Summary+Pages+Il+Jee

Today, our understanding of masculinity continues to be defined to be rather Western. However, many recent studies have shifted its focus from men of Western cultures to those of Eastern. Haruki Murakami, celebrated novelist for his reference to various things-- pop-culture, war, lesbianism, marathon-- has a common theme throughout his novels. This common theme “deals with issues of masculinity and national character in opposition to an entity that is not Western but Asian.” (Lo 1) Haruki Murakami, a polarizer among readers, unconsciously seeks a lost masculinity associated with his traditional background in his novels. Murakami is conflicted about his homeland; Although he left Japan to become a writer at Princeton, Murakami does not expatriate his home country. He claims, “Before, I wanted to be an expatriate writer. But I am a Japanese writer. This is my soil and these are my roots. You cannot get away from your country.” His cultural background plays a great role in developing his novel’s character, setting and plot. Although written in English, all of his characters are named Japanese and with meaning: Sumire (from Sputnik Sweetheart), violet; Komugi (from After Dark), wheat. The setting takes place in local locations, in which captures the typical moment of the life in Tokyo: Sumire’s affordable apartment located minutes away from the station, Mari’s hours at a family restaurant and consistent ordering of food to reduce her guilt from staying too long. A Chinese prostitute beaten up can be originated from Murakami’s interest in his father experience in the Sino-Japanese War in After Dark, or as we all know the Rape of Nanking. Ironically, Sputnik Sweetheart, a novel that explores in to lesbianism, well portrays lost masculinity. Murakami uses foil characters in order to emphasize and enhance the lost masculinity in male and finding of masculinity in women. Sumire’s love was not tender, delicate or fragile but rather coarse. Her love is like a “veritable tornado sweeps across plains, [...] tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, and crushing them to bits.” (Murakami 3) Where as the love narrator had for Sumire was mild, frail and tenuous. His love is like natural breeze that hardly moved the tip of a foxtail, making nothingness in the swift back and forth, brining tranquility. As a matter of fact, Sumire, like her favorite part of Lonesome Travelor by Jack Kerouac, lives her life “experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.” (Murakami 5); She wanted to live her life like characters in Kerouac’s novels --cool, wild and dissolute. While Sumire courageously approached Miu, her lover who was seventeen years older, married and a woman, to show her affection, the narrator only watched Sumire, his lover who was in love with a seventeen years older married woman, from faraway.
 * DRAFT**

Introduction** Thesis: Haruki Murakami, a polarizer among readers, unconsciously seeks a lost masculinity associated with ____________________ a revelation of the inner darkness in his novels.
 * OUTLINE

Murakami is conflicted about his homeland. Although he left Japan to become a writer at Princeton, Murakami does not expatriate his home country. He claims, “Before, I wanted to be an expatriate writer. But I am a Japanese writer. This is my soil and these are my roots. You cannot get away from your country.”
 * 1st Paragraph: Murakami Background, The Origin and Reason Murakami seeks Masculinity.**

Examples: After Dark Rape (Japanese vs Chinese) Masculity in woman (Sumire) Loss of masculity in Sputnik Sweetheart of the narrator One more from What I Think About When I’m Running Kerouac (Sputnik Sweetheart)
 * 2nd Paragraph: Examples of lost of Masculinity**

Murakami believed national culture and history to be a revelation, magic realism, a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of dream or fantasy, would play a role making what had happened in the love hotel, surrounded by fanciful and illusional lights of the red district surreal.
 * 3nd Paragraph: How reality and masculinity is distorted: use of Magical Realism (gender, mascuniliaty) to distort reality to a revelation.**

larger conclusion, what is being revealed (analysis and personal interpretation)
 * 4th Paragraph:**


 * Conclusion

Nice job with the magic realism article. Nice that you took that extra step to explore the topic further. 10/10 on each. Third -- 10/10 Funny to read about the masculinity subject with so many characters as the female. Um. . . what about Takahashi as exploring his own identity? What about Mari wanting to go to China to explore the language?

SUMMARY 1** [| http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4352966.ece] (2 PAGEGS)

Stephen Armstrong, journalist of TIMESONLINE summarizes the ten key facts about the “coolest writer”, Haruki Murakami, in the world. According to Armstrong;
 * 1) Murakami divides people. While some, especially the younger ones, adore his pieces, that were influenced by student rebellions, some view them as “pop, trashy and overly westernized”.
 * 2) Murakami is hugely influential. Many recognized novels and authors such as Lost in Translation by Sofia Coppola and David Mitchell were partly inspired by Murakami’s novels.
 * 3) Murakami’s books would not make a high-concept movie pitch. The protagonists in his novels are ordinary people trying to get by in life.
 * 4) Murakami is conflicted about his homeland. Although he left Japan to become a writer at Princeton, Murakami does not expatriate his home country. He claims, “Before, I wanted to be an expatriate writer. But I am a Japanese writer. This is my soil and these are my roots. You cannot get away from your country.”
 * 5) Murakami used to run a jazz club. Alcohol and music are commonly used throughout Murakami’s books. It is commonly used to portray negative and evil.
 * 6) Murakami owes everything to baseball. Murakami decided to write a novel the moment Dave Hilton, an American player for Yakult Swallows hit a home run against Hiroshima Carp.
 * 7) Murakami likes cats. Murakami has attachment for cats; his bar was called Peter Cat and he uses cats frequently to foreshadow something very strange that is about to happen.
 * 8) Murakami likes music. Many of his book titles are referred to music. Norwegian Wood, South of the Border, and Dance Dance Dance are all named after different music pieces.
 * 9) Murakami really, really likes running. As his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, he likes to run. He has ran many marathons, with the best record of 3 hours and 27 minutes.
 * 10) Murakami is a romantic. In his novels, love is portrayed with delicate wonder and a protagonist is driven by passionate need once the woman of his life is revealed. Yet, women are often spirits or fragile; some attempt suicide or kill themselves throughout the novel somehow.

