【光影岁月中的人+事】关于村上春树，你应该知道的…… 村上春树

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Haruki Murakami is quite possibly the most successful and influential cult author in the world today. The 59-year-old sells millions of books in Japan. His fifth novel, Norwegian Wood, sold more than 3.5m copies in its first year and his work has been translated into 40 languages, in which he sells almost as well. Last year’s novella, After Dark, shifted more than 100,000 copies in English in its first three months. His books are like Japanese food — a mix of the delicate, the deliberately bland and the curiously exotic. Dreams, memory and reality swap places, all leavened with dry humour. His translator, Professor Jay Rubin, says reading Murakami changes your brain. His world-view has inspired Sofia Coppola, the author David Mitchell and American bands such as the Flaming Lips. He is a recipient of the Franz Kafka prize, has honorary degrees from Princeton and Liège, and is tipped for the Nobel prize for literature.

1.MURAKAMI DIVIDES PEOPLE

In June 2000, the panel members of German television’s literary review show Das Literarische Quartett disagreed so violently about his writing that one of them quit after 12 years on the programme. Opinion is equally divided in Japan. While younger readers adore him and even choose to study at his alma mater, Waseda University, in the hope of living in the dorm he describes in Norwegian Wood, he is viewed as pop, trashy and overly westernised by Japan’s literary establishment, who prefer the formal writing of Mishima, Tanizaki or Kawabata. Born in Kyoto in 1949, he studied theatre arts at Waseda — although the course didn’t interest him hugely and he spent much of his time reading film scripts in the library. He was hugely influenced by the student rebellions in 1968, which find their way into many of his novels. As a result, he’s a typical baby boomer — openly critical of Japan’s obsession with capitalism. He finds Japanese traditions boring. This doesn’t go down very well.

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2.MURAKAMI IS HUGELY INFLUENTIAL

As well as countless Japanese novelists, the plot and style of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation were partly inspired by Murakami’s novels. David Mitchell — twice nominated for the Booker prize — owes a huge debt to him after reading him while teaching in Japan. Indeed, the title of his second novel, Number 9 Dream, is a veiled tribute to Norwegian Wood — both were named after Beatles songs. Among others, the Complicite theatre company adapted The Elephant Vanishes in 2003; Robert Wyatt reads from Murakami’s books on Max Richter’s 2006 album Songs from Before; and the Grateful Dead-style jam band Sound Tribe Sector 9 soundtracked a 2007 film version of the story All God’s Children Can Dance.

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3.HIS BOOKS WOULD NOT MAKE A HIGH-CONCEPT MOVIE PITCH

Imagine that JD Salinger and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had collaborated on a manga version of The Maltese Falcon. Norwegian Wood is the Japanese equivalent of The Catcher in the Rye — required reading for every troubled adolescent. Curiously, Murakami translated The Catcher in the Rye into Japanese and found it good but incomplete. “The story becomes darker and darker, and Holden Caulfield doesn’t find his way out of the dark world,” he argues. “I think Salinger himself didn’t find it either.” Murakami balances the mundane — intimate descriptions of preparing and eating simple meals feature regularly — with the fantastic. His protagonists are usually ordinary people trying to get by in life, until some type of ethereal male guide steers them into a new direction, sometimes quite literally. In All God’s Children Can Dance, Yoshiya, a young man working at a publishing company, wakes up with a crushing hangover and heads to his office hours later than usual. On the train coming home that night, he sees an older man who has the distinguishing features of his absent father. Yoshiya follows this man on the train, then through darkened, empty streets, to find himself in a deserted baseball diamond at night. The man vanishes, and Yoshiya stands on the pitcher’s mound in the cold wind and simply dances.

