Haruki Murakami (1949-) is a Japanese novelist. I study in the drama department of the literature department of Waseda University. From 65438 to 0979, his first novel, Song of Listening to the Wind, was put on the screen. Subsequently, his excellent works "Pinball in 1973", "The Adventure of Looking for Sheep" and "Norwegian Forest" were published one after another. His creation is not limited by tradition, with novel ideas, natural and unrestrained writing style, and is not vulgar. Especially when describing people's loneliness and helplessness, he did not write this emotion as a negative thing, but sublimated it into an elegant style and a state of enjoying this emotion through inner spiritual operation, thus providing readers, especially people living in cities, with a life model or life experience.

Four Kinds of Beauty in Haruki Murakami's Works

"What my novel wants to talk about can be briefly summarized to some extent. That is: everyone has been looking for a precious thing all his life, but not many people can find it. Even if you are lucky enough to find it, what you actually found has been fatally damaged in many cases. Nevertheless, we are still looking for it. Because if you don't do this, the meaning of life itself will cease to exist. " -Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is in China.

In China, the influence of Haruki Murakami is like morning fog or dusk, scattered on the streets of the city, erratic, but seemingly ubiquitous. Leo Oufan Lee, a famous scholar and professor at Harvard University, mentioned ten literary translations that had the greatest influence on China in the 20th century in his collection of essays "Reflections at the End of the Century", and Norwegian Wood ranked 10th. Undoubtedly, China's extensive reading has promoted the people, especially the young people's understanding of Japanese literature, Japanese culture and even the Japanese people and nation, and aroused their interest and goodwill to a great extent.

Haruki Murakami's masterpiece Norwegian Forest (hereinafter referred to as Nuo) was published by Lijiang Publishing House on 1989. In 2000, Haruki Murakami's other four books (The Adventure of Looking for Sheep, The End of the World, Cold Wonderland and Dance! Dance! Dance! At least 500,000 copies have been published, including 300,000 copies. 200 1, Shanghai translation publishing house took over, and in February of the same year, the "full translation" of Nuo came out. By April this year, Murakami's new work After Dark was published in Chinese, and 29 kinds were published in four and a half years, which not only almost eliminated Murakami's novels, but also included some essays. "Nuo" has been printed in 22 issues, with the number of copies exceeding1000000, and an additional 50000 copies are printed every two or three months. Kafka by the Sea published in April 2003 also performed well. The book has been printed five times, with more than 260,000 copies. These two books are basically in the top ten or fifteen bestsellers in recent years. AfterDark, published in April this year, printed 20,000 copies a month later, reaching 60,000 copies. Under such a rough calculation, Murakami's works have been printed more than 2 million copies in the past four years. Together with the 500,000 copies of the Lijiang River era, there are about 2.8 million original works published in several villages since 15, which is more than the sum of all Japanese literary works published in the new period. This is a legendary print run in China. The average print run of books including foreign literary works is less than 1 10,000 copies. As a result, Haruki Murakami and his promise have become a cultural symbol, and whether or not to see Murakami has even become a hard indicator of the qualification of petty bourgeoisie.

The French are not interested in Murakami.

Internationally, Murakami has quietly become one of the world's first-class writers. As of last year, his works have been translated or will be translated into foreign languages by more than 30 countries and regions, which is probably unique among contemporary writers in Japan and even Asia. In the United States, eight kinds of village novels have been translated into English. The fantastic imagination of his works and the alienation of modern people have won him a fixed readership, and his reputation is no less than that of Garcia Marquez. In Germany, since the publication of 199 1 German edition, Murakami's works have sold more than 1 10,000 copies, which is mainly due to his exploration and creation of the inner world with detective novels full of surprises and unexpected turns, and also won the reputation of "Kafka in Japan". In the British publishing industry, although translated novels only account for about 6%, since 10, 10 kinds of Murakami novels have been published. The warmth, beauty and sense of loss between the lines gave birth to British Murakami fans, and some media praised Murakami as "the original sound of world literature". The French did not show much enthusiasm for Murakami's novels. Although all his major works have been translated, only 20,000 to 30,000 people have read them. One of the reasons is that French readers are not new to Murakami, and feel that their techniques are very similar to those of European and American writers.

