Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words [Paperback]

"If literature is dead, someone forgot to invite Haruki Murakami to the funeral" Jay Rubin; "He has been made the subject of breathless comparisons: Auster, Salinger, Chandler, Borges... His books sell in millions in Japan; now he is gaining large readerships worldwide. One day, his growing legions of supporters insist, he will win the Nobel Prize" Matt Thompson, Guardian

A lively and eccentric new critical study --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Exciting and coherent-Illuminates with fluent intelligence --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

This genial guide to 'cool' Japanese author Haruki Murakami mimics the playfulness of his fictions...His intuitive critique gets close to the spirit of his subject --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

As a young man, Haruki Murakami played records and mixed drinnks at his Tokyo jazz club, "Peter Cat", then wrote at the kitchen table until the sun came up. He loves music of all kinds and when he writes, his words have a music all of their own, much of it learned from jazz. Besides being the distinguished translator of Murakami's work, Professor Rubin is a self-confessed fan. He has written a book for other fans who want to know more about this reclusive writer. He reveals the autobiographical elements in Murakami's fiction; explains how he developed a distinctive new style in Japanese; and how, on his return to Japan from America, he came to regard the Kobe earthquake (in which his parents' house was destroyed) and the Tokyo subway gas attack as twin manifestations of a violence lying just beneath the surface of Japanese life. In tracing Murakami's career, Rubin uses interviews conducted with the author between 1993 and 2001, and draws on insights and observations gathered from having collaborated with Murakami for more than a decade in preparing his works for an English-speaking audience.

Jay Rubin is a professor of Japanese Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State and Making Sense of Japanese, and he edited Modern Japanese Writers for the Scribner Writers Series. He has translated into English two novels by the Japanese writer Soseki Natsume, and also Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and after the quake. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.