I never read Murakami, but that hushed tone and emphasis on insignificance you describe seems to me typical of a whole string of Japanese writers and moviemakers, including the moviemaker Ozu and the novelist Kawabata. I have read the latter's The Master of Go and was very impressed. Incidentally, for a little-known modern writer who has made a great impression on me, try the Norwegian Tarjej Vesaas.
The greatest twentieth-century writers I have read are Thomas Mann and Andre' Gide. The latter's The Pastoral Symphony pretty much broke my heart, and the former's Doktor Faustus and short stories are things I go back to over and over again, for inspiration and to learn from them. Doktor Faustus also might interest you as a fantasy writer, since it is a textbook instance of how to suggest the supernatural without ever making a certain statement that it either exists or does not. And it contains a haunting, terrifying conversation with the Devil that goes on for dozens of pages without ever losing interest.
Interesting that you mention Thomas Mann, since the protagonist, Toru, is studying Western literature, and during part of the novel he's carrying Mann's Magic Mountain around to read. According to some reviewers, Murakami deliberately imitated one of the themes in that book since Norwegian Wood also features characters withdrawing into their own world within a sanitorium.
I may check out Doktor Faustus, and the Master of Go also sounds interesting, thanks.
Do. Mann's Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain are also great stuff - Buddenbrooks was my teenage-angst text way back when - but I cannot underline his short stories too much. One of them you have certainly heard of - Death In Venice - but they are all full of power and interest.
It's probably proof of my own orneriness that my favourite Mann is his unfinished Felix Krull. It's as if, at the end of Mann's life, writing had suddenly become light and spontaneous - and I love how he weaves elements of his own life - waiting for a ship at Lisbon - with the picaresque of Krull's irrepressible career; revisiting a scene of sadness with comic buoyancy.
Yeah. It's like Verdi's Falstaff - a sudden discovery, at the very end of one's life, of humour and lightness and also of a certain hilarious dishonesty. (Both Krull and Falstaff are 100% scoundrels.)
The greatest twentieth-century writers I have read are Thomas Mann and Andre' Gide. The latter's The Pastoral Symphony pretty much broke my heart, and the former's Doktor Faustus and short stories are things I go back to over and over again, for inspiration and to learn from them. Doktor Faustus also might interest you as a fantasy writer, since it is a textbook instance of how to suggest the supernatural without ever making a certain statement that it either exists or does not. And it contains a haunting, terrifying conversation with the Devil that goes on for dozens of pages without ever losing interest.
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I may check out Doktor Faustus, and the Master of Go also sounds interesting, thanks.
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