In any case, it is East Asia that really forms the popular reading craze in the village. In addition to Japan, Chinese mainland, Hongkong, Taiwan Province and South Korea are the main countries. Compared with western literature (or for western readers), Murakami's works are more sentimental in the east, elegant and euphemistic situations and mysterious colors of confusion between yin and yang; Compared with readers of oriental literature or East Asia, Murakami's works have more obvious traces of western literature, westernized props and perspectives. At the same time, his self-alienated "new individualism in the village" and his warm and subtle spiritual redemption are also important elements to attract East Asian readers.

Wang Xiaobo once talked with his brother: Apart from basic physiological needs, people's lifelong pursuit can be roughly divided into two categories: one is power, that is, understanding and controlling the world, such as politicians, businessmen and scientists; Another kind of pursuit of beauty is a delicate emotion, just like the sea soothing people. Speaking of Haruki Murakami, anyone who has read him can say a lot. One of the most attractive, I think it can be summarized as a delicate and soothing literary beauty according to Wang Xiaobo's words. I remember when I met him in Tokyo the year before last, he said to me, "If readers feel the same way when reading my book, it is that they have the same world as me." That world is undoubtedly made up of the beauty of literature. So specifically, what are the elements of beauty? I wonder if it can be summarized as the following four points, namely, the beauty of words, the beauty of loneliness, the beauty of metaphor and the beauty of profundity.

The beauty of words

Most people like Murakami's works because of the beauty of words. After all, literature is the art of language. Without the art of language and the beauty of words, there would be no literature.

Of course, the beauty of words here not only refers to the beauty in the usual sense, such as beauty, beauty, "beauty of words and beauty of sentences", but mainly refers to the uniqueness of words. The uniqueness of the text is the most precious character of literature. The uniqueness of a text depends largely on its uniqueness and non-replicability, that is, its style. To put it bluntly, it is "this" rather than "that". Generally speaking, compared with Chinese, Japanese obviously has its own uniqueness, which is "this" rather than "that". You can see at a glance that this novel is translated from Japanese, not English or Russian. Because of this, Murakami made up his mind to "wash all kinds of excrement" ... leaving them naked and pestering the Japanese. This "nudity" seems a bit shocking, even erotic, but it is actually the antonym of sticky wordiness-clean, neat, refined, natural, refreshing, elegant and exquisite. One reader wrote that reading Murakami's works "is like walking on a clear beach and looking at the clear blue sky in the distance." Cool! " . Another reader said that reading his works "is a kind of happiness that fills every inch of life". More readers quoted the feelings of the protagonist "I" in Noah when reading Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. "I opened a page and read the last paragraph. I never let me down. No page was boring. What a wonderful masterpiece! " It can be said that such a reading feeling can only be endowed by the beauty of words, and can only be obtained through the beauty of delicate words.

So, why are China readers so sensitive to the beauty of words? I have generally seen the reactions of Japanese readers and European and American readers. Japanese readers really like the beauty of its "style", but the response is not so enthusiastic; Europe and America are mainly attracted by "absurd imagination and modern people's sense of alienation" and "detective novel techniques", and hardly mention the beauty of words. In contrast, China readers almost fell in love with this point at first sight. Why is this?

I think there are at least two reasons for this. First, China people are descendants of the people in the poetic country, or direct or indirect descendants of Li Bai, Du Fu and Su Dongpo. I'm not a linguist, and I haven't done any research, but I always feel that Chinese is probably one of the most beautiful languages in the world-although theoretically any language can be exchanged at the same price-at least it is the most decorative language, such as flat and parallel, antithesis and so on. , should only be owned and qualified by China people. Although modern people are busy and impetuous, they don't have the time and grace to ride a donkey backwards with a hip flask on their back, but such cultural genes remain on them after all, making them particularly sensitive and interested in the beauty of words and lyrics. To a great extent, literature reading is to enjoy the happiness of words. It is indeed a wonderful pleasure that only the ancient medium of Chinese characters can convey. It can be said that it is God's special grace to people who can speak Chinese.

However, there are fewer articles that pay attention to the beauty of words and texts now-this is also the second reason I want to say-and only a few are particularly eager. Unfortunately, such excellent works and works seem to be in short supply in China's current literary world. Imagine-maybe I am ignorant-how many famous books can make us feel the beauty of words and literature besides a few words? Not to mention the unique styles written by Lu Xun and Qian Zhongshu. For example, I read the sentence "beautiful and beautiful girl" in a well-known prose anthology the other day. I was surprised and deeply grateful: fortunately, I didn't say "beautiful boy" at last. I wonder if it can be asserted that our precious China people are becoming vulgar, vulgar, obscene and frivolous! Murakami's works have exquisite beauty of words and literature, which just meets people's literary aesthetic needs.

