Belief in the “power of storytelling” drives Haruki Murakami

Japanese writer Murakami Haruki (村上 春樹), whose latest work (The Death of the Commander) explores new territory such as rebirth and family, says he believes in the power of storytelling .

” The Death of the Commander “, a novel published in Japanese in two parts, has a forward-moving story, multi-layered themes and luxurious images. It ends with a feeling of warmth, which envelops the characters who have lost loved ones or who are deeply hurt.

” Storytelling empowers people, I believe in that “, Murakami Haruki

The protagonist is a 36-year-old portrait painter, the “I” we already know in other Murakami stories. When his wife tells him out of the blue that she wants to leave him, the protagonist starts living in a house in the mountains of Kanagawa Prefecture, southwest of Tokyo, which used to be the home and studio of a painter of traditional ” nihonga ” paintings. called Tomohiko Amada . Throughout the story, curious things happen, written in the first person, as we see in many of Murakami’s works.

“I used to always write in the first person, so I had a sense of freedom when I went back to my old field,” Murakami said. “The novels I like, like ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘The Great Gatsby,’ are also in the first person. When I was translating novels like those, I wanted to write (that way) again. Maybe the novels in First person suits me.”

Murakami says that the title, ‘ The Death of the Commander ‘, came to mind and he was captivated by how peculiar it felt. Then curiosity reared its head: what kind of story would that be?” he asked himself. With a painter as its protagonist, the work is embedded with Murakami ‘s writing methods and visions of art.

“I don’t know how to paint pictures, but I think the fundamentals of painting and literature are the same, so I transferred the work I do writing novels (to history)”

The novel also addresses the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938 and the Nanjing Massacre in 1937. For Murakami, history is made of collective memories and he feels it is wrong to forget or alter them.” That is one of his core beliefs. Murakami feels a strong sense of alarm at xenophobia both in Japan and abroad .

“The idea that the world would be a better place if we just got rid of the foreign… has to be the same as what we call ethnic cleansing.”

Look pessimistically at the current situation in Japan: the bursting of the economic bubble of the 1980s was followed by a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by followers of a religious cult in 1995, a series of deadly and destructive earthquakes and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. However, he believes that “people’s trust in stories hasn’t changed. I think if you write a good story, it has some kind of power. I believe in power of the narrative .”

And have you already read ” The Death of the Commander “? Tell us in the comments what you think!