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.

In preparation for HP7 coming out in a couple of weeks, I re-read the 6th book in the series — amazing how comfortable & familiar it feels. I originally read the book right after the birth of my first son — and was happy to think about the time in the future when he’ll read them for the first time — sort of like the way I shared The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia with my folks.

I’m really looking forward to the 7th book — and a little sad. It’s astonishing how quickly Harry’s world has become part of the fabric of our own — it feels like something that maybe happens just once a generation or so. Stephen King’s editorial in EW captures the feeling pretty well, I think.

Anyway,  this series is a great achievement — there’s an innocence that we don’t seem to have much of anymore, but also no shying away from tragedy. It’s a more accessible series, with more real characters than any of  the fantasies that I grew up with — I’m excited to find out how it ends, and to think about sharing Harry’s very first trip to Hogwarts in 6 or 7 years with SPL.