The Beauty of Words
Most people like Murakami's works because of the beauty of words. After all, literature is the art of language, and without the art of language and the beauty of words, there is no such thing as literature.
What we mean by the beauty of words here is of course not only beauty in the usual sense, such as grace, splendor, and "beautiful words and sentences," but mainly the uniqueness of the text. The uniqueness of the text is the most valuable character of literature. The uniqueness of the text depends largely on the uniqueness and unrepeatability of the text, i.e., the style of writing. To put it bluntly, it is "this one" rather than "that one". In a nutshell, compared to Chinese, Japanese has its own uniqueness as a whole, which is "this one" rather than "that one". It is a sticky, rambling, long-winded, disconnected, and mopey novel, and when you look at the Chinese translation, you can tell right away that it's a novel translated from Japanese, not English or Russian. It is for this reason that Murakami is determined to rinse away ...... all kinds of flotsam wrapped around the Japanese language so that it is completely naked. This "not a stitch", it seems a bit appalling to say or even not not pornographic flavor, in fact, is the antonym of sticky and wordy - clean, sharp, refined, natural, fresh and elegant, delicate and transparent. A reader wrote to say, read Murakami's work "as if walking on a clean beach, look at the distance a blue water and green sky, cool!". It's so refreshing! Another reader said that reading his works "is a kind of joy, the joy of filling up every inch of life". More readers quoted the protagonist of "I" read Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" in the book, "I turned a page and read a paragraph, and I was never disappointed, not once, and not a single page made me feel bored. What a marvelous masterpiece!" It can be said that such a reading experience can only be given by the beauty of words, only through the delicate beauty of words can be obtained.
So why are Chinese readers so sensitive to the beauty of words? I have read the reactions of Japanese readers and European and American readers. The Japanese readers were admittedly attracted to the beauty of the "style", but the response was not so enthusiastic; the European and American readers were mainly attracted to the "strange imagination and modern sense of alienation" and the "detective novel technique" of the work, and were hardly attracted to the beauty of the writing. Europe and the United States are mainly attracted by the work's "strange imagination and sense of modern alienation" and "detective novel technique", etc., and hardly mention the beauty of the text. In contrast, Chinese readers have almost fallen in love at first sight. Why is that?
I think there are at least two reasons. One is that the Chinese are the remnants of a poetic people, or the direct or non-direct descendants of Li Bai Du Fu Su Dong Po. I am not a linguist, I have not done research, but I always think that the Chinese language is probably one of the most beautiful languages in the world - although theoretically any language can be equated - at least the most concerned about the decorative beauty of the language, such as leveling, contrasts, etc. should only be the Chinese language It is only the Chinese language that has and is competent to do so. Although modern people are busy and impatient, not the back of a wine bottle riding a donkey backwards to the wind and moon time and elegance, but after all, such cultural genes remain in them, making them the beauty of the words of the word chapter of the beauty of the word is still exceptionally sensitive and desirable. Literature reading is to a large extent for the pleasure of words and chapters. That is indeed the unspeakable pleasure that only the ancient medium of Chinese characters can convey. It can be said that it is a special grace from heaven for those who speak the Chinese language.
But nowadays there are fewer articles that speak of the beauty of words and the beauty of chapters--that is the second reason I am going to say this--and the fewer they are, the more they are desired. Regrettably, the Chinese literary world today, such a beautiful article such works seem to be in short supply. Imagine - maybe I'm not well-informed - how many masterpieces can make us feel the beauty of words and literature, except for the words of a few people? Not to mention Lu Xun and Qian Zhongshu's unique style of writing. For example, the other day I was in a rather famous prose anthology, read the sentence "beautiful and beautiful girl". I was astonished, but I was glad that I didn't say "beautiful and pretty boy". I don't know if I can assert that our precious Chinese language is being vulgarized, coarsened, obscene and flirted with! Murakami's works, with their delicate literary beauty, fulfill this literary aesthetic need of the people.
