69 (novel)
69 ( jap. 69 sixty nine , shikusutinain ) is a novel by Ryū Murakami . It was first published in Japanese in 1987, and in 2000 also in German translation by publishing house No. 8th.
content
In 1969 in a small Japanese town with an American military base: the seventeen-year-old narrator Ken attended high school with his friends Adama and Iwase. They are frustrated and influenced by the 1968 movement , French existentialism and beat music . To prove their own coolness and, among other things, to impress girls, they plan a spectacular action. First the narrator had the idea of making a nouvelle vague film similar to Godard's . However, it quickly turns out that the narrator only knows Godard's films by name and that he actually has no ideas for a film. Later they found the Vajra Committee , which decides to decorate the school with political graffiti and finally to barricade it completely. When they break into the school building during the night, one of their colleagues has to go to the toilet and defecates on the director's table.
Shortly thereafter, Ken has a summons to the police, who are not enthusiastic, but also know of harder cases. The school places Ken under house arrest, which means he may have to repeat a year.
After Ken is allowed to attend school again, he falls in love with a girl and has the chance to have sexual experiences for the first time. He now decides to organize a festival with the girls and his friends in order to show a self-made author's film there. When they received proceeds from ticket sales, they were blackmailed by the yakuza and had to pay 20,000 yen in protection money. The financial damage makes her film project even more amateurish than it would have been anyway.
Shortly after the festival, Ken has a romantic relationship with the girl called Lady Jane and watches the film in cold blood with her in the cinema. The story then fades out 15 years and takes stock: The relationship between Ken and the girl came to an end in 1970 because she left him for another friend. Ken has become a writer and his friends now lead a respectable, middle-class life; some of them now even belong to the establishment. Ken remembers his wild youth with sadness.
Movie
The novel was made into a film by the Korean-Japanese director Lee Sang-il and was released in Japanese theaters on July 10, 2004. Ken is played by Satoshi Tsumabuki , Adama by Masanobu Andō , Iwase by Yuta Kanai and Lady Jane by Rina Ōta .
criticism
"Otherwise the situational, allusive, and linguistic jokes are so contagious that reading it actually becomes the fun the students hope for from their erotic-political parallel action."
literature
- Ryu Murakami: 69 . Novel. From the American by Andrea Viala. Frankfurt a. Main, Suhrkamp, 2004, ISBN 3-518-45633-4
