However, it seems that the transition into adulthood is more demanding, more stressful. It’s set in the years 1968 to 1970, so it mightn’t be the same now. Haruki Murakami writes about the Japanese experience in “Norwegian Wood”. Suddenly, things are all a lot more serious, more permanent, less experimental, or this is how it seems. On the other side of 20, you emerge from university (if you’ve been lucky enough to go there) and dive straight into full-time employment, maturity, responsibility, expectations and adulthood. So, if you were old enough to die for your country, surely you were old enough to have a drink?Įither way, turning 20 for me meant that I had ceased to be a teenager, a group of people linked only by the fact that their age ended in the suffix “-teen”, but still it felt special not belonging to the grown up crowd.
Some of his novels take their titles from songs: Dance, Dance, Dance (after The Dells' song, although it is widely thought it was titled after the Beach Boys tune), Norwegian Wood (after The Beatles' song) and South of the Border, West of the Sun (the first part being the title of a song by Nat King Cole).įor people older than me, the most significant birthday was their 21st.īut when the age of legal adulthood was reduced to 18, turning 21 no longer had the same significance it once had.īefore then, you could be conscripted into the armed forces at 18, but you could not drink alcohol until you turned 21. Many of his novels have themes and titles that invoke classical music, such as the three books making up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The Thieving Magpie (after Rossini's opera), Bird as Prophet (after a piano piece by Robert Schumann usually known in English as The Prophet Bird), and The Bird-Catcher (a character in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute). Shortly before finishing his studies, Murakami opened the coffeehouse 'Peter Cat' which was a jazz bar in the evening in Kokubunji, Tokyo with his wife. His first job was at a record store, which is where one of his main characters, Toru Watanabe in Norwegian Wood, works. Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met his wife, Yoko.
He grew up reading a range of works by American writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and he is often distinguished from other Japanese writers by his Western influences. Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. His work has been described as 'easily accessible, yet profoundly complex'. Murakami Haruki (Japanese: 村上 春樹) is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator.
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