Most of these key facts seemed rather obvious and agreeable. However, I was rather amazed how renown Haruki Murakami was internationally in literature. As mentioned in the article, Murakami’s novel had the influence to raise a great debate on German literary review show, Das Literaische Quartett. The debated heated so greatly, one of the critics on the show, on June 2000 quit after 12 years on the program. I was intereted to read about his conflict he has with his homeland because, when I read his novel What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (the closest reading to his autobiography), he seemed to be a westernized man, who does not feel uncomfortable running shirtless in the streets of Athens. Despite his western influences, Murakami incorporates the every day life of the Japanese people in Japanese background.

Although the ten things about Haruki Murakami by Armstrong are applicable to novels I read -- After Dark, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and Sputnik Sweetheart--, there are counterexamples that confute the assertions made by Armstrong above. In Sputnik Sweetheart, women are portrayed independent and strong figures. Sumire and Miu, lesbian couple in the story are both portrayed as a business woman who travels on their own to an island on Greece. However, as Armstrong mentioned, there are many similarities between each novels. Music is commonly used to describe the setting of the quotidian lifestyles of the Japanese. For instance, music played in the family restaurant where Mari stayed had constantly had music playing from the juke box.

Undergraduate dissertation, The Use of Certain Fantastic Concepts in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki by Gareth Edwards (19 PAGES) [| http://gme.jp/arch/docs/dissertation.PDF]
 * SUMMARY 2**

One of the new things learned and yet mentioned in the next essay written by Gareth Edwards, was the topic of magical realism. Edwards claims that any of Murakami’s novels confirms Murakami’s “concerns rise beyond the quotidian, and that the minutiae of everyday life serve only as a backdrop used to create contrast, a point of reference to normality.” (Edwards 1) He believes that Murakami’s “brand of fantasy” to be more old-fashioned and lacking in science fiction techniques. The fantasy Murakami adapts, according to Edwards) interweaves the modern everyday life: not exactly magic realism but not a straight reflection of the progression of life as it is. He mentions that Murakami's reality had a pique and twist to it, which consistently featured in Murakami’s novels. The two opposed worlds -- real or magic-- was used to “cast light into the shadows of a real world consensually idealized as safe, clean and fair” and to confront the implication of social criticism. (19)

Well, what is this magic realism Edwards believe to be existent in some form in Murakami’s novels? Magic realism, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary is a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal or illogical elements of dream or fantasy. As I did more research on magical realism, familiar names and pieces appeared, such as Andy Warhol. What clicked to me was the natural and inapparent existent attraction I had for a literary and artistic genre I had never known of. I had been interested in Andy Warhol and his exhibition in Korea only quite recently, and Haruki Murakami for his what others call “mundane” stories.

An example of magical realism in Sputnik Sweetheart would be missing of Sumire in Greece during her vacation with Miu. Sumire a few days before her disappearance had symptoms that resembled hallucination. Even after weeks in search of Sumire, everyone’s lives returned normal as if nothing happend -- that of Miu’s or even of narrator, who had once fallen in love with Sumire. Many symbols that appear in his novels represent magical realism, for instance the electronic lights that blink in the early morning in the streets of love hotels. And by juxtaposing what is seemingly magical to what is real (the early morning life of the people in the streets of love hotel), Murakami “casts the light in to the shadows of a real world consensually idealized as safe, clean and fair” (19)

Return to What One Imagines to Be There: Masculinity and Racial Otherness in Haruki Murakami's Writings about China by Lo, Kwai-Cheung (18 pages) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3643/is_200407/ai_n14680993/?tag=content;col1
 * SUMMARY 3**

In this article, Lo dives in to the topic of Haruki Murakami’s books that deals with “issues of masculinity and national character in opposition to an entity that is not Western but Asian.”(Lo, 1) She hits many details in to the book of the 18 pages she wrote, such as Murakami’s reference to war-torn China, his father’s past (in the Sino-Japanese War) history of Japan, etc. Lo denotes Murakami’s perspective on the Japanese experience in Manchuria in the past. According to Lo, Murakami in his novels describe the atrocious experiences as revelation and “(un)consciously seeks a lost manhood associated with his father and Japan's past, turns out to be a revelation of the inner darkness that constitutes the "substance" of his subjectivity-no matter how much Murakami tries to escape from his national culture and history.” (9)

Although I have been aware of Asian subjects, it was interesting to read an article by a Chinese critic, who pinpointed Murakami’s point of view of the Asians within. Many who have read __After Dark__ I doubt would be curious of the significance of the prostitute having been Chinese. Lo in this article revealed its significance to me and also enlightened me to view Murakami’s novels with more in depth. Behind his simple sentence structures and modernistic backgrounds in his novels, there is an extra substance that adds to Murakami’s voice.

Although I’ve read three books by Haruki Murakami (one which is considered an autobiography), the allusion to the Sino-Japanese War or traces of his father remains minimal. The only example would be the Chinese prostitute and the Japanese businessman who beats her up in After Dark. The entire love hotel scene where he forces to have a sexual intercourse and beats the girl up is an allusion to Rape of Nanking. As Lo previously mentioned, Murakami seeks to understand his father’s history in the war. Well, so is Murakami’s portrayal of Japanese rape of Chinese considered a revelation? Our first instinct is to disagree with Lo because Murakami did depict the Japanese man as rapist and tempered. However, if Lo was to be correct about how Murakami believed national culture and history to be a revelation, magic realism, a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of dream or fantasy, would play a role making what had happened in the love hotel, surrounded by fanciful and illusional lights of the red district surreal.