The beauty of loneliness
Loneliness, like love and death, is an eternal theme in the writings of men of letters, especially poets. What kind of loneliness does Haruki Murakami write about? A reader wrote about her feelings: "[I] drank coffee and read page after page in the nighttime color. It was still summer, and the cool evening breeze danced through the gauze window, lifting the curtains and blowing away the curling mist on the brown cups....... I felt so good. The delicate strokes, the lonely life, seemed like writing about myself." Yes, the loneliness in Murakami's writing is the loneliness that everyone has, and it reads like writing about yourself, so it is the loneliness of an omnipresent ordinary person. And it is a very elegant loneliness, a very beautiful loneliness, which gives people a "good feeling". Most of the lonely people sitting lazily in the bar if the light if the dark, half-drinking not drinking diagonally holding up a glass of whiskey, half-seeing not looking at the wall of the famous paintings and imitations, half-listening not listening to the old-fashioned speakers flowing jazz, never complaining about the world, never give up on themselves, never looking for someone to talk to. In a word, instead of enduring loneliness to send off loneliness, it is better to say that it is operating loneliness, enjoying loneliness, watching over loneliness, and returning to loneliness. This is also the so-called petty capitalists most appreciate the classic scene, classic atmosphere, classic mood
However, Murakami's loneliness is not only from the cheap sentimentalism of the small people style, not only to the personal ripples of the state of mind of the repeated chewing. It stems more from a critical scrutiny and deep questioning of the nature of man, the nature of life, the social system, and one's own situation. Such scrutiny and questioning prompts constant reminiscing, constant traveling, and constant searching. As he said in his letter to Chinese readers in 2001 under the title The Room of Faraway Journey, "Everyone is looking for a precious thing in his life, but not many people can find it. Even if we are lucky enough to find it, what we do find is in many cases fatally damaged. Nevertheless, we continue to look for more than we can find. For if we do not, the meaning of life itself does not exist." So what was he looking for as Murakami? I think he is looking for the truth and dignity of life, the integrity and purity of subjectivity, and the freedom and outlet of the soul. However, these things are destined to be very difficult to find, "everything will be gone, and no one will be able to capture it" ("And Listen to the Wind"), and as a result, he had to wander in the wilderness of the mind for a long time, and then felt lonely, and then felt compassion and sadness. The tone of Murakami's works is characterized by a sense of loneliness, warmth, and sadness. It is like the mist of dusk, like a distant caveman under the moon, like the fragrance of lilies in the wilderness, low and lingering, lingering. Here, not only does loneliness not need solace, but loneliness itself is solace.
And this does not make the Chinese readers intoxicated and mesmerized, and does not cause their hearts **** invigorated. Because, like a child who has fallen behind, a large number of Chinese young people are in the loop of constantly lost and constantly searching. They are looking for the flag in the wind, the face is all over the debris; they are looking for a sincere smile, the face is the face of hypocrisy; they are looking for metaphysical values, the face is the metaphysical money; they are looking for pure blue sky, the face is the filthy gutter. What they feel is a deep and raging great loneliness and sorrow. The awakened one is necessarily a loner, the self-esteemed one is necessarily a loner, and the upright one is necessarily a loner. Although they may not always savor the beauty of loneliness, Murakami provides an outlet for loneliness and a paradigm for its sublimation, i.e., a technique for self-care, which allows them to silently maintain their own values and consistency, and "to make themselves strong according to the situation" (Haruki Murakami).