Beauty of loneliness

Loneliness, like love and death, is an eternal theme written by scholars, especially poets. What kind of loneliness does Haruki Murakami describe? A reader wrote down her feelings in the letter: "(I) drank coffee, mixed with the night, and read pages carefully." At that time, it was still summer, and the cool evening breeze passed through the screen window, dancing the curtains and blowing away the fog on the coffee cup ... I felt great. Delicate brushwork, lonely life, as if writing about yourself. "Yes, Murakami's loneliness is everyone's loneliness. Reading is like writing about yourself, so the loneliness of ordinary people is everywhere. And "feeling good" is an elegant loneliness and a beautiful loneliness. Most lonely people sit lazily in dark bars, drinking whisky glasses, watching imitation paintings on the walls and listening to jazz flowing in old speakers. They never complain about others, never give up on themselves and never talk to anyone. In a word, it is better to manage loneliness, enjoy loneliness, watch loneliness and return to loneliness than to endure loneliness. This is also the classic scene, classic atmosphere and classic artistic conception that the so-called petty bourgeoisie appreciates most.

However, Murakami's loneliness comes not only from petty bourgeoisie's cheap sentimentality, but also from repeatedly chewing the ripples of personal emotions. It is more from the critical examination and deep questioning of human nature, the essence of life, social system and one's own situation. This kind of examination and questioning urges us to keep recalling, leaving and searching. As he said in 200 1 a letter to readers in China entitled "A Traveling Room": "Everyone is looking for a precious thing in his life, but not many people can find it. Even if you are lucky enough to find it, what you actually found has been fatally damaged in many cases. Nevertheless, we are still looking for it. Because if you don't do this, the meaning of life itself will not exist. " So what are you looking for as Murakami? I think he is looking for the truth and dignity of life, the integrity and purity of subjectivity, and the freedom and export of the soul. However, these things are doomed to be hard to find. "Everything will disappear and no one can catch it" (Listen to the Wind). As a result, I had to wander in the inner wasteland for a long time, so I felt lonely, pitied and sad. A touch of loneliness, tenderness and sadness are the distinctive colors of Murakami's works. It's like a misty mist in the evening, like the distant flute under the moon, like the fragrance of lily in the wilderness, lingering. Here, loneliness not only does not need comfort, but is itself comfort.

And all this makes readers in China intoxicated and fascinated, and arouses their hearts. Because, many young people in China, just like left-behind children, are on the way to find their way back. They look for flags in the wind, but they are faced with debris everywhere; They look for sincere smiling faces, but face hypocritical faces; They pursue metaphysical value, but face metaphysical money; They are looking for pure blue sky, but they are facing dirty ditches. What they feel is deep, surging, huge loneliness and sadness. The awakened person must be lonely, the self-respecting person must be lonely, and the upright person must be lonely. Although they may not be able to ponder the beauty of loneliness every time at this time, Murakami has provided an outlet to exile loneliness, a paradigm to sublimate loneliness, that is, the technology of self-care, so that they can silently maintain their own unified values and consistency, and "can also make themselves stronger according to the situation" (Haruki Murakami).

The Beauty of Metaphor and Murakami's Interpretation of His Works

Murakami's writing style is "naked" or "transparent", but his story is confusing. This is related to Murakami's creative thinking. Murakami believes that "novels are fables in the final analysis, which makes fables realistic." In Kafka by the Sea, he was even bluntly said by Oshima: "Everything in the world is a metaphor" (the original words are from Goethe). In fact, fables or metaphors are basically the same thing, metaphors and symbols. Zhuangzi's Happy Journey, Li Shangyin's Why My Jinse Has Fifty Strings, and Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged are all well-known metaphors. In other words, metaphor itself is not unfamiliar, but it is rare to use it in such a large number as Murakami. His metaphor can be said to be as good as his humor, and he is indeed called "Kafka of Japan".

