A Simpler, More Physical Kind of Empathy
Lorna Sage
- South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
Harvill, 187 pp, £9.99, July 1999, ISBN 1 86046 594 3 - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin
Harvill, 609 pp, £12.00, May 1998, ISBN 0 18 604647 2
Talking to Jay McInerney in 1992, the year South of the Border, West of the Sun was published in Japanese, Haruki Murakami said that he wasn’t so much an international writer, as a non-national writer: ‘You might call it the Japanese nature that remains only after you have thrown out, one after another, all those parts that are altogether too “Japanese”. That is what I really want to express.’ His pleasure in jettisoning the picturesque and traditional signs of ‘roots’ is of a piece with the fact that he was a fan of the work of Raymond Carver, and became his Japanese translator. South of the Border is a minimalist’s novel. A 1984 interview with Carver is commemorated in a Carver poem:
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