Haruki Murakami is pissed off, and well he should be.
Turns out that his former editor, one of his former editors, now dead, secretly tried to sell the future Nobel prize winner¡¦s earlier handwritten manuscripts, pocketing the money for himself. The cad!
Popular novelist Haruki Murakami said in a monthly magazine released Friday that a number of his manuscripts have been put up for auction on the Internet and at secondhand bookshops without his permission.
In a contribution to the April issue of the magazine Bungei Shunju, Murakami discussed details on the auctions, denouncing it as ¡§unlawful trading of original manuscripts.¡¨
Murakami, 57, a celebrated contemporary Japanese writer, said that among the manuscripts is a handwritten translation of The Ice Palace by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940). A set of 73 of the manuscript¡¦s
400-character pages was put up for sale at a secondhand bookshop for more than 1 million yen.
In the 16-page article in the magazine, Murakami said he had handed the scripts to a now-deceased editor of the Chuokoron publishing house.