Murakami vs Mishima

Er, we'll find out the result next year bcz I can't type at this time of night. Shouldn't stop anyone from talking tho'

They both have done great bits of writing, but they both also annoy me frequently. But there must be somethign like despite that, as I keep being tempted back. I do think Murakami is wildly over-rated, though.

Could the thread author tell me why he has grouped these two authors in a poll together beause it doesn't really make any sense, the don't have much in common besides being japanese

Its not much more than 'being Japanese'. I know they're different, and that I would have set up Mishima against someone like Kawabata if I wanted similarity.

Thread is based on a throwaway comment I read on a puff piece on Murakami I happened to glance a couple of weeks ago where he said he hated Mishima. That kind of set me thinking that these two seem to be the more prominent authors to come out of post-war Japan and yet they couldn't be more different in terms of interests (ok I haven't Murakami's bk on the Tokyo gas attacks where there could be some overlap?)

Plus this place does need more polls.

I perhaps enjoy Murakami more but Mishima is waaaaay the better writer.

I've read very little of Mishima's writing, but liked it and have always meant to dig deeper. I've read TONS of Murakami, on the other hand, but find him increasingly tedious (assume we're talking Haruki and not Ryu).

It's hard to evaluate writing in translation, though. There are two primary translators of Murakami's short fiction that I'm familiar with (can't remember their names, don't wanna dig), and I've noticed that I much prefer the stories tranlated by Translator X to those by Translator Y. Wonder how much of clunky flatness that I find so offputting in the novels is due to the author and how much to the translators. (Given that clunky flatness seems to be a big part of Murakami's style, I mean.)

HM's long essay on running in the New Yorker a few weeks back was one of the more boring things ever published in that magazine.

^There have been three major Murakami English translators--Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. I'm not sure what it is -- they all seem to do "clunky flatness" at points--but I've liked all the Gabriel-translated ones the least. I'm totally unfamiliar with Japanese, so maybe it's just the selection (I remember reading a "translators roundtable" w/ Rubin and Gabriel where one of them wrote that they almost never have to compete for stories because they usually like different ones), but I'm curious if anyone else feels this way.

I've never read the second volume of Underground, which was translated by Gabriel (the first volume is Birnbaum), which is probably a good way to compare them.

The sarin-gas-attack book (Underground) was one of his I enjoyed the most, but partly just because the subject matter was so intrinsically interesting.

Murakami's thing gets tiring, yeah -- I'll admit some of the events can be hold interest, and those pop cult refs keep you awake sometimes, but after a book and a half I struggle with those. If there is anything Beatles-like about it I go all negative.

Mishima, on the other hand...the themes he obsesses over and over again: the mourning at the loss of Japan's 'glorious' imperial past, the influence of the West, which he seems to hate yet he throws in an obsession with bodybuilding (surely something quite Western as oposed to learning Kendo, I know absolutely zilch about it)...now obv there is lots more, but right now I've read six books by him and could easily another sixty. But still there is a sense it could all become unreadable in a year so its a good thing this is set for 2009...:-)

I know what you mean--I share almost NO beliefs with Mishima, but he's compelling.

HM's long essay on running in the New Yorker a few weeks back was one of the more boring things ever published in that magazine.

was it excerpted from his new book? because i liked that a lot, although i could see how a chapter would be boring. or maybe i like it because it's boring.

i'll have to check who translated what again, but i'm pretty sure i like philip gabriel's work the best!

gabriel and birnbaum, apparently.

i've never read any mishima, what's good?

I've only read Confessions of a Mask, which I enjoyed well enough.

same here, it's the only mishima i've read and although i liked it i felt he was telling me a lot and not really showing me a lot (a problem i also recently had with stefan zwig). i've read a 4 murakami's and that's enough. it's unlikely i'll read anything else my him.

i started the sailor who fell etc., stopped after about 20 pages. would like to return to it, i didn't hate it, but decided i wasn't in the mood for a book like that at the time (i had also just finished reading woman in the dunes). never read any murakami.

Is Woman in the Dunes anything like Mishima? From the film of it I wouldn't have thought so...

Yeah I agree he is telling me something quite basic. However its all in his expression of it.

I started on Confessions..., moved onto the The Sea of fertility (the tetralogy of novels he wrote later in his life). I'm about to start on a short story collection.