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4.MURAKAMI IS CONFLICTED ABOUT HIS HOMELAND

Both his parents taught Japanese literature, but he preferred reading second-hand pulp-fiction novels picked up in the port city of Kobe. He is a devoted fan of western music and hates the formalism of Mishima. In 1987, the huge success of Norwegian Wood made him an overnight celebrity, which terrified and annoyed him. In December 1988, he left the country, becoming a writing fellow at Princeton. A Japanese weekly magazine reported his departure under the headline “Haruki Murakami has escaped from Japan”. Published in 1994, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle picked apart the cultural groupthink that led Japan into the second world war, a theme he revisited in his first nonfiction book, Underground (published in 1997), about the Tokyo subway attacks by the Aum Shinrikyo cult. He worries about Japan’s tendency to forget wartime atrocities. Even so, he says: “Before, I wanted to be an expatriate writer. But I am a Japanese writer. This is my soil and these are my roots. You cannot get away from your country.”

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5.MURAKAMI USED TO RUN A JAZZ CLUB

He owned it from the end of his university years until 1981, when he was able to support himself with his writing. The experience may have contributed to the negative role of drinking in his books. He uses alcohol as a signifier of the petty, the negative and the evil. That is not to say he is teetotal. He loves beer, rewarding himself with a cold one for feats of writing or sporting endurance. Perhaps it was the crushed, social blend of booze and crowds that made Murakami uneasy. He once said: “When I had the club, I stood behind the bar, and it was my job to engage in conversation. I did that for seven years, but I’m not a talkative person. I swore to myself, once I’ve finished here, I will only ever talk to those people I really want to talk to.” As a result, he refuses to appear on radio or television.

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6.MURAKAMI OWES EVERYTHING TO BASEBALL

On April 1, 1978, he was watching a baseball game at the Jingu Stadium, in Tokyo, on a warm, sunny day — the Yakult Swallows against the Hiroshima Carp. An American player for the Swallows, Dave Hilton, stepped up to bat and hit a home run. In that instant, Murakami knew he was going to write a novel. “It was a warm sensation. I can still feel it in my heart,” he told Der Spiegel earlier this year. He started work that night on his debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing. It has many Murakami themes: there are animals; the hero is a young man, rather isolated, laconic, operating on cruise control and jobless; his eventual girlfriend has a twin (Murakami likes doppelgängers); cooking, eating, drinking and listening to western music are described often and in detail; and the plot is both incredibly simple and bafflingly complex. Writing while running a jazz bar proved difficult, however, and it is a fragmented, jumpy read. The unpublished manuscript won first prize in a competition run by the influential Japanese literary magazine Gunzo, but Murakami himself doesn’t like it very much and didn’t want it translated into English.

村上的一切都得益于棒球


1978年4月1日，村上正在东京神谷露天体育场看棒球比赛，天气温暖宜人、阳光灿烂，
是Yakult Swallows 对决 Hiroshima Carp。Swallowsdui2de一个美籍球员，戴维.希尔顿，举起球棒打了一个本垒打。就在那一瞬，村上觉得自己应该去写一篇小说。
“它是一个颤动，现在我还能在心底感受到那温暖的一颤”村上早年的时候这样对Der Spiegel说。
当天晚上他就开始写他的人生第一部小说，《且听风吟》。它包含许多村上春树的经典元素：动物，年轻男性作为主人公，深彻的孤独，对话，无业游走的人，双胞胎女孩（村上喜欢人物的分身设定），做饭、吃饭、喝啤酒，听西方音乐等等，这些在村上的作品中反复出现，并且很详细。故事情节令人难以置信地简单又令人困惑不已地复杂。
经营爵士乐酒吧的同时还要写作，这有点难，能写作的知识一些零碎时间，而且容易被打断。
在Gunzo杂志举办的一次日本最有影响的文学竞赛上，村上还未出版的手稿获得头奖，但是他自己并不怎么高兴，也不希望被翻译成英文。

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7.MURAKAMI LIKES CATS

His jazz bar was called Peter Cat, and cats appear in many of his stories — usually indicating that something very strange is about to happen. It’s a missing cat that starts off the whole surreal chain of events in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, while Kafka on the Shore features a confused and possibly brain-damaged pensioner called Nakata, who, after a mysterious incident involving a strange silver light at the end of the second world war, fell into a coma and woke to find that he had telepathic communication with cats. This, it turns out, is fortunate, as a conversation with an unusually bright member of the species, who is on the run from a strange cat-catcher called Johnnie Walker, ultimately leads to Nakata preventing the living embodiment of pure evil from destroying the planet.
As I said, something very strange.

