The other day I was at work reading the book “Dune” during my lunch break. One of the Japanese staff walked in with the biggest look of shock I’ve seen from her. She then said, “You are reading!?!?!? Not a comic book?!?!?!!” I always get that remark when people find out that I enjoy reading novels as much as the next person, and that my life isn’t all about video games, movies, or anime. Lately as part of my large catching up plan, I’ve been reading a lot of good books. “Dune” was a great read. A while back I read a fantastic cyberpunk novel called “The Diamond Age” that I highly recommend.
A friend of mine sometime back recommended this book, “Norwegian Wood” to me. He said that since I liked Japanese novels, that I would get a kick out of it. I was pretty surprised by just how good a book it was. Its not in my particularly favorable genres, but the love story told in its pages was magnificent, touching, sad, funny, you name it. Apparently the book and its author Haruki Murakami are pretty big here, yet even though the book says its a book “everyone” has read in Japan, only one of the foreigners at work had ever heard about it. Then again it is 20 years old, so I wouldn’t expect some of the people there to know about it. But certainly, its a great love story, and the late 60’s college setting really is a change of pace for the modern Japanese novels I have read, particularly the ones I read in college, that tended to fall into the usual overplayed time period of post war Japan. Definitely one of the best love stories I’ve read. The author even described my old home of Yotsuya perfectly in the book.
Next up for me, the works of Sherlock Holmes, and Neuromancer.
sneaky
I read that too. I thought it was good.
Right now trying to read more in Japanese, so I bought a couple used books for 100 yen. One that I got is called あなたのなかのＤＮＡ (The DNA inside you). It was written in 1994 so maybe it isn’t up to date with the latest and greatest. But it is fairly easy to read because it is apparently written for people that slept through science class…It answers questions like “Where is DNA?” and “Is DNA alive?” (No…it’s just a material!) So the word of the day is 細胞
I’ve been meaning to read some more books in Japanese myself as well. I bought 凉宮ハルヒの憂鬱 (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya), and ロードズ島戦記 (Record of Lodoss War), but I haven’t had the time to concentrate on them.
hmmm…Japanese fonts in the comments are really small. But time for bed…no more tweaking the website tonight!
Murakami is pretty much one of the most important authors in the world. He’s on the short-list for the Nobel Prize.
Everything he’s written is great. Although the novels “Norwegian Wood” and “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” are considered his best, I’m a huge fan of his short stories, particuarly in the collection “The Elephant Vanishes”. Supposedly there’s a movie of “Norwegian Wood” in production.
He’s also known as one of the best travel writers in Japan. He lived in Greece, Italy, and the US for like twenty years and wrote lots of great essays about it, but almost none of them have been translated yet. Saori almost started crying when she got her copy of them mailed from Japan.
Norwegian Wood is excellent. I’ve only read that and one other short story. I’d like to read more, but for such a famous author, his stuff is woefully represented at the library and most book stores. I guess I should buy some more on the internets.
Its really interesting, I took a lot of Japanese literature courses at UT and Sophia University, mostly consisting of works written after the war, and yet I can’t for the life of me remember ever hearing his name mentioned in any of the classes. Real shame too as I wish I had read this back then, and even in 06 when it was recommended to me. The prose is magnificent. There was one paragraph just describing Yotsuya, my old home, that even though it was describing it from 1969, made me feel at home. Not to mention the descriptions of loneliness and love really were close to my own feelings.
I kinda want to try and reread it sometime in Japanese, and get the feeling of the novel in its original form. I also want to get his other works.”Sputnik Sweetheart” sounded pretty interesting in its description, and the title rules.