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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The literary phenomenon that is Haruki Murakami, December 4, 2002
First of all, don't buy this book purely for biographical purposes, hoping to get some hidden insight on Murakami's life. It is clear that Murakami values his privacy intensely and Rubin goes to great lengths to respect that. Also, what information is given about Murakami will pretty much conform with what you probably could've assumed about him. This book, more than anything else, is a chronological literary criticism of Murakami's works up through "after the quake." Rubin does a good job of analyzing many of the running motifs and themes that occur in Murakami's books (wells, corridors, birds, and elephants, to name a few). It is clear that Rubin has a hard time being a Murakami fan and a Murakami scholar at the same time, but he seems to do a good job remaining impartial (although it is clear which books are his favorites and which are not!)My first experience with Murakami was when I read "A Wild Sheep Chase" a year and a half ago, and before I knew it I had read every major novel and short story he'd written, finishing Pinball 1973 just last week. I read the books in an order that pretty much had nothing to do with the order they were written (beware that the order that the English translations came out in is often quite different than the original order). As a result, reading the details Rubin gives behind each of the books and about the growth that Murakami experienced along the way were among the highlights of the book for me and helped to solidify the ties that hold his books together. Murakami fascinates me because he is still growing rapidly as a writer and a person and the growing pains as well as the links to his past work are found in each work if you know what to look for. Rubin spends the most time in this book discussing "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," which for me was an incredibly thrilling and frustrating book at the same time. Murakami had so many excellent storylines and so many running motifs, but many seemed to frazzle and die out by the end. Some call this piece Murakami's masterpiece, but I have a feeling that when all is said and done, this will be seen as a transitional piece: the first work where Murakami fully takes on the responsibility he feels towards the Japanese people. Murakami tackled so many issues with such brilliance (the Nomonhan Incident in particular) that I look forward to seeing where this new focus takes Murakami in the future. Some of his more recent work ("Sputnik Sweetheart" comes to mind) seem more of a step backwards than real progress, but there is no way Wind-Up Bird is a mere aberration. Perhaps more so than any other writer, we as readers have the interesting opportunity to watch Murakami grow and experiment before our very eyes. If you haven't already, definitely try to get your hands on some of the earlier novels and short stories Rubin mentions ("Hear the Wind Sing" in particular) to get an even better grasp of where Murakami has started from. If you are a serious fan of Murakami and want a better understanding of the thinking behind his works and a bit of an analysis of the works themselves (remember that as an individualist, Murakami believes his books have no one, strict interpretation!), "Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words" is a must-have companion to Murakami's works. Reliving Murakami's works through Rubin's analyses is a joy.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The reader from the dolphin hotel is right and wrong, September 23, 2002
This book is about 50% Rubin's analysis of Murakami's work, about 30% biographical, about 10% about the translation work and differences between Japanese and English, and about 10% "interview style" where we get a few inside details on The Man Himself. This much is true: Anyone expecting a lot of information about The Man Himself should be a little disappointed. The book bills itself as granting more info than it does. I suspect this is out of Rubin's own deferrence to Murakami's privacy. He treads delicately on the info of the author's life in the biographical sections and when we do get a smattering of Murakami's own words about himself (and it's rare), it feels like nuggets culled from stray emails rather than from a sustained closeness of the translator to his author-friend. That's a shame, but it doesn't mar the book, which is a real resource for English readers without a real roadmap of his lesser works. Knowing which stories I need to seek out is so much easier, and understanding the significance of Murakami's first two novels is much better illuminated than before-- given their basic unavailability in print in English.For me, Rubin's translations are my favorites. I simply have to disagree with the reader from the dolphin hotel. The touch that Rubin gives to his translations is very delicate and appreciated. I too have had a chance to peruse Binrbaum's NW translation, and although I can't find it directly lacking in any way, I simply prefer the Rubin version. I really wish Rubin had gone a lot further into understanding what it takes to translate Murakami. This is the area in which he has very unique knowledge compared to the rest of us and he only rarely tells us much about it. Sure, there is a subtext in this book about what it is like to translate certain things, but it was not enough. I rec this book highly to any Murakami fan, especially those that liked HBW&TEOTW and TWUBC --- Rubin dwells on these books plenty (in addition to NW, which sort of goes without saying ... if not for re-translating NW, Rubin would not have the credibility to get this book into print). This volume may have its flaws, but I think a career summary of HM comes at the right time, and Rubin is a good man for the job.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Rubin - a fine editor, but too often pale as a writer, October 8, 2007
Jay Rubin is the English translator for such Murakami releases as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood and after the quake. In this book, he brings some interesting insight from Murakami into the novels that have captured such a level of interest in the US. While most US Murakami fans probably only first learned of this author in picking up a copy of A Wild Sheep Chase (for me, it was finding "TV People" in the fantastic anthology Monkey Brain Sushi), Rubin shows us how Murakami has developed a much more thorough career in Japan and has put out not only an impressive number of translations of classics from the English (which was the way he first received any notoriety in the US) but travel writing and even has a website where fans can actually get responses from H.M. himself.
By using a nice array of tidbits from interviews and insight from Murakami himself, Rubin provides a wonderful perspective of Murakami's simple and artistic pursuits in his writing. How Murakami uses inspiration from detective novels to provide novels that have trhe rhythm and drive of a mystery, but the mysteries themselves become unsolveable ones - the influence of Murakami's own disillusionment with the protests of his youth - the influences of jazz and other popular music on Murakami's writing - how Murakami has tried to tackle different genre as his career continued. This, as well as a small treatise on the Boku-narrative Murakami uses in Japanese, one that is far more informal than the usual first-person narratives of Japanese literature (and also a good explanation for the central mystery of my attraction for Murakami's novels, that the narrators always seemed to be the same person, and in fact are, to an extent), makes this book well worth purchasing and exploring if you have any interest in Murakami's writing.
Though it is obvious that Rubin wants to keep the tone of the book informational and biographical in broad strokes rather than critical, it seems that he cannot resist the occasional foray into psychological criticism, which are typically rather empty in nature and don't carry much weight. Also, Rubin's assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of Murakami's later works sound somewhat snooty and seem off the mark.
As an editor and compiler, Rubin puts together a fascinating collection of information of Murakami's work and perspectives from the author himself that don't feel too defensive against analysis (though it would seem that Murakami himself is), and there is an interesting appendix on translation from Japanese, but as an author in this book, Rubin typically falls short of the mark. Murakami, no doubt, was intended to shine brightly in this book, but sometimes he does so more as a competent writer holding power over his admirer.
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