In this literary essay, Rahad Abir talks about how he discovered the writings of Murakami by chance and fell in love with it.
One day, half a dozen years ago, I was having a chat with one of my fellow Bengali writers. The conversation drifted into writing sex scenes. Sex sells, as the saying goes; but how much to write about it? Does it have to be explicit or subtle? There is nothing like writing a bad sex scene that may spoil the story.
Read Norwegian Wood, my friend suggested. You will know what you want to know about incorporating a sex scene into your story, he added.
Having returned home that evening, I downloaded a PDF version of Norwegian Wood and started reading. I finished the novel in two days. I had to. It was more than a page-turner, more than an unputdownable book. And I had never read anything like this, to say the least.
That was when my romance with the Japanese author Haruki Murakami began. Six months later, I reread the novel. Why? To study and steal writerly techniques from his narrative.