, individuals in this novel are instead pulled apart. Blind to the violence that is perpetrated against them by consumer capitalism, Murakami's characters believe that their irrationality is rational (Kalekin-Fishman 2008, 537).
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.
Dormant or near-dormant short-period comets can unexpectedly regain the ability to eject dust. In many known cases, the resurrection is short-lived and lasts less than one orbit. However, it is ...possible that some resurrected comets can remain active in later perihelion passages. We search the archival images of various facilities to look for these "reactivated" comets. We identify two candidates, 297P/Beshore and 332P/Ikeya-Murakami, both of which were found to be inactive or weakly active in the previous orbit before their discovery. We derive a reactivation rate of , which implies that typical short-period comets only become temporarily dormant a few times or less. Smaller comets are prone to rotational instability and may undergo temporary dormancy more frequently. Next generation high-cadence surveys may find more reactivation events of these comets.
El trabajo aborda el conjunto de relatos cortos de Murakami traducidos al español, un total de cincuenta y cinco cuentos, recogidos -salvo uno- en cuatro volúmenes compilatorios: El elefante ...desaparece, Sauce ciego, mujer dormida, Después del terremoto y Hombres sin mujeres. Se busca reconocer la singularidad de cada una de estas obras, y al mismo tiempo las marcas propias de la narrativa del autor. Para ello, se atiende básicamente al panorama temático que cada una de estas compilaciones ofrece. Es pertinente rastrear cómo se ha pergeñado cada uno de estos libros, y los vínculos que pudieran encontrarse con la obra global del autor. Junto al registro del material temático, interesa tener en cuenta el posible empleo de procedimientos narrativos señaladamente murakamianos.
Contemporary literature encompasses not only works but also culture, defining the processes of the past preserved in the memory of posterity. Haruki Murakami influenced the shaping of this modern ...culture to a great extent. The research purpose is to investigate the phenomenon of Haruki Murakami analysing the components of the collective and individual consciousness of the Japanese nation in his fiction. At the methodological level, the following methods of analyzing literary phenomena were used in the training to solve the set tasks: hermeneutic interpretation and sociological method. The research reveals the main features of the urban world of the Japanese society portraying it in progress (from the post-war period to the present moment). The evolution process is portrayed as detachment, independence and solitude. The literary factors reflect both internal spiritual relations and global intercultural links. At the same time, the writer portrays Japan as a country experiencing technological and informational progress, thereby declaring that it is ready to accept and participate in the world changes and become a part of the globalisation process. The writer has made a great contribution to the treasury of Japanese literature and his works are considered an important part of the intercultural interactions between countries they are trying to achieve in a global world. The results close the theoretical and empirical gaps in the literature and literary criticism and contribute to the analysis of the cultural and literary traditions of Japan.
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