John’s Blog

I’m in the middle of reading After Dark, a novel by one of my half dozen favorite authors, Haruki Murakami (translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin). I was surprised to find an article this morning in one of the blogs I read about China — this is an interview with the writer in China who translates Murakami’s work into Chinese. This is something that never occurred to me, really — I always think of Murakami as fundamentally Japanese, but with American notes — and to think of him from a new perspective, particularly the Chinese angle, which he writes about some — is really eye-opening for me. Great interview.

Another essay by Murakami in the New York Times this weekend is great — it talks about how he writes like jazz.  My favorite bit of the interview is Murakami quoting great jazz pianist Thelonious Monk:

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

Fanastic. If you mean a note enough, it will sound different. I’ve always felt that something was different in great works — Murakami’s especially — and maybe this is it — the intensity of meaning, of nuance.

After Dark is good so far, but not my favorite. It takes place in the midnight-to-morning hours of Tokyo after the trains have stopped running. Sorta like Murakami’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” We’ll see how the 2nd half goes.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 7:29 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.