Photo by Eamonn McCabe

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” ― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami, like his protagonists, is not drawn to crowds or fame. When asked by the Paris Review if he has any literary friends, he responded with “No, I don’t think so.” When pressed, he elaborated

I’m a loner. I don’t like groups, schools, literary circles. At Princeton, there was a luncheonette, or something like that, and I was invited to eat there. Joyce Carol Oates was there and Toni Morrison was there and I was so afraid, I couldn’t eat anything at all! […] I just want to have . . . distance.

Murakami’s preference for distance has left an impression on his writing, which features recurring themes of alienation and loneliness. His work is frequently melancholy, marked by fatalism, and tends to the surreal. His fiction is heavily influenced by Kafka, but it is not bereft of humor. Quite on the contrary, Murakami’s dry humor shines through the melancholia, in part due to his admiration of the American satirist Richard Brautigan.

In addition to Kafka and Brautigan, Murakami names Chandler, Vonnegut, Salinger, and Kerouac as early influencers, as well as Western classical and jazz music. His taste for Western culture falls out of step with his parents’ profession. He was born in 1949 to two professors of traditional Japanese literature.

Their love of both traditional culture and writing did not immediately pass down to their son. Murakami began writing fairly late, at the age of 29, but his appreciation of the arts was fostered early. He studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife Yoko whom he married at age 23. Although Murakami does not claim any writers in his social circle, he compares Yoko as the Zelda to his F. Scott Fitzgerald — his first reader, trusted advisor, and confidante.

By age 29 he was running a jazz club in Tokyo named Peter Cat, much like the protagonist of his later novel South of the Border, West of the Sun. According to an oft-repeated story, he was inspired to write his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979) in 1978 while watching a baseball game in Jingu Stadium between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp.  When American Dave Hilton hit a double, Murakami suddenly realized that he could write a novel. He went home and began writing that night, and completed Hear the Wind Sing in ten months. He sent it off to the only literary contest that accepted a work of that length, the Gunzo Award, and, naturally, won Best First Novel.

Since then Murakami’s novels and short stories have won numerous awards. His most notable works include Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995), Kafka on the Shore (2002), and 1Q84 (2009–2010).

Several of his works have been adapted for film or stage, including a 75 minute film adaptation of this week’s story “Tony Takitani”. The film played at various film festivals and was released in New York and Los Angeles on July 29, 2005.

As Murakami tells it, he was intrigued by the name Tony Takitani when at a garage sale in Hawaii he found a yellow T-shirt that said, “Tony Takitani, House (D).” At the time, Takitani was running for office. Murakami decided to write the man’s life story.

Early in his career, Murakami maintained a position of social detachment, refraining from commenting on social or political issues. But he credits a stay in the United States in 1991 as changing his position from one of detachment to commitment. His early books, he said, originated in an individual darkness, while his later works tap into the darkness found in society and history.

This shift is reflected in both his work and his public life. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995) is considered his first socially conscious book, dealing in part with war crimes committed by the Japanese in Manchuria. This is a topic which stays with Murakami to this day, as evidenced by his April 2015 call for Japan to apologize for the atrocities committed against China, Korea, and other countries during WWII.

His social consciousness extends beyond socio-political awareness to individual intimacy and care. In interviews, Murakami stresses the importance of being kind to his readers and serving their needs in his writing. In 2014 he launched an advice column where he personally answers fans questions about their everyday lives, from how to navigate sticky social situations to, of course, love.

Image taken from Mr. Murakami’s Place.

“I can’t think of another writer alive today with the kind of intimacy he has with his readers — and he takes it very very seriously,” says Roland Kelts, a journalist who has previously written about Murakami for The New Yorker.

Although his advice column is written exclusively in Japanese, the Washington Post has written a piece with translated excerpts that capture the quaintness and sincerity well.

His commitment to people has made him a natural choice for Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2015. Writing for Time, Yoko Ono states

He is a writer of great imagination and human sympathy, one who has enthralled millions of readers by building fictional worlds that are uniquely his. Murakami-san has a singular vision, as informed by pop culture as it is by deep channels of Japanese tradition.

