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If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.
Haruki Murakami - 1Q84 (via murakamistuff)(Source: kindlequotes, via murakamistuff)
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The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring—and all of the acts carried out—on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories. All it did was embrace the heavy past with cool, measured detachment. On the moon there was neither air nor wind. Its vaccum was perfect for preserving memories unscathed. No one could unlock the heart of the moon. Aomame raised her glass to the moon and asked, “Have you gone to bed with someone in your arts lately?”
The moon did not answer.
“Do you have any friends?”
The moon did not answer.
“Don’t you get tired of always playing it cool?”
The moon did not answer.
Haruki Murakami, my favorite passage from 1Q84 thus far, page 213.
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Sam Anderson profiles the great Haruki Murakami:
When Murakami sat down to write his first novel, he struggled until he came up with an unorthodox solution: he wrote the book’s opening in English, then translated it back into Japanese. This, he says, is how he found his voice. Murakami’s longstanding translator, Jay Rubin, told me that a distinctive feature of Murakami’s Japanese is that it often reads, in the original, as if it has been translated from English.
You could even say that translation is the organizing principle of Murakami’s work: that his stories are not only translated but about translation. The signature pleasure of a Murakami plot is watching a very ordinary situation (riding an elevator, boiling spaghetti, ironing a shirt) turn suddenly extraordinary (a mysterious phone call, a trip down a magical well, a conversation with a Sheep Man) — watching a character, in other words, being dropped from a position of existential fluency into something completely foreign and then being forced to mediate, awkwardly, between those two realities. A Murakami character is always, in a sense, translating between radically different worlds: mundane and bizarre, natural and supernatural, country and city, male and female, overground and underground. His entire oeuvre, in other words, is the act of translation dramatized. -
limited edition of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
“This limited edition of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 was a collaboration between Kristen Harrison here at The Curved House, Simon Rhodes of Harvill Secker (an imprint of Random House) and designer Stefanie Posavec. The edition was strictly limited to 111 copies signed by the author…” — The Curved House
(via typoretum)
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View our whole series of 1Q84 quotegraphics, and be sure to tune in to our Murakami Mix on Spotify.
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You won’t be able to get your hands on 1Q84 for one more week, but in the meantime, watch this video of Chip Kidd talking about what went in to designing the book’s gorgeous cover.
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(Source: aaknopf)
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“We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence?”
// Haruki Murakami, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles”
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