Comments on: Who will feed the Haruki Murakami fans online?

By: g dawg

g dawg — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:00:58 +0000

Perhaps he has withdrawn from the web these days because he doesn’t want to become part of such obvious marketing strategies?

By: daniel

daniel — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 02:15:19 +0000

I guess it doesn’t really matter, to be honest, but it is a little strange. This is the Murakami that has hand-crafted his Complete Works. The same one who kept all plot details under wraps and didn’t release review copies of his most recent book. And he isn’t a stranger to the Internet nor to technology in general. Yet he has a somewhat lame Web representation. We also know that people are keeping an eye out for his interests online, to a certain extent. There’s a strange disconnect here. (And yes, what I’d really like is for someone to let ME design his site and run the news section, heh.)

I wrote a little bit more here: http://bit.ly/9JxRn3

One other thing to mention is Murakami’s relative distaste for the publishing industry, as reflected in 1Q84 and in the famous short story “The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes.” I’m not sure why the site for 1Q84 is so corporate, then.

By: LU

LU — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:02:12 +0000

We are talking about a writer,an intellectual, an artist that needs his own personal world to “produce”. That world is definetely not the Web. Which is very understandable. So, does it matter if he has an updated Webpage or a Twitter presence?

By: daniel

daniel — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:45:47 +0000

Abroad he’s been very active – more active than he’s been in Japan. He’s admitted such in interviews (I believe in an issue of monkey business last year), and his reasoning is that he wants to use the position he’s gained to act a sort of cultural representative of Japan. But back home he’s definitely not as active as he used to be.

I realize that there’s a difference between being as connected as someone like William Gibson (highly active on Twitter, which I guess makes sense given the kind of material he writes) and disconnected along the lines of Cormac McCarthy (still using a typewriter? Also victim to Twitter satire: https://twitter.com/therealcormac ), but I think the best example of the change is the reader interaction on his new website – illustrations of the letter Q which are little more than a marketing gimmick. It’s far from the work he was doing on the Asahi site.

“Withdrawn” might be a little strong. “Disconnected” and perhaps even “uninvolved” might be closer to the truth. @ourmaninabiko might have said it best when he retweeted this story: “Maybe he doesn’t need to care, tho.”

By: Roland Kelts

Roland Kelts — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:49:09 +0000

I don’t believe Haruki has ‘withdrawn even further.’ Quite the opposite. Last year he braved repeated warnings, political rebuke and possibly violence by flying to Israel to accept the Jerusalem Prize, the nation’s highest literary honor–amounting to a whopping $10,000. “I chose to speak here rather than say nothing,” he explained, and proceeded to deliver a moving speech in English declaring that he remained forever on the side of the oppressed.

Reportedly, half the room of Israeli VIPs sat on their hands afterward.

Less than two years ago, I spent several days with Haruki in the Bay Area, where we conducted a 90-minute ‘taidan’/onstage conversation before an audience of 3,000 at UC Berkeley. He met with students and conducted open Q&A sessions in literature classes, signed books both at Berkeley and, for several hours, at a bookstore in downtown San Francisco. He also sat for an interview with a reporter from the SF Chronicle.

The reason he’s not actively online right now is likely related to writing, specifically writing well, which takes time and enormous concentration.