The Beauty of Metaphor and Murakami's Interpretation of His Own Work
Murakami's writing is certainly "naked" or "transparent," but his stories are layered and confusing. This is related to Murakami's creative philosophy. Murakami believes that "a novel is, in the end, a fable, and it is the fable that makes the fable realistic". In Kafka by the Sea, he even borrowed Oshima's mouth to say bluntly: "Everything in the world is a metaphor" (originally from Goethe). In fact, allegory or metaphor is basically the same thing, it is a kind of simile and a kind of symbol. Zhuang Zi's "The Journey to Freedom", Li Shangyin's "Fifty Strings in a Brocade", and Qian Zhongshu's "The Siege" are all familiar metaphorical masterpieces. That is to say, metaphor itself is not unfamiliar, but it is rare that Murakami uses it in such a large number of ways. His metaphors are as common as his humor, and he is indeed the "Kafka of Japan.
"There is no such thing as a perfect essay, just as there is no such thing as utter despair," is the first line of Murakami's debut novel, "And Listen to the Wind," and then in the epilogue he quotes Nietzsche as saying, "The light of the day knows nothing of the depth of the night," and then in the concluding line, a metaphor: "The same universe is the same as the universe. The concluding line is another metaphor: "Compared to the complexity of the universe, our world is nothing more than the medulla oblongata of a sparrow." This sends us a clear message: his novels will be filled with countless subtle similes, including enigmatic metaphors. This is true of his subsequent works. The pinball machine and the twin women in "Pinball in 1973," the sheep with starched backs and the goatherd and "Mister" in "The Adventure of the Sheep Hunt," the unicorns, the night ghosts, and "Division" in "The World's End and Cold Wonderland. "The Factory" and the Gastric Expansion Woman in "The End of the World and Cold Wonderland", the breathless fireflies and "Amelia" in "Norwegian Wood", "Dance! Dance! Dance! the goat man and six white bones in "Dance! Dance! Dance!", the repeated piano piece "Star Crossed Lovers" in "South of the Border, West of the Sun", the sputniks and ferris wheels in "Sputnik Lovers", the wind-up bird and the Shamrock and the Faceless Man in "The Curious Incident of the Birds", and Kafka on the Shore, which can be described as a novel constructed of countless metaphors and a huge maze of metaphors. Kafka by the Sea" can be said that the novel is a huge labyrinth constructed by countless metaphors, or even itself is a huge metaphor. As for the short stories, the list is endless. As a technique, in a big way, it is a parallel advancement of two lines: a table and a mile, a ghost and a bright, a moving and a quiet, a real and a virtual, a yin and a yang, a this side of the world, a other side of the world, a real world, a spiritual world ......, the real and the virtual, the yin and the yang, the life and the death are the same as each other, the truth is indistinguishable from falsehood, and the mountains and the water are heavy, and the clouds and fogs surround the world. To put it in a small way, it is constantly making what inexplicably goes missing. Take animals as an example, cats are missing, sheep are missing, even elephants are missing, there is a short story simply called "The Disappearance of the Elephant". An elephant has disappeared from its pen, and it's an elderly elephant, "so old that those who witness it for the first time are often disturbed by the fear that it will immediately fall to the ground and die." This is not all, one of the elephant's hind legs is still attached to an iron ring, which is connected to an iron chain, "the iron ring and the chain know at a glance that they are unbreakable, even if the elephant spends a hundred years to use all its strength, it will not be able to do anything about it". And yet, just such an elephant suddenly disappeared. The authorities used the police, the fire department and the self-defense force, plus several helicopters, but they couldn't find it even in the evening, and the elephant just disappeared. Needless to say, it would have been fine if a kitten or a pug or a rabbit had disappeared, but the elephant is the second largest of all existing animals after the whale, which means that it is the animal that is least likely to go missing and least likely to go missing. Summarizing the information revealed by Murakami on various occasions, it is not difficult to deduce that the elephant is a metaphor for a warm and peaceful spiritual home, and that the disappearance of the elephant is a metaphor for the possibility of such a spiritual home disappearing forever. In 1979, in his debut novel And Listen to the Wind, Murakami looked forward to the elephants' "return to the plains" ("By that time, the elephants will have returned to the plains and I will have described the world in even more beautiful language"), while in 1985, in his piece The Disappearance of the Elephants, he concluded that "the elephants and the people who live in the plains are the same as the elephants who lived in the plains. In 1985, in this piece, "The Elephant's Disappearance", it was concluded that "the elephant and its keeper have disappeared completely, and are unlikely to ever return here".