村上喜欢猫


他的爵士乐酒吧就叫“PeterCat”，猫还出现在他的许多小说里-通常是奇特的事将要发生的标志。
在‌《奇鸟形状录》里，以一只走丢的猫展开一连串的超现实事件；《海边的卡夫卡》中，一个头脑混乱、很可能是有过脑损伤的名叫中田的老人，他在二战结束的时候，经历了一件神秘的事：被卷入到一道奇怪的银光里，然后陷入昏迷，醒来后竟然发现自己能通过心灵感应与猫交流。后来证明这种能力相当有用，通过与一个非同寻常的猫的交流——猫一直在逃避一个名为JohnnieWalker的捕猫怪人——中田尽自己所能去阻止这个活着的邪恶化身去破坏这个星球。
就像我说的那样，有些情节很怪。

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8.MURAKAMI REALLY LIKES MUSIC

Many of his book titles are musical references: Norwegian Wood after the Beatles song, South of the Border, West of the Sun after a Nat King Cole track and Dance, Dance, Dance after the Beach Boys tune. The three books in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle are named after a Rossini overture, a piano piece by Schumann and a character in Mozart’s Magic Flute respectively. In Kafka on the Shore, the hero’s contact with the spirit of a dead woman who has obsessed him throughout the novel finally comes about when he discovers a cache of vinyl records in a desolate library on the outskirts of a regional city and plays Beethoven’s Archduke Trio. In Pinball, 1973, revolutionary students occupying a university building find a classical-music library and spend every evening listening to records. One beautifully clear November afternoon, riot police force their way into the building while Vivaldi’s L’Estro armonico blares at full volume. One interviewer visited Murakami’s flat and found a room lined with more than 7,000 vinyl records.

村上很喜欢音乐

他的许多作品的标题就来源于音乐：《挪威的森林》是甲壳虫的歌，《国境以南，太阳以西》是纳京高的歌，《舞舞舞》则来自于海滩男孩。
《奇鸟形状录》中三本书的命名分别来自：罗西尼序曲，罗伯特·舒曼的钢琴曲和莫扎特《魔笛》中的一个角色。
在《海边的卡夫卡》中，一个死去的女孩缠着主人公并通过心灵互相交流，当主人公在远离城区的破落图书馆里发现了一张密纹唱片、放着贝多芬的三重奏时，女孩出现了。
《1973年得弹子球》里，闹革命的学生占领了一幢学校大楼，那里有一个古典乐储藏室，于是他们每天傍晚都听唱片来打发时间。一个干净漂亮的11月午后，在维瓦尔蒂的最大音量的音乐声中，警察冲进了这座大楼。
在一次到村上公寓的采访中，记者看到有一个房间竟然整整齐齐地放着超过7000张密纹唱片。

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9.MURAKAMI REALLY, REALLY LIKES RUNNING

His latest book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, is the closest thing he’s written to an autobiography (although some fans suspect Norwegian Wood has more than a little of his own life at its core).
In this extended monologue, Murakami reminisces about his life as seen through the prism of the sport.
He began running at the age of 33 to lose weight after giving up smoking. Within a year, he had run his first marathon. He’s also run the original marathon, between Marathon and Athens — albeit in reverse, because he didn’t want to arrive in Athens during the rush hour.
His personal best time for a marathon is 3hr 27min, in New York in 1991. In 1995, he ran in a 100km ultramarathon. It took him more than 11 hours and he nearly collapsed halfway through. He describes his second wind as a religious experience, but decided that he wouldn’t run another one. He believes that “a fortunate author can write maybe 12 novels in his lifetime. I don’t know how many good books I still have in me. I hope there are another four or five. When I am running, I don’t feel that limit. I publish a thick novel every four years, but I run a 10km race, a half-marathon and a marathon every year”. He gets up at 4am, writes for four hours, then runs 10km. On his tombstone, he would like the phrase “at least he never walked”.