There is no perfect article, just like there is no complete despair. This is the first sentence of Murakami's first novel "Listening to the Wind", and Nietzsche's words are quoted at the end. The last sentence is also a metaphor: "Compared with the complexity of the universe, our world is like a sparrow's brain." This sends us a clear message: there will be countless subtle metaphors, including enigmatic metaphors, in his novels in the future. Its later works are indeed like this. 1973 pinball machine and twin girls, Sir in Sheep with Star Stripes on its Back and Adventure of Looking for Sheep, unicorn, nightingale, organization, factory and stomach-expanding girl in Doomsday and Cold Wonderland, faint fireflies and Amilao in Norwegian Forest. Dance! Dance! The Sheep Man and Six Bones in South of the Border and West of the Sun, the piano music played repeatedly, the lovers born under the disaster (Lovers in Stars), the satellites and ferris wheel in Putnik Lovers, the clockwork bird and the faceless man in the deep well in Strange Birds, Kafka by the sea, can be said that the novel is a huge maze constructed by countless metaphors, and even it is huge in itself. As for short stories, there are countless more. Generally speaking, as a technique, it is promoted in parallel by two lines: one side, one interior, one secluded and one bright, one movement and one quietness, one reality and one emptiness, one yin and one yang, one world on this shore, one world on the other side, one real world, one supernatural world ... The reality and reality are intertwined, the yin and yang are intertwined, life and death are together, the truth and the falsehood are difficult to distinguish, mountains and rivers are complex, and clouds cover the fog. In short, it is to keep making something disappear for no reason. Take animals for example. The cat disappeared, the sheep disappeared, and even the elephant disappeared. There is a short story simply called The Missing Elephant. There is no elephant in the elephant pen, and it is an old elephant. " As old as a dodder, people who see it for the first time often feel uneasy, and I am afraid that it will die limply at once. "This is not counting, just like a hind leg with an iron ring attached to an iron chain." Iron rings and chains are unbreakable at first glance, and even if an elephant tries its best in a hundred years, it is totally helpless. "However, in this way, an elephant suddenly disappeared. The authorities used the police, fire brigade, self-defense forces and several helicopters to toss and turn. Until the evening, they still couldn't find it, and the elephant disappeared inexplicably. Needless to say, it doesn't matter if Xiaohua Mall next door or his pug rabbit is missing, but it's like a behemoth second only to whales among the existing animals, that is to say, the animal that is not easy and should not be missing. But it's gone, gone, clean. Based on the information revealed by Murakami on many occasions, it is not difficult to infer that the spiritual home of metaphor is warm and peaceful, and the spiritual home of metaphor may disappear forever. 1979, Murakami expected the elephant to "return to the plain" in his debut novel "Listening to the Wind" ("By then, the elephant will return to the plain, and I will describe the world in a better language"), but in 1985, he concluded that "the elephant and its keeper have completely disappeared, and it is impossible to return here".

Judging from the large number of letters I received from readers, these metaphors seem to be the main reading obstacles for readers in China. Perhaps most of the letters are written by high school students, especially female high school students, and our traditional education in China requires them to summarize the theme or central idea, and habitually urges them to get to the bottom of it. Not only high school students, but also college students can't understand it-so they write to me or ask me directly in class, which makes me desperate. Really cornered, had to ask Murakami himself for help. Murakami cooperated and replied in the form of an open letter: "What my novel wants to talk about can be simply summarized to some extent. That is: everyone has been looking for a precious thing all his life, but not many people can find it. Even if you are lucky enough to find it, what you actually found has been fatally damaged in many cases. Nevertheless, we are still looking for it. Because if you don't do this, the meaning of life itself will cease to exist. " It can be seen that Murakami's answer to this question is largely to answer. As far as I can see, Murakami almost never summed up the theme of his works in this way on other occasions-although objectively and to some extent-on the contrary, he opposed setting the theme when writing, thinking that his works would become rigid. What he talks about is more metaphor. In July 2002, in an interview with Kafka by the Sea, which was just published at that time, it was further explained by the expression of "myth": "The more the story (story) plays its original function, the faster it approaches the myth. To put it more extreme, it may be close to the world of schizophrenia. " I'm afraid what he said next is also very enlightening to us: "In this sense, there may be some places in my novel that are not suitable for analysis. ..... I'm not pretentious, sometimes I suddenly feel that when writing a story, I don't want to analyze things similar to my prototype one by one, but I want to write it down like a whole stone. Finally. I'm not sure how much this feeling can be conveyed to readers. " (Young Kafka, edited by Haruki Murakami, published by Xinchao Society in June 2003) In this way, metaphor is bound to be used. It can be said that metaphor, myth and symbol are always a highlight of Murakami's works. Many readers of China, especially those with certain life experience, got the message and followed him into a magical world full of metaphorical beauty with great interest. Here, I only quote a reader who talks about "white-collar workers" or "petty bourgeoisie" to interpret the meaning of clockwork bird in The Travels of Strange Birds: "It is a magical bird, a writer's longing for truth in fantasy, and all the hopes of this world and life are in jeopardy. It condenses human thinking about the world and destiny in the context of the previous era, and is the desire of human beings to return to nature and return to the essential state of life in a state of extreme anxiety. "

