英语听力：寻羊冒险记—寻找村上春树 2

 Murakami turned Japanese literature on its head, writing novels and short stories heavily influenced by Western literature that were contemporary, humorous, and that often slipped into the surreal.

 

Hello, mister, what’s the matter, lost your guidebook?

 

Do you speak English?

 

Enough. Where are you staying?

 

Shibuya,

 

Yeah, you really are lost. Follow me, I’ll take you somewhere you can get a cab.

 

How come you can talk?

 

How come you can understand me?

 

Something tells me that looking for Murakami isn’t going to be, well, straightforward¹. For a start, he doesn’t do TV or radio. But for the first time ever, he did agree to meet up with the producer and answer some of our questions off camera, and on condition that his own voice wasn’t heard. We asked him first if the inspiration to write came easily.

 

Sometimes it comes, and sometimes it stops coming. I don’t know why, but you know, writing fiction, writing novels is just like searching for something in the dark places, so you need every help, every help you can get. Sometimes it’s cats; sometimes it’s wells. And in the dark places, there are small things waiting to help you.

 

Over and over again, I’ve heard people react to reading Murakami as though something has happened to their brains. I mean, they actually, I think without being prompted, they talk about their minds being played with, or their brains having been turned inside out, whether one thing or another, I mean, just over and over again. And I can vouch² for that myself, it’s very, it’s almost a physical sense of something going on inside there. It changes you. It makes you see time differently; it makes you feel differently.

 

Tall and tan, and young, and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking. But each day as she walks to the sea, she looks straight ahead, not at me. The tune³ always brings back memories of the corridor in my high school, a dark, damp high school corridor. Whenever you walked along the concrete floor, your footsteps would echo off the high ceiling.

1 straightforward   

adj.正直的，坦率的；易懂的，简单的

参考例句：

• A straightforward talk is better than a flowery speech.巧言不如直说。
• I must insist on your giving me a straightforward answer.我一定要你给我一个直截了当的回答。

2 vouch   

v.担保；断定；n.被担保者

参考例句：

• They asked whether I was prepared to vouch for him.他们问我是否愿意为他作担保。
• I can vouch for the fact that he is a good worker.我保证他是好员工。

3 tune   

n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整

参考例句：

• He'd written a tune,and played it to us on the piano.他写了一段曲子，并在钢琴上弹给我们听。
• The boy beat out a tune on a tin can.那男孩在易拉罐上敲出一首曲子。