For those in the West who haven't read Japanese literature, I highly recommend it.
When I first read Murakami, I had mixed feelings. I struggled to relate with his characters; their outlook on the world seemed so alien compared to mine. I also was frustrated that "nothing happened". His writing seemed much more driven by the underlying emotion of the narrative ("foreboding" is the best description that comes to mind) than plot.
However, when I traveled to Tokyo for the first time I realized that the feelings that I had reading his novels captured the essence of the city - the sense of duty, the isolation, the assertion of individuality in a place that epitomizes collectivism. His writing provided a window into a worldview that could not have been more different from my own.
I'm glad to have run across this article; I'll add these other authors to my reading list.
To be fair, "nothing happening" can equally well describe much of the Western post-modern literary tradition.
I think one thing that sets Murakami apart is the earnest simplicity of his writing. His writing seemingly doesn't attempt to manipulate the reader, and it doesn't seem to aim beyond high school English in complexity. It's workmanlike, unaffected, and personal. To me, it brings to mind John Williams (Stoner) and Karl Ove Knausgaard (who is admittedly a much more capable prose stylist).
In his earlier works, the simplicity feels a bit... simple. But in hi later, more mature works, he doesn't shy away from going into detail about the sheer mundaneness of living. I haven't read 1Q84, but the first book to really deserve the stereotype of Murakami as being about single guys with cats lounging about in empty apartments while waiting for the pasta to boil is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the core theme of which is figuring out reality, and by the extension, life. It's a work where the economy of style meets an economy of plot (even though it's actually a complex plot!) perfectly, and it's a masterpiece.
I've never been to Japan, but I find his other concerns you mention — isolation and so on — to be just as relevant in other social-democratic cultures (perhaps the US less so).
I found his simplicity and “nothing happens” as emblematic or Zen art. A few lines abstractly capture a bird or stream, and the background is as much a part of the story as the lines.
Agreed. I think a better comparison is with modern author's like Hemingway.. Forget which story, but there is a Murakami short that is directly influenced by a Hemingway short.
I read the 3 tomes of 1Q84 (translation) in one day or two and while the first one was good, I found the two others were boring: every mystery or expectation he rose wasn't met in the end. That was a frustrating read.
For text in Japanese I only read a few pages in class and during exam and that wasn't relevant to my interest either: the style is flat and he use to many loan words from English. Up to that point I wonder where his success come from because I really don't get the appeal of his work (from what I read).
Apparently he originally used to write in English first and then translate into Japanese. His English isn't good, so it forced him to write in a highly simplified fashion. It seems he now writes directly in Japanese, after he settled on his style. I haven't read more than a page or two of his books (browsing the bookstore) and I found it extremely easy to read (in Japanese). I suspect that's the appeal. Like you, I'm not a huge fan, but the number of novels I've read in Japanese is fairly small in number so I'm not the best judge of Japanese literature :-)
~ Shameless plug~ I love Murakami, and I did a podcast with a friend on "following an author's canon" through the eyes of Murakami's work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEkaCe--UR0
I talked a lot about that idea of "exploring" vs. "plot" and what makes him so refreshing.
If you haven't read a Murakami I suggest starting with Sputnik Sweetheart first.
Ha, funny you should say that. I've enjoyed every Murakami I've read with the exception of Sputnik Sweetheart. Couldn't finish it, there was just something about the style and the plot that I didn't enjoy.
I started with A Wild Sheep Chase and thought that was a good start point. Also his book of short stories, The Elephant Vanishes, would be quite a nice intro if you prefer shorter stuff, I think.
Looks interesting. Is it worth reading in English with the heavy censorship? From what I can tell English readers aren't left with a real conclusion to the story.
>The sex and race-driven identity politics currently animating and, to my mind, diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West are either muted or non-existent in Japan, where postmodern aesthetics are the outer skin of a modernist backbone. Japanese stories focus on the individual adrift in seas of excessive convenience and information, obsessed with personal not political identities, and questions of the soul.
Oh boy, this puts into words how I've felt about Japanese vs. Western media for a few years now.
This paragraph is deliberately left vague - a Rorschach test of sorts.
I am not quite sure what he is referring to exactly. I do know that my local bookstore has much more books from authors who are gay, trans, black, Asian, etc than it did 15 years ago. If you value diversity in your media - which I do - then this is wonderful. We had a NY Times best seller last year about black women mathematicians working at NASA in the mid 1900s - it’s very hard to imagine who would have published that book in the 90s or 2000s.
If that constitutes “diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West” in the author’s mind, so be it, but perhaps he should be a tad more upfront about what he really means.
My reading would be: contemporary western literary culture is excessively, stiflingly concerned about authenticity. I want to read books about a wide range of experience, far wider than any individual is likely to have in reality; the best fiction is at least partly an exercise in imagination as well as observation.
It's great that authors from different racial/sexual/... backgrounds are writing, but with contemporary culture focused heavily on racial/sexual/... identities, we need novels that can engage with that and show us different perspectives within a unified narrative. So we need to be ok with authors writing from the perspective of identities other than their own, even- especially- when that inevitably leads to some inaccuracies. The push for diversity may have lead to greater inter-novel diversity, but it has, ironically, heavily damaged intra-novel diversity in the west, as many authors (understandably) no longer dare to attempt to represent other identity-perspectives in their work.
