Global Courant 2023-05-24 15:14:38
The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami was awarded this Wednesday in Spain with the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Letters, a prestigious award that Mario Vargas Llosa, Leonard Cohen or Paul Auster, among other authors, have won.
Murakami’s “universal scope” is shown in an “ambitious and innovative narrative, which has been able to express some of the great issues and conflicts of our time,” said the jury’s decision for this award convened by the Princess of Asturias Foundation, the heiress to the Spanish throne.
The eternal candidate in the pools for the Nobel Prize for Literature, thus received this recognition for his entire career and contributions to global literature.
With a style that is as mysterious as it is accessible, this writer who specializes in mixing reality and fantasy in his works has global blockbusters such as “Tokio Blues”, “1Q84” or “Kafka on the shore”, which were also well received by the criticism.
Born in the city of Kyoto (western Japan) 74 years ago, Murakami studied at Tokyo Waseda University, worked in a record store and set up a jazz bar in the Japanese capital without ever thinking of that. of writing, until one day inspiration struck him in the most unexpected place.
He began his first novel, “Listen to the Song of the Wind”, at the age of 29, after coming up with the idea while watching a baseball game in Tokyo. It was published in 1979 with immediate success in Japan and since then each of her books has become a cultural event in the Asian country.
Passion for literature… and for music
Music was always the greatest passion of the Japanese writer ahead of literature and, as he himself acknowledged on several occasions, it has profoundly influenced his prose, which flees from structural conventions.
“Rather than learning writing techniques from novels by other authors, I tend to pay attention to rhythm, harmonies, free improvisation and that kind of thing,” said the author in a radio program he hosted in Japan in 2018, where he answered questions from his followers and played some of his favorite songs.
Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Photo EFE.
His melomania is evident in works such as “Dance, dance, dance” (2012) or the most recent “Kill the Commander” (2017), where Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni” acts as the soundtrack; as well as in other stories and his extensive references to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, two of his leading bands.
Another of his main hobbies is long-distance running, something he also explored in his work “What do I talk about when I talk about running” and an activity that, according to him, is quite similar to the process of writing a novel.
In fact, Murakami has been running a marathon a year since he was 33 years old and has already published more than thirty books including novels, collections of short stories and essays.
His journey through journalism
Like Capote, the Japanese novelist made a foray into journalism with “Underground” (1997), a collection of interviews with victims of the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995 and with some members of the Supreme Truth sect, responsible for the deadliest attack in Japanese history to date.
Haruki Murakami i won the Princess of Asturias Award.
This work stands out in his career for providing an unambiguous look or literary decorations at the contemporary problems of his country, something that to date has not been attempted again by an author as allergic to the spotlight of the media as to literary prizes. (he stated that he did not want them because they are for “finished” authors).
Even so, Murakami was translated into fifty languages and previously received other international literary awards such as the Franz Kafka and the World Fantasy Award (both in 2006) or the Hans Christian Andersen for Literature (2016), as well as awards in Japan such as the Tanizaki and the Yomiuri.
Other Japanese have received the Princess of Asturias -then called the Prince of Asturias-, such as the astronaut Chaiki Mukai, who was awarded the International Cooperation Award in 1999 and in 2008, Professor Shuji Nakamura won the same recognition for Scientific Research. and physicist Sumio Iijima.