Just found a couple of Junichiro Tanizaki bks and Kawabata's Master of Go so I hope its all exciting stuff to absorb...

kobo abe is nothing like mishima. abe is bonkers. surreal, insane, you name it. kafka x 10. i thought woman in the dunes was just unbelievably great. it haunted me for months after reading it.

mishima was literally bonkers insane but i know what you mean.

mishima's BOOKS aren't all that bonkers though. or what i've read anyway. with abe you get plots like this:

"The unnamed narrator is a low-level employee at an office-supply firm who, in jest, proposes a new product called a Kangaroo Notebook. His assignment to produce a rough sketch of the notebook is interrupted, however, when he discovers, while eating breakfast, that radish sprouts are growing where his leg hair used to be. At a dermatology clinic, he meets a disturbingly seductive nurse, after which he is then strapped to a bed in an operating room and tranquilized. From this point, the narrator's experiences grow increasingly hallucinatory as he is released into the world with nothing more than a blanket and a hospital bed, which turns out to be a remarkable machine with its own agenda. Buffeted about, seemingly deprived of free will, the narrator lands in a corner of hell, where he takes a sulfur-spring cure and meets child-demons who perform for tourists and the villainous specter of his own mother. More than once, he is rescued by the nurse from the clinic, who, it turns out, collects blood for her own mysterious purposes and has a strange American boyfriend named Master Hammer Killer, who conducts research into sudden deaths."

"The principal character, nicknamed Mole, has converted a huge underground quarry into an "ark" capable of surviving the coming nuclear holocaust and is now in search of his "crew." He falls victim, however, to the wiles of his first crew members, a con man-cum-insect dealer and his two shills, one of them a pretty young woman. In the surreal drama that ensues, the ark is invaded by a gang of youths and a sinister group of elderly people called the Broom Brigade, led by Mole's odious father, while Mole gets his leg trapped in the ark's central piece of equipment, a giant toilet powerful enough to flush almost anything, including chopped-up humans, out to sea."

The appeal of Mishima (who I've always liked a lot) seems to me to be a bit like D H Lawrence. Both were pretty much quacks, but were so obsessed and committed to portraying their visions that their books are compelling, whether you're attracted to their "philosophies" or not. Murakami has his visions, etc., but the laid back thing suggests he fantasises about himself in the mould of a Raymond Chandler dude. So I guess in that sense, M + M are similar in that they have a strong vein of unapologetic vanity, but Mishima's pushes beyond Murakami's worldly vanity so that it becomes something grander, if that makes any sense. I'm tired.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Voting for the one I've read (Mishima).

I'm not voting because I've only read one Murakami book and so am not really qualified. Best thing about Murakami to me was that I had actually cooked pasta while listening to the overture from La Gazza Ladra about a month before reading Wind-up so I was basically really relating with the protagonist from the get go.

Really want to read Mishima though.

Favourite Japanese writer on the basis of very little reading would be Oe tho.

Can you recommend a book by Oe, btw?

I haven't voted so far! :-) Mishima it will be.

By Total coincidence I was just reading about the new production of Mishima's play Madame De Sade starring Judi Dench!

The Oe I read first and that I liked the most was the four, very short, novellas "Prize Stock", "Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness", "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" and "Aghwee the Sky Monster" collected in this book:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71XQ9JNMBQL._SS500_.gif

The longest and best of those to me was "The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away" which is the longest story, and maybe, the most nutty. Really cool unreliable narrator stuff going on in it.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Thanks for the recommendation jim.

Scott, or anyone else, what Kobo Abe should I read? I have only read "Woman In The Dunes." I haven't read much Mishima either, but I feel i've at least sort of oriented myself towards his work.

Another Oe I'd suggest is one of his earlier novels (may even be his first), Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. Adored this book, such that I now buy any Oe I see. The novel has what I still think of as quite a Japanese habit, and which I detect in Mishima but not so much in Murakami, which is an oddly distant, very "still" way of describing objects or aspects of physiognomy that seems to simultaneously treat them as strange, delicate, beautiful, while also importing something sinister... Does anyone else get this or am I on my own?

Abe to track down -- Face of Another

But read Mishima, Ian (glad he won my one and only poll, wasn't expecting it tbh)!

If people need Mishima recs:

- The Sea of Fertility tetralogy is a must-- Runaway Horses and Decay of the Angel are probably the best in that group.
- The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea-- gorgeous gorgeous prose.
- The Sound of Waves-- again, an A+
- Forbidden Colors-- hard to find, but an excellent look into gay Japanese life in the Shinjuku district in the 1950's. Really quite a brilliant book, way ahead of its time and rarely talked about in the canon of non-Western queer/gay lit.

I've read pretty much everything he ever wrote (during a deep depression, oddly), so if you want details, let me know. The only one I really don't like, possibly because of the translation and possibly because of the over-labored sense of detail, is Temple of the Golden Pavilion.

read this, ian:

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/covers_450/9780307389633.jpg

or this:

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/covers_450/9780375726514.jpg

Mishima thread

Mishima might have won the poll but I saw someone reading Murakami on the train today :-(

My roommate was flipping through my copy of the biography of her most famous compatriot, and getting angrier and angrier. It was affecting her English for the worse.

"Why he do that! Just, do somewhere, in private! Why he do that, that just ..."

[a struggle to express the ultimate transgression]

"... just ... make everyone ... FEEL BAD!"