A FOND, OLD, FARAWAY ROOM
.
“Anyone who falls in love is searching for
the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they
think of their lovers. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond
memories of. One you haven’t seen in a long time…”
“.. A fond, old, faraway room?”
“Exactly.”
--from “Kafka On The Shore”, Hanuki Murakami
.
.
.
We mind that there mustn’t be dust
On those closed blinds.
Behind those blinds,
We find us.
We find ourselves salving
Our sore selves,
Saving us so
Fleetingly. So Pretend - Completely.
And after each chapter,
Which does us delirious,
It can be meant as some payment,
It can serve to defray cost
It can’t save us, when in a night and a day,
without fail, We will derail.
Alone, All memories lost
.
.
.
“I choose the rooms that I live in with
care,
the windows are small and the walls almost bare,
there’s only one bed and there’s only one prayer;
I listen all night for your step on the stair”
the windows are small and the walls almost bare,
there’s only one bed and there’s only one prayer;
I listen all night for your step on the stair”
--Leonard Cohen,RIP,/ from “Tonight Will be Fine”
Murakami Haruki is distinguished among other successful Japanese writers due to the heavy influence of American and European literary and musical culture. As a high school student in Kobe he learned to read English from the 1955 Ross Macdonald collection of short stories "The Name is Archer." In 1978, at 29, when he was managing the Peter Cat jazz bar in Tokyo, he watched former San Diego 3rd baseman Dave Hilton of the Yakult Swallows hit a double as the 1st batter against the Hiroshima Carp and suddenly realized that he could write a novel. That night he began writing "Happy Birthday and White Christmas" and spent an hour on it after work every night for the next 4 months. He submitted it, retitled "Kaze no uta o kike" ("Hear the Wind Sing," an adaptation of the last sentence in Truman Capote's short story, "Shut a Final Door") to "Gunzō," one of Japan's leading literary magazines, because its annual Gunzo Prize for New Writers was the only literary contest that would accept a work of that length (40 short chapters in 130 pages). It won 1st prize and was adapted as a film by Ōmori Kazuki in 1981. "Noruwei no Mori" (Norwegian Wood, the title of a John Lennon song from the Beatles' 1965 "Rubber Soul" album) made him into a celebrity; French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung adapted it into a 2010 film. His 2002 novel "Umibe no Kafuka" (translated in 2005 as "Kafka on the Shore")featured 2 distinct but interrelated plots delineated in alternating chapters. The Kafka of the title is not the famous author, but in 2006 Murakami won the Franz Kafka Prize awarded by Praha and the Franz Kafka Society to honor the author's "humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, its existential, timeless character, its generally human validity and its ability to hand over a testimony about our times." The award's next 2 winners, Harold Pinter and Elfriede Jelinek, went on to win the Nobel Prize the same year.) His work has been translated into 50 languages, and he has translated Raymond Carver and J. D. Salinger into Japanese.
ReplyDeleteLeonard Cohen was a Canadian poet, novelist, songwriter, and singer. He began publishing poetry as a student at McGill University in Montreal in 1954 and his 1st book, "Let Us Compare Mythologies," appeared in 1956, the year after his graduation. His next book, "The Spice-Box of Earth," appeared in 1961 before he moved to Hydra, an island in the Saronic Gulf. There he wrote 2 novels, "The Favourite Game" (1963) and "Beautiful Losers" (1966). The following year, at 33, he decided to become a singer/songwriter, and is 1st album "Songs of Leonard Cohen" appeared in 1967, and "Songs from a Room," which included "Tonight Will Be Fine," in 1969, but he did not begin touring as a musician until 1970. Though he retained his Judaism, in the 1970s he began an interest in Buddhism and was ordained a monk in 1996; his literary and musical output declined during those decades, but after his manager pilfered most of his money he returned to writing and performing. His 14th album, "You Want It Darker," was released in October 2016, 2 weeks before his death. In 1998 he told an interviwer that writing was "like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it."