An obsession with Murakami

On Tuesday, 1Q84, the highly anticipated novel by the great Japanese writer Haruki Murakami will be launched officially in English.

It is one of the biggest highlights in the literary calendar this year, one that fans of the writer have been waiting eagerly for.

This is his 12th novel, following After Dark, which was published in 2007.

1Q84 was published in Japan in May 2009 and was an immediate bestseller there. Its first print run was sold out on the first day and it achieved sales of one million copies in a month. It has since sold over four million copies.

With its phenomenal success, translation into different languages quickly went ahead, with the English publication rights secured by the United States publishing giant, Knopf, and an October launch date was announced in January this year.

Already, the buzz is huge. There's an excerpt from the novel titled Town Of Cats in the Sept 5 issue of The New Yorker.

In an interview with the magazine, Murakami said: "Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before.

"With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me. I do think (this novel) has been a major step in my career."

I first got to know of Murakami when a fellow writer briefly mentioned him to me back in 2002. "What? You have never read his works? You should," he said with mock surprise.

Being a slow, cautious reader, back then and even now, I chose one of the slimmest books in his oeuvre, South Of The Border, West Of The Sun.

The story is about a man who starts to question his life after being reunited with his first love from high school, an enigmatic woman with a limp due to polio in her childhood.

It has all the hallmarks of a Murakami novel, filled with lonely, introverted characters struggling to keep their fragile individualism in the face of a suffocating, conformist society, and a strange, sometimes-convoluted, plot that involves disappearance, death and disillusionment.

In Murakami's hands, all things are possible. As one of his translators, Mr Jay Rubin, once said: "It is not because he is writing about Japan that people love him... It's about the moment-to-moment sensation of being in his world. Inside his head."

Of course, Murakami isn't the first Japanese writer I read when I first got interested in Japanese literature. I also read Yasunari Kawabata, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki and Yukio Mishima but, somehow, none of them came close to capturing my attention quite like Murakami.

The worlds he created, vastly different from those of the old masters of Japanese literature, were darkly compelling, where hope and despair change like shifting elements of light and shadow, a world I could sink into, as a observer who kept his distance, much like his characters, who live different, parallel lives much like my own, yet so different in so many ways.

The pleasure goes deep, like a drug and, perhaps, that's why I keep coming back to him.

When I began to write short stories in 2005, I used his short stories as a guide to show me what a truly great short story can do, to create an entire world, full and complete in itself.

Even now, when I get stuck writing my stories, I'd pull out my dog-eared copy of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of his best stories, from my bookshelf and read one of the stories, picking up an idea or two, and getting inspired all over again.

His influence is all over my writing psyche, truth be told.

With the day approaching fast, and the anticipation building up to a fever pitch, my hunger, and obsession with Murakami, continues to grow and grow, as I wait to enter his head, into the strange world he has created in 1Q84.

The author's collection of short stories, The Rest Of Your Life And Everything That Comes With It, will be launched on Monday at the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF).

He will appear in several other SWF events. Visit www.singaporewritersfestival.com for more information.

For more my paper stories click here.