EWP 3

The breaking news we heard this week was that Kurt Vonnegut passed away. His late novel Jailbird, which I read only once and only in translation while I was in school, remains one of the best novels I've ever read. I don't have much to say about him because his only novel I read in English was Breakfast for Champions, which I got my hands on only last year. I read most of his novels in translation. They're all great. His style spawned a lot of followers, among them Murakami. Murakami's first novel reads just like Vonnegut. To say it's plagiarism is not enough. It's more than that, though his first and its sequel are the only ones I like of Murakami. His first novel was imbued with a wry, sarcastic sense of humor (though only superficially), which he obviously borrowed from Vonnegut. His other novels, none of which was in the style of Vonnegut, all seemed to me crappy. Because they seemed to me to be awfully lacking a sense of humor, which I think is one of the prerequisites for any great literary works. Norwegian wood is one of the crappiest novels I've ever read. But I digress. It's a shame that most Japanese seem to believe that Hemmingway and Steinbeck and Stephen King are the only great American novelists worth mentioning. I first got to know about Vonnegut via Kenzaburo Oe's essay, in which he raved about Vonnegut's sarcastic writing style and credited him as a successor of the great tradition of satire in the history of English literature dating back to the days of Jonathan Swift and the like. As it often happens, it looks like the Nobel prize went to the wrong person.