black long hair
Swinging black straight long hair is a frequently appeared thing in Murakami’s novels. It’s a symbol of women’s beauty, fascination, tenderness, delicacy and transience. And a woman has black long hair couldn’t be happy. (Hear the Wind Sing, Norwegian Wood, Colorless Tuskuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, First Person Singular)
car
Car is not only a viecle, but also is a cultural thing expresses the characteristics and the life style of a person who owns it. (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Killing Commendatore) Also car is a medium on which one experiences a landscape or a geography, and traces a story. (If Our Words Would Be Whiskey, Drive My Car)
Derek Hartfield
Derek Hartfield is an imaginary American writer who appears in Haruki Murakami’s debut novel Hear the Wind Sing. So he does’t exist in reality.
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.
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, so we need a measuring stick, not sensitivity.
foreign language
To acquire foreign languages in Murakami’s novels is to know a rule of a system and a rule as Wittgenstein's language game. he can learn easily many foreign languages, so he can obtain and dominate many language games such as love with women, the Japanese academic-oriented society, and he . (Norwegian Wood) Tengo Kawana and Tsukuru Tazaki acquired French and German in their university years. It may signifies they became grown-up and got the pass to communicate with others. (1Q84, Colorless Tuskuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage)
music
Murakami is an enthusiastic fan of jazz, classical music and rock. And Murakami ran jazz bars in Kokubunji and Sendagaya, Tokyo, because he wanted to listen jazz always. Music is an essential element, has important role and meaning in Murakami’s works. On Norwegian Wood, music is a practical treatment of mind and a thing of which one traces a story. On After Dark, many pop music and easy listening songs appeared, and they imply the ordinary and vulgar mood of contemporary Japanese city sceneries. (Novelist as a Profession, Norwegian Wood, After Dark)
talent, genius
Talent or genius in Murakami's works is a nature of which certain people own, to express or to perform seriously music, writing or art getting over an own limitation. It’s not a technique or knowledge got by learning. (Norwegian Wood, South of the Border, West of the Sun, Sputnik Sweetheart, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Killing Commendatore)
Tomohiko Amada
Tomohiko Amada is an imaginary Japanese painter of traditional Japanese painting who appears on Haruki Murakami’s long novel Killing Commendatore. His model might be a Japanese art painter, Sanko Inoue (1899 – 1981).
Tomohiko Amada was born in Aso, Kumamoto. He graduated from the Tokyo Fine Arts School (later Tokyo University of of the Arts), then he studied abroad Western painting in Vienna from the end of 1936 to the beginning of 1939. He was caught in a scandal of aborted assassination in Vienna, was concerned with his lover, a member of a resistance group. Then he was sent back to Japan by the Japanese embassy in Berlin.
He returned to Japan in February 1939. After the Pacific War had ended, he debuted again and he succeed in the Japanese style painting as an up-and-coming painter. (Killing Commendatore)
Related Posts and Pages
Summary | Novelist as a Profession
Literature / littérature / Literatur Page