ATA: Choosing Murakami

After weeks of thinking about who to choose, I finally selected Murakami. 
This was because out of all the authors work that I read I found his work the most immersive when I was reading it. I had only read After Dark and Norwegian Wood previously and thought it was a great opportunity to take out some more of his work. 

I started with a basic mind map looking at the different aspects of his life;

 - Murakami had never set out to be an author.

 - He was at a baseball game when he decided to write his first book. 

- He enjoys Jazz music but is not a talented musician 

- He owned a Jazz bar with his wife 

- Both his parents were literature teachers, he grew up around a variety of writers and his work is generally considered very westernised. He is popular but is often critiqued as not a traditional japanese writer. 

- He doesn't enjoy fame

I also looked at places where he lived and drew a few small sketches of them. He has lived in the same region for quite a while, Although born in Kyoto, he spent his youth in Shukugawa (Nishinomiya), Ashiya and Kobe. He attended Waseda University in Tokyo where he met his wife. 

Looking at where he lived helped as Murakami draws from personal surroundings and experiences when he writes. 

His books have a lot of very good visual quotes and his characters are often described well enough to come up with a decent idea of what they look like. 

The first book I looked at was After Dark. It is a smaller novel out of the ones he has written but carries one of the main themes that occurs in his work - Alienation. The novel revolves around a young trombone playing student Takahashi Tetsuya and a 19 year old named Mari Asai who is spending the evening reading in a restaurant to escape her home, where her older sister Eri Asai has been "asleep" for months. 

As the book is set at night, most of my initial drawings were just in pencil or centered around the colour blue. 

I found it quite hard to do loose drawing at the start so a lot of my first stuff in the sketchbook is "finished". 

I drew Eri Asai in her bed. Although not being able to draw loosely annoyed me, I did really like this piece of work using yellow as an accent colour among the blue. 

I also drew Mari Asai (walking girl) but wasn't pleased with that. I drew Takahashi as well, I was quite pleased with his little face.