Mystery in Murakami and Chandler  


  I've really enjoyed reading Murakami's short stories because he is able to really hone one what makes him so interesting and bizarre and make it more puzzling. In "Where I'm Likely to Find It," the reader only reads a couple pages of mystery and therefore the strangeness of Murakami's subjects ad events are that much more obvious. I appreciated Murakami's surreal-ness mixed into everyday life more in his other novels such as Sputnik Sweetheart and South of the Border West of the Sun than I did in A Wild Sheep Chase. Perhaps it is because those novels were later so Murakami had a stronger grasp on his craft. I felt at times that A Wild Sheep Chase knew where it was going but almost got a little bored with itself on the way and although everything that happened in the story was relevant plot-wise, it seemed to meander sometimes. In The Long Goodbye I had absolute confidence in Chandler the entire time I was reading the story that every detail was going to be resolved and we would be left with no questions. I thought Chandler made the red herring details as subtle as the large clues so that the reader was at his complete mercy. In A Wild Sheep Chase every detail was obvious in its importance from the beginning and the mystery was how the detail was important, not if a detail was important as in Chandler.

A post from Leyla Tonak

Haruki Murakami borrows heavily from the annals of the hard-boiled detective genre. His introspective and methodical everyman protagonist, often known only as “Boku,” the Japanese pronoun for “I,” encounters reinvented hard-boiled tropes in the new landscape of magical realism. A vague air of mystery winds through the endless hours spent in bars and movie theaters or on long journeys, the countless cups of coffee brewed and drunk, the reliable entrance and exit of quirky quasi-femmes fatales, interspersed with episodes of death or violence, dream sequences and matter-of-fact rumination on life’s idiosyncrasies. As often as Murakami borrows, he alters, so that the climax of his stories are not the whodunit reveal to which detective-genre fans are accustomed but quite the opposite, seeming to fade out or hang suspended in time, drawing vague and unformulated conclusions. The plots, of course, are also largely constituted by Murakami additions of bizarre and surreal encounters and experiences which certainly would not appear in the street-sense harsh pseudo-realism worlds of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.

This intertextuality between Murakami and hard-boiled giants like Hammett and Chandler has been a recent discovery for me. It was not so long ago that I first discovered the film noir genre, and with it the gritty P.I.’s of hard-boiled detective fiction. When I entered the class, I had already read and loved several of Murakami’s books, totally unaware of their connection with the genre. So for me, my journey with Murakami has been rather like a surgery (or a skinning); first examining the body at face-value, seeing its skin and the functioning whole, and then looking beneath to explore the organs which operate unseen and make up the system. I have been journeying into Murakami, learning his influences, his critiques, his personal history and the effect of translation on his prose, only after discovering him with no prior knowledge of these things and being sucked into his world by the sheer force of his singular style. I understood some of his references of course, but this class has illuminated many more parallels. It’s an immensely rewarding way to experience an author, and I look forward to continuing the process of exploring Murakami’s biology.

Melancholy Ending

A Wild Sheep Chase was my first full experience with Haruki Murakami's work.  After finishing the book I am unsure about my feelings towards the ending.  Boku's girlfriend leaves him and her special ear power is taken away.  On top of that the friend Boku was looking for turned out to be dead.  Boku is a hard boiled character and is unfazed by these things but the ending is still slightly depressing.  Despite Boku being fine I am left in a damper mood.  I have never read any other novels by Murakami and it makes me wonder if Murakami's other works also have a melancholy ending.

Murakami Gives Advice to Fans

We all know that Murakami has many fans worldwide, so it's no surprise that some fans would like to receive advice or answers to questions they may have. In 2015, Murakami responded to these fans by starting an advice column called "Murakami-san No Tokoro", which translates into "Murakami's Place". 

Image borrowed from Murakami's webpage where he answered fans: http://www.welluneednt.com/

The questions were interesting, but I think Murakami's replies were the highlight of the column. Murakami likes to keep his life details private, so some may believe that it's hard to get to know him personally. However, the advice column allows us to see how humorous Murakami really is with his unique and witty responses. Here are some questions and responses that were asked in the column:

Posts were borrowed from http://www.vulture.com/2015/02/best-of-haruki-murakami-advice-column.html

Most Frequently-Assigned English Books

Here is a table from the Washington Post article I mentioned yesterday, comparing the most frequently-assigned books at all schools vs. the Ivies. Heart of Darkness is on both lists.

To read the whole article, click here. 

Adventures of Sherlock Homes

In the current section of reading, boku is seen again reading the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" and Professor Elliott mentioned why he would be reading that. I believe it's a nod to the detective fiction genre that Murakami uses as inspiration for The Wild Sheep Chase because while boku isn't exactly a P.I he is sent to find a sheep that he innocently used in a photograph. The circumstances and the job are something a P.I like Marlowe would do.

T.S. Eliot liked detective fiction!

Here is a link to an article by Paul Grimstad in the newest New Yorker. I thought it might interest you since we have been talking a lot about detective fiction lately.


http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-makes-great-detective-fiction-according-to-t-s-eliot



And here is the first paragraph:

FEBRUARY 2, 2016

What Makes Great Detective Fiction, According to T. S. Eliot

In 1944 the literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote an exasperated essay in the pages of The New Yorker titled “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” Wilson, who at the time was about to go abroad to cover the Allied bombing campaign on Germany, felt that he’d outgrown the detective genre by the age of twelve, by which time he’d read through the stories of the early masters, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Yet everyone he knew seemed to be addicted. His wife at the time, Mary McCarthy, was in the habit of recommending her favorite detective novels to their émigré pal Vladimir Nabokov; she lent him R. F. Heard’s beekeeper whodunit “Taste for Honey,” which the Russian author enjoyed while recovering from dental surgery. (After reading Wilson’s essay, Nabokov advised his friend not to dismiss the genre tout court until he’d tried some Dorothy Sayers.) Surrounded on all sides by detection connoisseurs, Wilson sounded genuinely perplexed when he wondered, “What, then, is the spell of the detective story that has been felt by T. S. Eliot and Paul Elmer More but which I seem to be unable to feel?”