Note | Who is Derek Hartfield ? | Jean-Michel Serres, Composer-pianist (Apfel Café Music): Website

Derek Hartfield is an imaginary American writer who appears in Haruki Murakami’s debut novel Hear the Wind Sing . (Chapters 1, 32 and 40, Afterword) So he isn’t a real person. And he doesn’t exist in reality.

The character model of him might be Kurt Vonnegut or Robert E. Howard.

Derek Hartfield was born in 1909, a small town, Ohio. After graduated a high school, he had been working at the post office in his hometown for a while, then he became a writer.

He was an unfortunate writer. He sold his fifth short novel to Weird Tales for twenty dollars in 1930. The next year, he wrote and wrote 70,000 words per month, in the following year, it gained 100,000 words, it was 150,000 words in the year before he passed away. There’s the legend that he might change and buy again a Remington typewriter every six months.

His writing career is only eight years and two months. Most of his works are adventure stories or horror stories. His biggest hit series is Waldo, boy adventure of a mixture of both of them. Other his works are What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? (1936), the semi-autobiographical novel One and a Half Times Around the Rainbow (1937) a sci-fi short story The Martian Wells and so on.

A man of the same age as Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and He was few writers which can use words as a weapon equal to them. Yet his his text is difficult to read, the story is random and the theme is immature. But he could never grasp exactly what it was he was fighting against, so his life and career were barren and miserable.

On a clear Sunday morning, in June 1938, the year his mother had passed away, he jumped from the Empire State Building holding a portrait of Hitler and put up an umbrella.

When the summer vacation of the third grade of junior high, the narrator was given a book of Derek Hartfield by his uncle. And the narrator bought some paperbacks by Hartfield which a foreign crewman sold, each of them was priced 50 Japanese yen, at a second-hand book store in Kobe, when he was a high school student.

Descriptions about Hartfield represented Murakami’s philosophy of writing and policy of life. On Novelist as a Profession, Murakami said that when he wrote Hear the Wind Sing, he thought “I must write from I have nothing to write”. (p. 134)

A work of Hartfield was titled What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?, which means Murakami’s antipathy to the Japanese artistic and authoritarian literary scene. He thought was “It’s fine it’s only feeling fun to write for me.” (p. 270)

Hartfield’s writing is the ideal model which deconstructs the grand narrative and significance of the Japanese pure literature. The narrator learned by the style of. Hartfield, as writing is the act of verifying distances among things, we need a measuring stick, not sensitivity.

Only in the Japanese edition, there’s the afterword, “Hartfield, again… (as an afterword)” as a fake episode. The content is the narrator or Murakami himself visited a small and shabby graveyard of Derek Hartfield. Including the effect of the afterword, Japanese readers had been believed Hartfield was a real person. When the novel was published, the librarians were confused by inquiries from the readers who believed he really existed.