Haruki Murakami's "Scheherazade"

 

photo art by Merlin (at link below)

The 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature is set to be announced tomorrow and Murakami's odds, according to an English betting company, is 1/4. The Prize Committee has always been known to surprise, however.

The New Yorker recently published Murakami's story "Scheherazade" and you can read it online here:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/scheherazade-3

Here is the magazine's interview with Murakami about the story - 

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-this-week-haruki-murakami-2014-10-13

"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."