A list of short stories by Murakami and published by the New York can be found here.

Between Mary Flannery O’Connor’s diagnosis with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus in 1951 and her eventual death in 1964, Flannery O’Connor wrote more than two dozen short stories and two novels. Born on March 25th, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia (USA), she died on August 3rd, 1964 (aged 39) in Milledgeville, Georgia, from complications of the disease, which had also killed her father.

After a strange episode when she was a young girl, being featured on Pathé News for having a trained chicken that could walk backwards, she graduated from Peabody Laboratory School and Georgia State College for Women with a social sciences degree. Whilst she attended GSCW, she served as editor for the college literary magazine, The Corinthian, and contributed many cartoons and written pieces including essays, fiction and occasional poems.

She won a scholarship to the State University of Iowa to study journalism, but after one term she decided that journalism wasn’t for her, and asked to be transferred to the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop to study for a masters in Creative Writing.

Her style has been described as ‘Southern Gothic’, filled with black humour and her characters are often morally flawed. Despite being a devout Catholic, her stories often feature fundamental Protestants. The writing is underpinned by her characters’ struggle with human sinfulness and a desire for divine grace. She wrote: “Grace changes us and change is painful.”

She also weaves dark humour through her stories, often based on the disparity between her characters’ limited perceptions and the awesome fate awaiting them. Another source of humour is frequently found in her portrayal of well-meaning liberals trying to cope with the rural South.

O’Connor was hard-working, spending each morning writing even as she struggled in her later years with lupus. She never married, relying for companionship on her close relationship with her mother and her vast correspondence. Writer Betty Hester received a weekly letter from O’Connor for over nine years.

For her work, she received many honours, including an O. Henry Award in 1957 and the National Book Award in 1972, and she was the first fiction writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America.

Ernest Hemingway working at his book For Whom the Bell Tolls at Sun Valley, Idaho in December 1939

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21st 1899, to Grace Hall-Hemingway, a musician, and Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician.

In his  early years, he developed a taste for outdoor adventure in the family’s summer home on Walloon Lake in Michigan, which would come to influence his writing.

On leaving high school in 1917, he joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter, and he later took their style guide to heart for his fiction writing: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”

Early in 1918, he volunteered to help the war effort in Europe, signing on to be an ambulance driver in Italy. Those familiar with Hemingway’s work will know that an experience in Italy was described later in a non-fiction book, Death in the Afternoon.

His gallantry in assisting Italian soldiers won him the Italian Silver Medal for Bravery, but a bad injury resulting from mortar fire took him off the battlefield. Whilst recuperating, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, but she left him for an Italian officer. This experience affected his relationships thereon after, and he abandoned wives before they could abandon him.

After returning from Europe, he became staff writer and foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly in 1919. In September 1921 he married his first wife, Hadley Richardson,  and two months later, the couple moved to Paris with Hemingway working for the Toronto Star as their foreign correspondent. It was this period that inspired the fictional account of their lives in Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife. Hemingway’s first book, an anthology of short stories and poems called, to-the-point true to Hemingway fashion, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in 1923. It was quickly followed by In Our Time, another collection of vignettes and stories.

He also worked on The Transatlantic Review with Ford Madox Ford, which featured some of his short stories. Around this time, he began to earn the praise of critics, who credited him for reinvigorating the short story genre.

Hemingway began work on his first novel on his birthday, 21st of July, 1925. In October 1926, The Sun Also Rises was published.

There followed a glittering career as a writer, including such major works as A Farewell To Arms, To Have and Have Not, For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and many of his novels, short stories and non-fiction works have been made into major films. The Old Man and the Sea, which was published in 1951 after Across the River and Into the Trees garnered bad reviews, won him a Pulitzer Prize the following year. In 1954 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

During his life, Hemingway travelled extensively, covering the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. During the Second World War, he covered the hostilities for Collier’s Magazine, and was present at the Normandy Landings, and at the liberation of Paris in August 1945. He was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery in WWII by the United States Military, having been “under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions”.

