What Inspired Japanese Author Murakami To Start Writing?

Much of the power of The House on Mango Street comes from outside of Esperanza’s personal growth. The author saw how the women on Mango Street were controlled by marriage, by poverty, by culture and looked to tell their stories in order to document their circumstances and assist in their flight from those circumstances through the use of narrative and the development of a totally new self. Rafela, Sally and Mamacita are all portrayed as roles for women in order to teach lessons to Esperanza about how to grow up to be a woman. Each chapter of the book portrays a different female character and therefore the book is a study of the limited roles that women have been given to fill in cultures similar to the author’s. Although the book is critical of these roles, Cisneros portrays each of the female characters with sympathy and complexity and therefore her work does not read as a angry or negative rant. Rather the work is a series of portraits that collectively argue for a woman’s right to create her own life and to have her own space, starting with the space that she has in her own home.

Sherlock Holmes was a product of Dr. Joseph Bell, one of Doyle’s professors at the University of Edinburgh. He was famous for being able to tell a great deal about a patient from slight physical clues. Dr. Bell was also very good at observing small details that others had missed. Doyle was greatly influenced by his teacher and he used Dr. Bell as a basis for his main character Sherlock Holmes. He was also a great observant and used his skills to piece together small details that others had missed. Many of the popular detective stories of Doyle’s time included cases solved by a rational detective rather than brute force. These were particularly influential in relation to the character of C. Auguste Dupin in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. However, while Doyle was heavily influenced by these stories, the character of Sherlock Holmes was vastly more complex and drew a great deal from Doyle’s experiences of Victorian society and the emphasis on science and progress. In addition to these Doyle needed a character for his stories. Holmes, a completely original character at the time, became very well known and instantly associated with his creator. The stories in which he appeared did much to establish the reputation of their author as a writer of crime stories. They also greatly contributed to the re-definition of the genre into a more intellectual and more exciting one.

'Norwegian Wood' by Haruki Murakami is a lot like talking to an old friend who knows all of your wounds. The book reveals little about its characters in the way of backstory, but what there is (Naoko’s fragility, Midori’s boldness, Watanabe’s numbness) contains the whole of human experience. The global appeal of the book likely comes from the fact that love and loss sound the same in any language.

Dazai Osamu’s work, especially ‘No Longer Human’, is like a conversation with someone who really gets it when it comes to feeling desperate and confused. Much of the novels content resonates strongly with me and I imagine with many other readers, as we struggle to come to terms with our own identity. This novel explores many of the same emotions and dilemmas that the protagonist Oba Yozo faces and can be a very tough read in places, but is also beautiful in places and often very poetic. It’s a reason why Dazai’s work has such a huge influence on the Japanese literary scene and inspires so many people to attempt to create art in its rawest form.

This book was inspired by Young’s own desperation. She was bedridden with chronic illness and felt far from God in her traditional prayers. She began to write on paper, sometimes with Jesus sitting beside her, and what she wrote would become these love letters to the Jesus she wanted to believe was near. These are not theology books, but a man and woman struggling to find God in the midst of their deep pain. And that makes their work so powerful – desperation often creates the best art.

This slang is so much fun to read. ‘Shuck it all.’ That sounds so cool to say. I imagine Dashner having a lot of fun making up all this slang for the world of Maze Runner. Writers are often just playing with language when they write and that can be the seed for an entire culture. Probably he thought of it and said ‘what would these kids swear with?’ and just kept going from there.

A very practical theme of communication and its failure is developed in the stories: missed calls and texts that do not arrive, names forgotten, letters that arrive late. Most of the plots are constructed around the communications between the two body-swapped characters and the failed attempts to understand each other in the world that they are both in to return to. The moments of clear and perfect understanding in all the stories are extremely rare and precious against the background of so much ‘noise’. The themes are not limited to romantic misunderstandings but extend to the basic problems of human communication in order to convey one’s inner world to another human being. The supernatural elements in the stories are often used as a metaphor for such communication: a magical connection that goes around the normal ways of human communication and conveys the message of the supernatural connection that is so difficult to achieve in real life.

This student writes in huge numbers across all ages. From what I can gather, her main teacher is her consistent application of writing. Yes, you can read up on all the theory ever written on storytelling but until you have written a million words and thrown most of them away you have learned very little. But from each finished story, even the unpublished ones, she learns new things and gets more confident in solving problems as she goes along. Just like any craft (woodworking, painting etc) her writing develops through her consistent application of it. So much writing is happening at so many different ages that the biggest teacher is simply writing a lot. You can read as much as you want about writing, but until you write a million words (most of which will be terrible and have to be thrown away), you aren’t really learning. Each finished work — whether published or not — solves new problems. Writing a lot helps you learn how to write, and finished works give you confidence. The abundance of writing at all these ages also allows for a lot of play. There’s no reason that every writing project has to be a novel. There are picture books and short stories and poems. Each of these forms of writing teaches different skills. For example, a picture book is incredibly compact and so requires the writer to be economical in every respect, also to be a symbiotic collaborator with the illustrator. A short story is a very small space in which to develop a complete arc with a complete resolution. Writing in many different forms helps to keep the muscles of the creative writer flexible so that the writer won’t get stuck in a rut with just one way of writing.

While reading ‘Born in Blackness’, Howard W. French’s latest book on African history, I kept thinking of how this book would stick with me long after I finished reading it. As someone who has lived and worked in Africa for decades and written for some of the world’s leading publications, French has a unique vantage point for his history. And what he sets out to do with ‘Born in Blackness’ – to challenge the predominantly Eurocentric view of history and to show how Africa’s contributions to the world were actively suppressed and subsequently rewritten – he does with great depth and detail. Much like one would read a book by a well-traveled uncle who is sharing forbidden knowledge, French’s writing is intelligent and easily followed by the reader. The obvious intention of his book is for historical revision, in order to hold people accountable for their distortions of the past. After finishing the book, I look at the “world history” section of most bookstores with suspicion, wondering what other falsehoods are being perpetuated on the public.

I have only one question to pose here, and it is one that has intrigued me for years: Why did she write this? To survive, perhaps. Poetry was Plath’s “blood jet” after all, but in The Bell Jar she has a far larger canvas upon which to explore in more depth the compass-less world of her greatest fear: depression. The mention of shock therapy and attempts at suicide are not random. All of this is illustrated in vivid detail so that she might try to explain to the reader the unexplained aspects of her own life – that when the world demands that we want everything it can never provide the proper tools to bear the weight of it all. And yet she made it all look strangely beautiful.