Review
Murakami's last book of short stories to be published in English was
After The Quake, a collection of
six stories relating to the Kobe earthquake (see sidebar). His new
collection is something quite different; instead of a small selection of short
stories relating to one event, he presents us with 25 stories written over 25
years from 1980 to 2005, many of which have previously been published in
The New
Yorker,
Granta and
Harper's.
Although the stories are not presented chronologically, a clear progression in his writing style can be seen - from the early stories that are so surreal as to be almost indescribable, to his more
tangible recent stories. It's even possible to see differences between the
stories translated by Jay Rubin, as opposed to Philip Gabriel - apparently, the
two translators find themselves drawn to different...
Beyond the Book
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continued from main block.
In addition to writing his own books in Japanese (which have been translated
into more than thirty languages), Murakami is a skillful translator of English
works into Japanese, including works by Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, John
Irving and Paul Theroux.
In 2006, Murakami became the sixth winner of the Franz Kafka Prize, co-sponsored
by the Franz Kafka Society and the city of Prague (previous winners include
Philip Roth and Harold Pinter). In 2007 he was awarded the Kiriyama Prize
for Fiction for
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman but, according to the Kiriyama Official
website, "declined to accept the award for reasons of personal principle".
The Kiriyama Prize, established in 1996, is a literary award...
