Annotated Reading: Jay Rubin and Haruki Murakami

Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. London, UK: The Haverhill Press, 2002.

Author and professor Jay Rubin has had a long relationship with the works of Haruki Murakami, having translated the very popular Norwegian Wood, the masterpiece Wind-up Bird Chronicle and the most recent release After Dark. In this scholarly work that resembles both the insights of literary critic and the praise of an impassioned fan, Rubin points out a number of interesting observations that may be useful to those who are interested in jazz abroad, particularly in Japan, and how jazz influences the writing of fiction.

Haruki Murakami first encountered American jazz as a teenager when he attended a concert featuring Art Blakely and the Jazz Messengers. Later, before embarking on his writing career, he owned a popular jazz club called Peter Cat in a western suburb of Tokyo. As one of the most popular Japanese writers in the world, he continues to use jazz in nearly all of his work. Whether it is using a particular song to evoke a mood—essays have been written that attempt to offer a complete discography of works referenced in his stories, mix CDs have been compiled by fans, even his publisher’s web site streams clips of songs alluded to in his work—or using jazz clubs as a setting, as he does in South of the Border, West of the Sun and A Wild Sleep Chase among others, or actual musicians as characters as he does in the short story “Tony Takatani,” Muraki infuses all his writing with jazz music.

Rubin opens his introduction with a quotation from a speech Murakami delivered at the University of California at Berkeley where he examined the relationship between his prose style and the beat of jazz: “[T]he sentences have to have rhythm. This is something I learned from music, especially jazz. In jazz, great rhythm is what makes great improvising possible. It’s all in the footwork. To maintain that rhythm, there must be no extra weight. That doesn’t mean that there should be no weight at all—just no weight that isn’t absolutely necessary” (2).

For those who are unfamiliar with Murakami or uninterested in reading literary criticism, the book does have an appealing feature. It contains, to my knowledge, the only English version of his short story “The 1963/1982 Girl from Ipanema.” This early, slim (only five pages) story contains many of the themes—“loss and ageing, memory and music, time and timelessness, reality and the wells of the unconscious, and melancholy longing for a special time and place”—that mark the best of Murakami’s more mature work.

Recommended Titles (in order of my own preference):
Wind Up Bird Chronicle
Norwegian Wood
Kafka on the Shore
After the Quake (Short stories)
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Sputnik Sweetheart