From the large number of letters I've received from readers, it seems that these metaphors are the main obstacle for Chinese readers. Perhaps it's because most of them are high school students, especially female high school students, and our traditional language education, which requires them to summarize a theme or a central idea, habitually pushes them to get to the bottom of it. And it's not just high school students; college students have trouble reading, too - so they write to me or ask me directly in class, and I get desperate. I was so desperate that I asked Murakami himself, the person who started it all, for help. Murakami was cooperative and replied in the form of an open letter, "What I want to say in my novels can be summarized in a somewhat simple way. It is that everyone is looking for a precious thing in their lives, but not many people can find it. Even if we are lucky enough to find it, what we actually find is in many cases fatally damaged. Nevertheless, we continue to search for it. For if we do not, the meaning of life itself ceases to exist." I can see that Murakami answered this way largely for the sake of answering. As far as I can tell, Murakami almost never summarizes the themes of his works in this way on other occasions - even though they are objectively, to some extent, his themes - rather, he is opposed to setting themes in his writing, believing that it makes the work stagnant. He spoke more of metaphors, and in an interview in July 2002 about the then newly published Kafka by the Sea, he further explained in terms of the expression "myth": "The more the story [the story] functions as a story, the more quickly it approaches myth. To be more extreme, perhaps closer to the schizophrenic world." The passage he immediately follows is also, I'm afraid, revealing to us, "In this sense, there may be something about my fiction that doesn't quite lend itself to parsing. ...... It's not that I'm pretentious, but sometimes I suddenly get this feeling that instead of parsing the story one by one in terms of what resembles archetypes in myself, I'm writing it as if I've swallowed it whole into a rock and don't want to think about anything, in the end. To what extent this feeling can be conveyed to the reader I am not quite sure." (Haruki Murakami, ed.: Junior Kafka, published by Shinchosha in June 2003) In this way, the use of metaphors is inevitable. It can be said that metaphors, myths, and symbols are always a highlight of Murakami's works. There are many Chinese readers, especially those who have some life experience, who understand this, and are interested in following him into a magical world full of the beauty of metaphor. Here I will only quote the interpretation of a "white-collar" or "petit-bourgeois" reader of the allegory of the clockwork bird in The Book of Strange Birds: "It is a magical bird, the writer's longing for the real in the midst of the unreal, and the world and life on the brink of collapse. world and all the hopes of life in its precariousness. It is a collection of mankind's thoughts about the world and destiny in the context of the previous era, and it is mankind's longing to return to nature and the essential state of life in a state of extreme anxiety."
The beauty of profundity
Last year marked the 25th year of Haruki Murakami's career. Perhaps to commemorate or celebrate this year, the 55-year-old Murakami turned into a night bird, flying from 11:56 p.m. to 6:52 a.m. the next morning, and flying very high, towering over him, so to speak, with a bird's-eye view. The record of that bird's-eye view is Murakami's latest full-length novel, After Dark.
