The global appeal of Haruki Murakami

---

Akira Nagae
Autumn of 2006 saw many of the large bookshops in Japan providing corners to display the works of Haruki Murakami. But this was no bargain sale. These corners were set up because expectations were riding high that Murakami would be receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize, however, was eventually awarded to Orhan Pamuk of Turkey.
The Cultural sections of newspapers often run stories reporting that the works of Murakami are being translated into Asian and western languages and read by young people around the globe. Moreover, after being awarded the Frank O'Connor Prize and the Franz Kafka Prize, expectations in Japan were suddenly raised to a new level. All news of Murakami being awarded the Franz Kafka Prize included without fail the comment that many of the previous winners had gone on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Haruki Murakami is one of the most important novelists in modern Japan. He is also one of those very few writers whose works are highly appraised by the literary experts, and sell well, too. In many cases, books that are well received by critics do not do well on the market, and the critics tend to ignore the bestsellers.
However, Murakami is by no means an overnight success. Proof of this is seen in the fact that he was not awarded the Akutagawa Prize, the most prestigious award in Japan given to promising new writers of literary works. When Murakami made his debut at the end of the 1970s, he was given an enthusiastic welcome by the younger generation of Japan who at that time were not disposed to reading Japanese literature. Many of them were too young to have participated in the youth rebellions that raged throughout the world in the 1960s, and felt impotent and lost due to feelings that their baby boomer elders had devoured for the most part all the possibilities in the world. They were quite familiar with western literature, especially modern American novels. The early works of Murakami, which showed influences from Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigar and even stretched back to include F Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, were greeted as "their kind of literature." It could be that this was what made Murakami unacceptable to the literary establishment at that time.
His readership was given a major boost in numbers as well as broader demographics when he published the bestselling 'Norwegian Wood' in 1987. Since Haruki Murakami has become an established novelist whose new works are certain to be hits. Murakami makes public appearances, and hardly ever agrees to be interviewed by magazines, much less TV. He also refrains from making any comments that could be taken as social criticism. After the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway system, however, he put together a collection of interviews with the victims of the attack and followers of the Aum Shinrikyo cult that had been responsible for the subway attack. He also published a novella related to the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake that shook Japan in 1995. In this way, Murakami attempts to portray himself as being committed to society, while at the same time maintaining his own unique distance.
According to A Wild Haruki Chase, a book published last year which focuses on a recent Murakami Symposium, 23 translators, publishers and writers from 17 countries revealed that the first translation of a work by Murakami into a foreign language was in 1986 in Taiwan. Currently, his novels are translated and published in nearly 40 countries. Around the world, Murakami's works are read in the same manner as they are in Japan. In other words, the degree of exoticism or orientalism in the perspective has decreased-and this is probably what differentiates his works from those of previous giants of Japanese literature such as Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima.
Why has Haruki Murakami become such a major force in world literature? There may be two major reasons for this. One is the abstract and allegorical quality of his novels. Although proper nouns such as places and products appear, they are not overly important to the plot, and his novels can be read by changing the location of the story to any city in the world.
The other reason is that the reader can readily identify with Murakami's underlying themes. The pop culture of the west exists at the root of Murakami's works, and this pop culture has come to be shared throughout the world. This has become an increasingly strong trend after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Murakami does not have a positive view of the consumer-driven society, but then, he doesn't criticise it up front either, just casting a cynical eye on it. This is probably what readers can relate to and why they accept it. Ironically, the growing consumer-driven society is a major factor behind what has made Haruki Murakami such a force in world literature.
— Japan+