村上特别特别喜欢跑步


村上的新书《当我谈跑步时我谈些什么》是他最接近于自传的作品（虽然一些村上迷猜测《挪威的森林》的故事内核来自于村上本人）。
在这本长篇独白里，村上透过运动的棱镜来追忆自己的人生。
33岁戒烟后，为了减肥，村上开始跑步。不到一年，他就开始跑人生第一次的马拉松。他还在雅典到马拉松之间跑过最原始的马拉松跑道------尽管和裴里匹底斯的方向相反，因为他可不想在交通高峰时段到达雅典。
他的个人马拉松最好记录是3小时27分钟， 1991年的纽约马拉松。1995年，他参加了100千米的超长距离马拉松比赛，在中途几乎要放弃，跑了超过11个小时才跑完全程。他把中途差点放弃最终又坚持下来当做一次宝贵的经历，并且决定再也不跑这样的比赛了。
他相信:”一个幸运的作家一生中可以写大概12部小说（由于其局限性的存在）。我不知道我还能写几本，希望会是四五本。当我跑步的时候，却感受不到局限性。我四年出版一本长篇，但是每年会跑一次10千米比赛，一次半程马拉松和一次全程马拉松。”
他四点起床，写作四个小时，然后再跑10千米。在他的墓碑上，可能会这样写“至少他不只是走路”。

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10.MURAKAMI IS A ROMANTIC

His protagonists are usually transformed by exquisitely tender physical unions with unusual, beautiful and often confused or mysterious women. He describes love with delicate wonder, and his hero is driven by passionate need once the woman of his life is revealed. “I have to talk to you,” Norwegian Wood’s Toru Watanabe tells the emotionally troubled Naoko. “I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”
Yet it usually doesn’t work out. Murakami’s women are often spirits or extremely fragile. They write the hero long, rambling letters from afar and either attempt suicide or manage to kill themselves during the course of the novel. In one case, the love interest turns out to be the ghost of the hero’s mother, captured when she was a teenage girl. Murakami himself has been married since 1971 to Yoko, although he has speculated in interviews about whether this was the right thing to do. “Unlike my wife, I don’t like company. I have been married for 37 years and often it is a battle,” he told Der Spiegel. ”I am used to being alone. And I enjoy being alone.”

村上是个浪漫主义者

他的主人公通常会因为女孩而被改变人生，这些女孩通常是罕见的、漂亮的、神秘不可捉摸的妙龄女郎。他用细腻的笔触描写爱，一旦主人公生命中的那个女孩出现，主人公就会全力以赴。

《挪威的森林》中的渡边这样告诉饱受情感困扰的直子：“我想告诉你，我有一百万件事要告诉你，这个世界我想要的只是你，我想看到你，跟你说话。我想要我们两个从头开始，一起做我们经历的每一件事。”

但是，也不尽如此，村上书中的女孩经常受到精神困扰、异常脆弱。她们从远方给主人公写长而凌乱的信，尝试自杀或者在小说中真的自杀了。在有一篇小说里，在看到母亲还是小女孩的照片时，主人公爱上了死去的母亲的鬼魂。

村上本人1971年与阳子结婚，尽管如此，有时在采访中他会怀疑这是否是正确的决定。“与妻子不同的是，我不喜欢公司。结婚37年来，我们经常为这个争论”，他告诉DerSpiege，“我比较喜欢独自呆着，我很享受孤独的感觉。”

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sorry,1~5找不到中文翻译~~自己翻译又不好~~大家就看英文吧~~如果有朋友能帮忙翻译过来就更好了~~