But not everything in Hemingway’s life was positive. His father committed suicide in the winter of 1928, just minutes before a letter had arrived from Ernest telling him to not worry about money troubles. He commented, “I’ll probably go the same way.” During his life, he was beset by injuries from accidents and war coverage. Apart from the injury sustained in Italy in 1918, he was concussed in London in a car accident; another car accident in 1945 smashed his knee and caused a deep forehead wound; in 1944 in Africa, he nearly died after being involved in two successive plane crashes; and in 1955 on a fishing expedition in Africa, a bush fire caused him second degree burns. In Venice in 1955 his fourth wife, Mary, reported his injuries consisted of two cracked discs, a kidney and liver rupture, a dislocated shoulder and a broken skull.

When he was in Paris, he became friends with Irish writer James Joyce, and spent many evenings in heavy drinking sessions. His obsession with drink stayed with him. The uncle of his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, bought the couple a house in Key West. It is said the location, opposite the lighthouse, made it easy for Hemingway to find it on his way home from drinking sessions at a local bar, Sloppy Joe’s.

He suffered from severe headaches, high blood pressure, weight problems, and diabetes. His drinking increased partly to mask the pain from his injuries. He began to sink into depression as, one after another, his great literary friends began to die.

In his final years, his mental state deteriorated, and he became confused, disorganised and irritable. His brother and his sister, as well as his father, all committed suicide. On July 2nd, 1961, Hemingway unlocked the basement storeroom in his house in Idaho, removed his favourite Boss shotgun, pushed two shells into it, put the end of the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. His complicated history as war hero, writer, womanizer and alcoholic, polarized is reception. To some he was an inscrutable enigma, to others a hero, and to others still a villain.

Regardless of one’s opinion on his character, he is sparse writing irrefutably changed the world of literature.  Hemingway referred to his style as the Iceberg Theory: the facts float above the water, the supporting structure and symbolism operate out of sight. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the short novel The Old Man and The Sea, where the simple tale of an old fisherman parallels on many levels with religious texts.

This week we’ll be discussing “The Old Man at the Bridge”.

Abe Kobo was born Abe Kimifusa in Tokyo in 1924. (Kobo is the Chinese reading of his given name.) His father was a doctor and taught medicine at a local college. As a small boy, his family moved to Mukden, Manchuria, home of the Manchurian Incident of 1931 in which the Japanese military staged an assault on Japanese railway tracks, and blamed the Chinese as a pretext for invasion. From 1931 to 1945, the Japanese ruled Manchuria as its puppet state under a brutal regime which terrorized local Russian and Chinese populations. From this distant and grim view of his native Japan, Abe grew critical of modern culture.

He returned to Japan in 1941, and enrolled at Tokyo Imperial University in 1943 to pursue medicine. However, his passion for writing, and indifference to medicine prevented a career as a doctor. He graduated in 1948 with a medical degree under the condition that he would never practice, an arrangement which allowed him to save face.

He was first published as a poet in 1947, and then as a novelist in 1948 for The Road Sign at the End of the Street. Though the first novel established his reputation in literary and avant-garde circles, he did not receive widespread, international acclaim until his 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes.

For more information on Abe, I turned to Rachel Stewart who earned an M.A. in English Criticism and Theory from the University of Exeter. Her thesis titled The Nature of Worlding in Contemporary Japanese Literature will be published in the journal Literature Compass. (Full disclosure: Rachel Stewart is my lovely, delightful, sharply intelligent sister-in-law.)

Anais: On next week’s podcast we’re reading “The Magic Chalk” by Abe Kobo. I know you’ve studied much of his work, and Japanese fiction in general. What can you tell me about Abe as a writer, philosopher, and artist?

