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www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/haruk...
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is to offer advice to troubled readers in an agony uncle column on his website, his publisher said Tuesday.
The website [is to be] named “Murakami-san no tokoro” or “Mr Murakami’s place”.
[...]
The publicity-shy writer will pen answers to queries, offering his opinions and advice on how to tackle all manner of difficulties, said Shinchosha Publishing.
“He will receive questions of any kind,” a company spokesman said, adding that he will answer queries written in a variety of languages.
Murakami will also answer fans’ questions on his likes and dislikes—including cats, a favorite animal of his, and the Yakult Swallows, the Japanese baseball team he supports.
Problems and queries will be accepted until the end of January, and Murakami’s answers will be published over the following two months.
__________
mainichi.jp/english/english/features/news/20141...
[Haruki] Murakami: Westerners tend to read my books according to the rules of logic. There's a strong traditional tendency to interpret things logically, so they'll say things like "this novel is post-modern" or "that one is realism." (...) The focus is more on literary method than on plotlines or themes, so the complex overlapping of reality and non-reality is regarded more or less as a new method of postmodernism.
In Asian countries outside Japan, on the other hand, the focus is on the stories. Readers seem to be more naturally attracted to the dynamics of the storyline. The fictional sophistication of the characters, such as their lifestyle and attitudes, also seems to appeal to them. Asian readers aren't so interested in "isms."
For example, when one of my principal characters sits at the bottom of a well and then passes through a rock wall, a westerner might interpret it as "postmodernism" or "magical realism," but an Asian will simply accept it in a "hmm, it could happen" kind of way. [Laughter] To put it roughly, Asians -- including the Japanese -- see reality and non-reality as two sides of the same coin.
[...]
In the late 1960s, people in my generation were in possession of a kind of idealism that said that the world could be made better. But young people these days don't think that way. They think the world will probably get worse. You can't make flat statements about this kind of thing, but personally, I think people need to strive for a certain level of optimism. (...) I would like to write novels for the generation of younger people who are in a pessimistic frame of mind. It's an important task for us, to give new forms to the idealism of the '60s and to pass it on. This can hardly be done through "statements." I believe that it's the job of fiction to offer a "hypothetical axis" to a world that no longer has one.
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is to offer advice to troubled readers in an agony uncle column on his website, his publisher said Tuesday.
The website [is to be] named “Murakami-san no tokoro” or “Mr Murakami’s place”.
[...]
The publicity-shy writer will pen answers to queries, offering his opinions and advice on how to tackle all manner of difficulties, said Shinchosha Publishing.
“He will receive questions of any kind,” a company spokesman said, adding that he will answer queries written in a variety of languages.
Murakami will also answer fans’ questions on his likes and dislikes—including cats, a favorite animal of his, and the Yakult Swallows, the Japanese baseball team he supports.
Problems and queries will be accepted until the end of January, and Murakami’s answers will be published over the following two months.
__________
mainichi.jp/english/english/features/news/20141...
[Haruki] Murakami: Westerners tend to read my books according to the rules of logic. There's a strong traditional tendency to interpret things logically, so they'll say things like "this novel is post-modern" or "that one is realism." (...) The focus is more on literary method than on plotlines or themes, so the complex overlapping of reality and non-reality is regarded more or less as a new method of postmodernism.
In Asian countries outside Japan, on the other hand, the focus is on the stories. Readers seem to be more naturally attracted to the dynamics of the storyline. The fictional sophistication of the characters, such as their lifestyle and attitudes, also seems to appeal to them. Asian readers aren't so interested in "isms."
For example, when one of my principal characters sits at the bottom of a well and then passes through a rock wall, a westerner might interpret it as "postmodernism" or "magical realism," but an Asian will simply accept it in a "hmm, it could happen" kind of way. [Laughter] To put it roughly, Asians -- including the Japanese -- see reality and non-reality as two sides of the same coin.
[...]
In the late 1960s, people in my generation were in possession of a kind of idealism that said that the world could be made better. But young people these days don't think that way. They think the world will probably get worse. You can't make flat statements about this kind of thing, but personally, I think people need to strive for a certain level of optimism. (...) I would like to write novels for the generation of younger people who are in a pessimistic frame of mind. It's an important task for us, to give new forms to the idealism of the '60s and to pass it on. This can hardly be done through "statements." I believe that it's the job of fiction to offer a "hypothetical axis" to a world that no longer has one.