Almost every Indian novel heard of in Britain has come from the Anglophone elite.
Murakami, born in 1949, ran a Tokyo jazz club before he became a published writer, with the novel "Hear the Wind Sing," in 1979.
Like an evil whisper from a Stephen King novel, hear it on the breeze and shudder: Leyton is the new Clapton; get in before it falls.
He wrote the opening pages of his first novel, "Hear the Wind Sing," in English, then translated those pages into Japanese, he said, "just to hear how they sounded".
Neither title has yet been published in English, although two of Murakami's early novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, are just out in translation.
Our nameless narrator has a history: he appeared, along with his friend the Rat, in Murakami's first two novels, "Hear the Wind Sing" and "Pinball, 1973" — neither of which Murakami has allowed to be published outside of Japan.
By Ligaya Mishan September 21, 2009 Our nameless narrator has a history: he appeared, along with his friend the Rat, in Murakami's first two novels, "Hear the Wind Sing" and "Pinball, 1973" — neither of which Murakami has allowed to be published outside of Japan.
In the more complicated case of Maud Casey, whose influences are the writers John Casey and Jane Barnes -- who happen to be her parents -- she admits that as a child, she imagined that she would grow up to be her parents, and that until she went to graduate school she could not read a novel, any novel, without hearing their voices in her head.
Her novel, "The Hearing Trumpet," first published in 1976, is still in print.
The academic hero of his novel "Disgrace," hearing an African talk orotundly, reflects: The language he draws on with such aplomb is, if he only knew it, tired, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites.