Rachel: How fantastic that you are delving into Abe Kobo. He is one of Japan’s better known authors, but his work still deserves a wider readership. He is essentially an absurdist who is often sold to the West as Japan’s Kafka, and that is on many levels true in the sense that he ridicules modernity, but I think he is less humorous than Kafka. From a literary history perspective that so often aims to categorise writers by nationality, he is an interesting case because he was brought up in Manchuria and that has led critics to claim he was better able to criticise modern Japanese culture.

Kobo was very much influenced by Western authors who were beginning to be translated and published in literary magazines at the time, perhaps most significantly Sartre. Kobo was largely concerned with the evolution of humans, which was no doubt influenced by his war experience. I think it’s important to remember when reading Kobo that the Western reader at the time would have had a typically exoticised view of Japan, which is to say cherry blossoms and geishas. His writing certainty helped to raise the status of Japanese literature.  His focus on figures who are marked by the notion of flight, markedly the nomad, deserter, Jew, and gypsy, brings attention to the individual within the state; the concept of which was a contentious topic at the time in Japan, and in many ways remains so.

For a complete contrast I would recommend a ‘High Literature’ author like Kawabata Yasunari or Yukio Mishima, both of whom were very right-wing in contrast to Kobo.

Anais: Could you talk a little more about the difference between Abe and the high literature, right-wing authors like Kawabata and Mishima? What are the main differences?

Rachel: Authors like Mishima and Kawabata were very much concerned with how Japan was perceived by the wider world. Yukio actually committed the most traditional suicide harikiri (seppuku) over the state of Japan’s political future amongst other things. They wrote about huge topics like death and impossibility – Kawabata’s House of Sleeping Beauties is a brilliant example – while Kobo was more concerned with the state of human nature in the postwar years. History plays an important role here as the upbringing of each author varies considerably as does the political atmosphere that they each grew up in. Put simply, Kobo commented on human evolution (or devolution) and society, whilst others are known to have fought against the changes that postwar politics brought to traditional Japanese culture.

Anais: How did ‘high literature’ authors like Mishima and Kawabata receive Abe?

Rachel: As far as I know, Kobo was well received in Japan, even by the very established authors we’re talking about alongside him. The interesting thing about Kobo is that for those who love him he is Japanese, but for those who don’t he is not Japanese, because of his upbringing in Manchuria.

Anais: What exactly is the distinction between ‘high literature’ and ‘low literature’?

Rachel: They’re Japanese terms used in elite Japanese circles, and only really discussed by big name scholars. It’s really a huge area that has a great deal to do with early postwar politics and literary history.  It’s especially difficult to talk about from a Western view point, because it is too closely tied to questions of evolving cultural identity, you see. These days the distinction has become fairly subjective, and it’s a topic that is quite difficult to be politically correct about. Generally, low literature means writing that is not quintessentially Japanese, for example, works that include English words and references to Western pop culture. Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana are classed as low, while a modern high writer might be someone like Murakami Ryu.

Anais: You said that in some ways the comparison to Kafka is accurate. In which ways is it not?

Rachel: I think there is a more tangible element to Kobo than there is to Kafka. Kafka is more allegorical, while Kobo is at times more of a magical realist. Amazingly they both succeed in having their characters turn into inanimate objects or animals in a way that comments on social issues. The biggest difference for me is that Kobo is more concerned with the individual in modern society (bearing in mind that individualism can be a contested topic in a very group-centered culture like Japan), while Kafka is more concerned with ridiculing society as a whole.

***

Abe also had a passion for film and theater, writing screenplays and plays for the stage as well. He collaborated with Japanese director Teshigahara Hiroshi on the film adaptations of his novels The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another, and The Ruined Map. They also collaborated on The Pitfall, which is a film adaption of a TV series. The screenplay was also written by Abe.

Abe founded a theater company in the 1970’s and put on productions in Tokyo, Washington and New York in collaboration with his wife, Machi, who survived him along with their daughter, Neri, after his sudden heart failure in 1993. He was 68 (Click here for fascinating NY Time obituary).

All Japanese names in this article are listed in the Japanese convention of surname before given name.