Haruki Murakami

I have been reading a few of Haruki Murakami's novels lately. The works are very inspiring for my art because :
1.The writing is surreal drifting off to waking dreams , memories,the subconscious mind and supernatural realms.
2.set in Japan yet global in content .All people everywhere can relate to it.
3. there is a sense of unresolved mysteries, tales within tales and secrets, metaphysical labyrinths
4.the works are self reflective 
5. the plots are set in contemporary societies d by music particularly jazz music
6.Two factors—a straightforward, easy-to-follow narrative voice paired with an often bewildering plot—is  a conscious choice by the author.I want my art to be beautiful yet very layered and convoluted.
Murakami’s world is an allegorical one, constructed of familiar symbols—an empty well, an underground city—but the meaning of those symbols remains hermetic to the last. His debt to popular culture (and American pop culture, in particular) notwithstanding, it could be argued that no author’s body of work has ever been more private.

His works are built around an almost obsessive urge to explore and understand the inner core of the human identity. His heroes routinely journey into a metaphysical realm—the unconscious, the dreamscape, the land of the dead—to examine directly their memories of people and objects they have lost.
Murakami is a Japanese writer but he is also a “global” one, meaning that his works are best read not as expressions of Japanese culture, but as examinations of questions that concern all humanity. What is the nature of the individual self? What is the meaning of “happiness,” or “success,” in the global age? What is the soul, and how do we get one? Why are some people turned off by the structures of contemporary societies, and what alternatives do they have? These are just a few of the many issues Murakami addresses, and they affect us all.
Murakami's works are usually in the first person narrative in the tradition of the Japanese novel.It is frequently surrealistic and melancholic or fatalistic marked by a Kafkaesque rendition of the "recurrent themes of alienation and loneliness.The processing of collective trauma soon became an important theme in Murakami's writing, which had previously been more personal in nature. Murakami returned to Japan from USA in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack. He came to terms with these events with his first work of non-fiction, Underground and the short story collection after the quake.Underground consists largely of interviews of victims of the gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system.Many of his novels have themes and titles that invoke classical music, such as the books "The WInd Up Bird Chronicle" ,"The Thieving Magpie" (after Rossini's opera) "Bird as Prophet" (after a piano piece by by Robert Schumann usually known in English as The Prophet Bird),"The Bird Catcher"(a character in Mozart's Opera the Magic Flute) "Norwegian Wood "(after the Beatles Song).His characters delve into a parallel consciousness ,supernatural realms or dimensions such as descending down a dry well.'Strange things happen in this world," Haruki Murakami says. "You don't know why, but they happen."Novels in general, he thinks, benefit from a certain mystery. "If the very important secret is not solved, then readers will be frustrated. That is not what I want. But if a certain kind of secret stays secret, it's a very sound curiosity. I think readers need it."
"When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen. I just wait. Norwegian Wood is a different thing, because I decided to write in a realistic style. But basically, I cannot choose."
I’m a loner. I don’t like groups, schools, literary circles. At Princeton, there was a luncheonette, or something like that, and I was invited to eat there. Joyce Carol Oates was there and Toni Morrison was there and I was so afraid, I couldn’t eat anything at all! Mary Morris was there and she’s a very nice person, almost the same age as I am, and we became friends, I would say. But in Japan I don’t have any writer friends, because I just want to have . . . distance.

Surreal Dreams

Sinan Hussein's exhibition "Just a Trip" recently concluded in Stal Gallery, Muscat . I was fascinated by the convoluted narratives and could identify with the forms depicted on  large, colourful  oil paintings on show. In many ways Hussein had created a dream-like, escapist world where realism and logic  had been replaced by the dreamlike  world of his mind, his so-called “secret landscape” where there were no limits to what can or cannot be possible and different creatures  coexisted in harmony on his canvases.Though there was a lot of symbolism in the works, I did not not wish to understand the artist's point of view but wanted instead to allow the canvases to speak to me directly and to draw my own conclusions.I found it interesting to think how we have an urge for meaning making and wish to "understand" the whys in works of art.Why can't we leave a mystery an unsolved mystery?