What did the night bird see? It sees Mary, a Chinese-speaking college student who has sex with a young man in a restaurant; it sees Ally, a beautiful girl who sleeps day and night, and the man who stares at her from the TV; it sees the Chinese girl who is naked and crouching in a corner, crying, after being beaten by Shirakawa, her john. And then through the surveillance camera will be long locked in Shirakawa body: Shirakawa, thirty-five-six years old, suits, set a pair of small gold-rimmed glasses, well-mannered, "looks to give people the impression of knowledge," at all do not see that the person is a prostitute, let alone can not see that he would be because the girl came to the menstruation of the girl made it impossible for him to discharge their desire to beat up and in order to prevent the girl from reporting to the police to strip all the clothes and take away. He would not be seen as a whoremonger, let alone one who would beat up a girl because she was menstruating and strip her naked to prevent her from reporting it. Thus, what we see in this new work is no longer the Murakami who spends most of his time alone in a bar or a suite, savoring his solitude in the rain outside the window and the sound of Western music; no longer the Murakami who gazes at the centimeter-high whisky left at the bottom of the bottle, or who reads The Critique of Pure Ideals while lying on his bed; and no longer the Murakami who drums and tinkers with the backyard flowers of the mind, but rather, the Murakami who has the courage to face "evil" and discover "evil". Instead, he is a Murakami who dares to face "evil" and discover "evil". However, the discovery of evil or the emergence of the embodiment of evil did not begin with After Dark. For example, "Mister" in The Adventure of the Sheep Hunt (1982), "The Night Ghost" in The End of the World and Cold Wonderland (1985), Izumi Watanabe and Boris the Peeler in The Book of Curious Birds (1994, 1995), and Kafka by the Sea (2002). Kafka by the Sea (2002), and "Father" or "Jonny Walker". But the evils in these works share the same characteristic, that is, they are rather vague and puzzling. Whether it is the characters, their behavior or the time and place, they are often shrouded in the layers of history and the dappled light and shadow of the real and the illusory, lacking a sense of reality and real time in detail, beyond the common sense and common sense, true and false, false and true, which is still the case with Kafka by the Sea until two or three years ago. But After Dark is different. It can be said that Murakami's first convergence of evil for the "height, shape and hair are extremely ordinary, walking on the street to meet a few head can not leave an impression" of the "ordinary guy", the way of evil and the object of evil and the consequences of their evil are realistic and specific, real, real, clear, clear, clear. The way of evil, the target of evil, and its consequences are real and concrete, real, real, real, real, real, real, real. What is particularly thought-provoking is that Shirakawa went back to the office to work the night shift as if nothing had happened right after he committed the violence, and as a computer technician who prided himself on being the "number one expert," he continued to listen to music to troubleshoot the malfunctioning computer. When he took out the beaten girl's clothes one by one in his office before going home, a puzzled look appeared on his face, as if to say, "Why are such things here?" In a nutshell, Shirakawa doesn't have the slightest sense of criminal wrongdoing, much less introspection - and that's saying something as profound as it is. In short, Murakami is not only a "soft" writer from whom some Chinese readers can read a petit bourgeois mood, but also a serious writer who dares to point his pen at "evil" and "hard", a conscientious writer who dares to face history and reality head-on. Dare to face history and reality with conscience, courage, sense of responsibility and deep sense of problem writers. Profoundness is also a kind of beauty, a kind of harsh beauty that shines like the edge of a knife. In this sense, it can indeed be argued that if "Kafka by the Sea" is still an evil incubated in eggshells, it finally breaks out of its shell in "After Dark".
Along with the discovery of "evil," "After Dark" also portrays the Japanese as the embodiment of "good. For example, the manageress of a love hotel where a Chinese girl goes is outraged by Shirakawa's brutality and vows not to spare "the guy who beats up innocent girls. Mary, the heroine, who is studying Chinese at university and is about to go to Beijing to study, says that the first time she sees the Chinese girl "I wanted to be friends with her, very, very much. ...... I feel like that girl has stayed with me completely now, as if she has become a part of me." Perhaps, as one Japanese critic put it, "Finding a line that is different from the benchmarks and paradigms of good and evil that prevail in society is an important motif of Murakami's work" (Tatsuya Mori, "Revolt Against Meta-Theoretical Society," The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 12, 2004).
Of course, his profundity is fully and uniquely expressed in other aspects such as knocking at the modernity and subjectivity of human beings, contemplating the existential dilemma of human beings and the ultimate direction, etc., so I will not spare any more words here. (