Online Class Notes (Mike)

Write about your thoughts on Murakami.

Notably, Murakami’s novels often have musical themes and often speak of the power and beauty of music. More than that, his titles are often taken directly from songs. The three volumes comprising The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle refer to works by Gioachino Antonio Rossini, Robert Schumann, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Norwegian Wood, possibly Murakami’s most famous work, is named after a song by the Beatles, and Dance Dance Dance, a sort of sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, is named after a song by the Beach Boys.

Murakami’s work is the highwater mark at the intersection of popular culture and serious literature. As a writer who has filtered such a variety of influences into his work, he is a complete original. He is also a writer who has sought to understand Japanese history (especially Japan’s role in World War II), but he has done so without attempting to make political statements.

He examines, explores, and dissects history, war, love, and identity with the same complex (and sometimes confusing) gracefulness. Murakami, like Georges Simenon and Charles Bukowski, has become his own brand name. Though his work has been described in many different ways—as Magical Realism, surrealism, hard-boiled mystery, love story, cyberpunk—it is almost entirely impossible to identify one of his books as anything other than a “Murakami.”

Murakami goes where a novel takes him, where history takes him. He goes to the place where love and memory and fear take him. As an independent artist with a singular vision, he is unrivaled in this generation of world writers.

Murakami examines many of the prominent themes readers have come to expect from him—love, loss, spirituality, dreams, the power of music, redemption, and sexual identity—but he also further investigates Japan’s World War II heritage, the notion of reality, and the authority of prophecy, fate, and nature.

Vocabulary

cosmopolitan (adj.) international

Cannes Film Festival 戛纳电影节

burn out
I got burned out at 28.
burnout (n)

memoir (n) 回忆录

chamber (n) a large/spacious room

coming-of-age (adj./n)
I wrote a coming-of-age novel.

Dream of the Red Chamber

I am the person who devote to reading.
I am the kind of person who can be totally devoted to reading.

I am burned out by the intensive workload.

I changed the way of writing
I changed the way of writing as I am age.

I already born my boy.
I already gave birth to my son.

We treat him with respect.
We respect him as an equal individual.

Love, loneliness, war are common mother themes in literature.

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