Clarissa Oon | THE STRAITS TIMES
Haruki Murakami has been a companion to a writer from singlehood to motherhood
In my 20s and reeling from a break-up, I read everything best-selling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami had written, drowning myself in his prose the way others might in bottles of whisky.
I have never been a fast reader, but his lonely charismatic male protagonists and pacey yet meditative narratives – thrillers that make you ask “why” rather than “who” – made it easy for me.
On weekends and when I did not have to work, I read through the night, coming up for air the next morning.
In that way, I tore through eight novels and short story collections in a few months – at that point, the sum total of his output that had been translated into English.
Fifteen years on, as a time-strapped working mother of two, I recently picked up Mura- kami’s “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage: (2014) and wondered if I would still find him appealing.
A perennial favourite to win the Nobel prize for literature as well as a recurring presence on bestseller lists around the world, his fame had grown in the intervening years, but I had not read anything by him in nearly a decade.
Would I see my younger self in his fiction and cringe? Or would I discover something more enduring, something that could still speak to me even as I entered the fifth decade of my life?
For readers like me, who have spent part of our lives submerged in the printed word, these are important questions. >>READ MORE
