GIRL TALK
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GREAT art is clear thinking about mixed feelings, the 20th century American poet W.H. Auden once said.
When I read that line in a magazine recently, I thought immediately about my current obsession, Haruki Murakami, arguably the world's most popular living Japanese novelist.
Prior to becoming a Murakami junkie and devouring five of his novels in their English translations in the past two months, I had an abysmal track record as a literature graduate.
I had all but stopped reading, my excuses being work, movies, theatre, travel and other seductions of the world outside the page.
En route to Tokyo on a work trip, I had picked up a Murakami novel called South Of The Border, West Of The Sun at an airport bookshop, thinking rather patronisingly that it would offer me some 'local' flavour.
I had not then heard of the reclusive author whose melancholy 1987 novel Norwegian Wood had turned him into a literary superstar in Japan, forcing him to move to Europe and the United States to avoid being stalked by fans. Only several years later did he return to his home country.
South Of The Border, whose title comes from an old Nat King Cole song, begins as a deceptively simple tale about one man's life, going from an only child in a middle-class family to the owner of two jazz clubs...