Profound beauty

Last year was the 25th year of Haruki Murakami's debut. Perhaps to commemorate or celebrate this year, 55-year-old Jun Murakami simply flew away and became a nightingale. He flew from midnight 1 1: 56 to 6: 52 the next morning, flying very high and commanding. This is a bird's eye view. A Bird's Eye Record is Murakami's latest novel After Dark.

What does the nightingale see? I saw Mary, a female college student and a young man speaking Chinese in a restaurant. I saw Ellie, a beautiful girl who slept day and night, and the man who watched her intently from TV. I saw the China girl who was naked and tearful in the corner after being beaten by the customer Shirakawa. Then, through the surveillance camera, I stared at Shirakawa for a long time: Shirakawa, in his thirties, in a suit and tie, wearing a pair of small glasses with gold edges, gentle and gentle, "his appearance gives people an intellectual impression." He can't see that he is a prostitute at all, and he won't start a fight because the girl is menstruating, take all his clothes off and prevent him from reporting the case. Therefore, in this new work, what we see is no longer a lonely village gentleman who spends most of his time alone in a bar or suite, immersed in the drizzle outside the window, enjoying western music, a village gentleman who gawks at a few centimeters of whisky left at the bottom of a bottle or lies in bed watching Critique of Pure Ideal, a village gentleman who is obsessed with intensive cultivation in his mind, but a village gentleman who dares to face evil and explore. However, the discovery of evil or the appearance of evil incarnations did not begin after dark. For example, "Sir" in The Adventure of Looking for Sheep (1982), "Nightmare" in The End of the World and Cold Wonderland (1985), and Watanabe Rishi in The Travels of Strange Birds (1994,1. However, the evil in these works has a similar feature, which is vague and puzzling. People, behaviors, time and place are often shrouded in the mysterious and mottled light and shadow of history, lacking a sense of realism and real-time details, which is beyond common sense, true and false, and virtual and real. Until Kafka by the sea two or three years ago, it was still like this. But it's different after dark. It can be said that the evil in Murakami's works is the "ordinary guy" whose height, figure and hairstyle are extremely ordinary, and meeting in the street can hardly leave an impression on people. His evil ways, evil things and their consequences are realistic and concrete, true, clear and definite. What is particularly thought-provoking is that after the violence in Zai Shirakawa, he casually returned to the company to work the night shift and continued to listen to music as a computer technician who claimed to be the "number one master" to repair the faulty computer. When he took out the clothes of the girl who was beaten one by one in the office before going home, a puzzled expression appeared on his face, as if to say, "Why is there such an object here?" In short, Shirakawa has no sense of crime, let alone introspection-this is equally profound. In a word, Murakami is not only a "soft" writer who makes some China readers read petty bourgeoisie, but also a serious writer who dares to point his pen at "evil" and "hard", a writer with conscience, courage, sense of responsibility and profound problem consciousness who dares to face history and reality directly. Profound is also a kind of beauty, a kind of sharp beauty that shines with cold light like a blade. In this sense, we can really think that if Kafka by the sea is still a demon hatched in the eggshell, then it finally surfaced in After Dark.

After Dark not only discusses "evil", but also depicts the Japanese as the embodiment of "goodness". For example, the female manager of the Love Hotel where a China girl went was outraged by Shirakawa's atrocities and vowed never to let this "guy who beat innocent girls" go. Mary, the heroine, is studying Chinese in a university and is going to study in Beijing. She said that when she first saw her, she "really wanted to be friends with her ... I think that girl is completely with me now, as if she had become a part of me." Perhaps, as a Japanese critic said, "Finding a line different from the common benchmark and norm of social good and evil is an important motif of Murakami's works" (Tatsuya Mori: Rebellion against Meta-society, Asahi Shimbun, 2004+0 1. 12).

Of course, his profundity is fully and uniquely reflected in his inquiry into human modernity and subjectivity, his thinking about human survival dilemma and ultimate trend, etc., so I won't talk about singing here. (This edition is adapted from the author's speech at the Beijing Office of the Japan Foundation for International Exchange on June 25th. )