The New Yorker has published a previously untranslated short story by Haruki Murakami – the Japanese author who has been bookies’ favourite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for many years. 2014 proved to not be his turn, once again, with this year’s Nobel prize going to French author Patrick Modiano.
The story, titled “Scheherazade”, is about a man called Habara who cannot leave his house (for reasons not shared with the reader). He keeps a diary where he writes about the stories told to him by someone he calls Scheherazade, an eccentric woman who takes care of his needs.
Read Murakami’s story:
Each time they had sex, she told Habara a strange and gripping story afterward. Like Queen Scheherazade in “A Thousand and One Nights.” Though, of course, Habara, unlike the king, had no plan to chop off her head the next morning. (She never stayed with him till morning, anyway.) She told Habara the stories because she wanted to, because, he guessed, she enjoyed curling up in bed and talking to a man during those languid, intimate moments after making love. And also, probably, because she wished to comfort Habara, who had to spend every day cooped up indoors.
Because of this, Habara had dubbed the woman Scheherazade. He never used the name to her face, but it was how he referred to her in the small diary he kept. “Scheherazade came today,” he’d note in ballpoint pen. Then he’d record the gist of that day’s story in simple, cryptic terms that were sure to baffle anyone who might read the diary later.
The New Yorker‘s Deborah Treisman spoke to Murakami, asking him about the story, the characters and the possibility of a sequel. Read the article:
Your story in this week’s issue, “Scheherazade,” is about a man who is being held in a house that he can’t leave, where he is visited twice a week by a woman who has been hired to bring him food and supplies, and perhaps also to attend to his sexual needs. We never learn, in the story, why Habara can’t leave the house. Do you know?
Sorry, but I don’t know the exact circumstances that brought about the situation, either. Of course, I have a few ideas about what might be the cause, but I expect my readers do as well. I’m not trying to make a big secret out of it—in fact, I think if you took their hypotheses and mine and stacked them on top of each other you’d have an important form of author-reader communication. Because what’s important isn’t what caused Habara’s situation but, rather, how we ourselves would act in similar circumstances.
Book details
- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
EAN: 9781846558337
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