It's not less volume though, it's no volume. No-one can write authentically as black and white, straight and gay, cis and trans, but we need books that incorporate all of those and more. Conceivably collaborative novels could be an answer, but I haven't seen them be very successful either.
>- it’s very hard to imagine who would have published that book in the 90s or 2000s.
do you live in the same america as me? maybe it wouldn't have been a nyt bestseller ten or twenty years ago, but why do you think it wouldn't have been published?
If you "predict" that it might not make a bestseller list, it's not a particular leap to predict that it wouldn't make it past a publisher, either?
I am making no attempt to quantify this, I simply have no data, but it seems the argument is that today it is relatively more fashionable to write a book about black women doing something that is traditionally thought of as something white men would do, regardless of the "classic" qualities of the work. If it is the case (and I have no data to argue either way) that such a fashion means that a mediocre book about black women doing something (not saying the particular book is good or bad, I don't know it) gets published instead of a really good book about white men doing something, that could certainly be considered "diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West".
But there has always been literature pandering to political fashions, and fashionable literature has always enjoyed an edge over unfashionable literature. Some of it is good and has stood the test of time, and some (most, probably, this is a power law domain) of it pretty bad, and totally forgotten. It's easy to look at the literature that survived from 20 years ago and compare with whatever flash-in-a-pan is being hawked by publishers right this minute and see all kinds of diminished products.
For thise interested in Murakami's contemporaries, Banana Yoshimoto is an interesting case. I've only read one of her works, Kitchen, but the similarity is almost astonishing. They both cover themes of loss, a strong sense of a mystical undercurrent right underneath everyday life, and independent (but not necessarily rebellious) protagonists -- and, while it may be an artifact of translation, they have similarly uncluttered but lively prose. She came a bit after he did, in the late 80s, so maybe he influenced her.
In Chinese, Ge Fei's Invisibility Cloak -- while a much more recent work -- also comes to mind, although there's something harder and less dreamy about it. Invisibility Cloak is about a niche audio technician and hobbyist who gets involved with a strange underworld customer, and I'll leave it at that :)
If you like Murakami and want to dip a toe into "deeper" (or at least more prestigious and less popular) Japanese fiction, Kenzaburo Oe (Changeling, A Personal Matter) is a good starting point. If you want to go darker, a little more unhinged, and on the opposite end of the political spectrum, Yukio Mishima (Confessions of a Mask) is also good.
If you want to go even further back, Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters is an oddly enjoyable story of adult sisters and their shifting relationships -- if Proust is like a jungle, alive and profligate and almost obscenely lush, then Tanizaki is more like fresh-cut wood, clean and with a certain reserve and neutrality, but still alive.
I find Yasunari Kawabata the least accessible of all these writers, but he seems to be held in high esteem in Japan. His Snow Country is I'm guessing making references to things I don't understand, but it's at least pleasant to read, and the ending is (I'm told, and at least kind of feel, but not with any sophistication) a very nice example of ma, which Wikipedia tells me roughly means negative space.
Finally, to end an overlong post, I first heard of most of these things in Brian Phillips' excellent longform article connecting modern Japanese sumo, older Japanese literature, and Yukio Mishima's very strange attempted coup/suicide: http://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-hak...
> It’s impossible to overestimate the depth of his influence on contemporary Japanese literature and culture,
This is complete 100% pure grade A nonsense. It's like saying "it's impossible to overestimate the depth of Dan Brown's influence on contemporary America literature and culture." Haruki Murakami has lots of obsessive fans, but he has had almost zero influence on Japanese literature or culture because nobody other than his rabid fans cares about his writing.
> Japan’s current literary and cultural scene takes in “light novels”, brisk narratives that lean heavily on sentimentality and romance and often feature visuals drawn from manga-style aesthetics, and dystopian post-apocalyptic stories of intimate violence, such as Natsuo Kirino’s suspense thrillers, Out and Grotesque.
This is also total garbage. "Light novels" are specific (terrible) genre of young adult novels with anime style illustrations (yes, illustrations, not just "aesthetics") that are probably aimed chiefly at middle schoolers. Natsuo Kirino’s books are not "light novels." This article is intentionally trying to conflate these completely different things in order to misleadingly suggest that actual Japanese literature has been influenced by "manga-style aesthetics."
> Music plays a prominent role in much contemporary Japanese literature; but it is not mere metaphor. Murakami...
Yes, Haruki Murakami loves to litter his books with references, Ready Player One style, but this is not something that is normal in Japanese literature.
> But there are larger currents at work that make today’s Japanese stories, poems, animations and manga so vivid as domestic cultural artefacts, and so ripely attractive to the rest of the world.
> Ten years ago I wrote in my book Japanamerica:
So basically, "Having written a book about the popularity of anime in the US makes me an expert on Japanese literature." Please.
Ah, there it is. It wouldn't be an online discussion of Murakami without at least one person vehemently arguing that his work is garbage, that most Japanese people don't care about him, and that his novels don't reflect Real Japan.
I actually think that most people in Japan don't really care about him. Grew up in Japan as a native, very few of my friends actually read his novel. Everyone knows he's a famous author, but that doesn't mean his work is popular among the masses. I wouldn't say it's garbage, but I tend to think he's famous mostly because all the critics praise him.
I didn't mean that he was wrong, only that they were trite observations that somebody always mentions. Even the fact that his work is not popular among the masses doesn't add much to the conversation, any more than pointing out that the average American doesn't care about Jeffrey Eugenides, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen, or Thomas Pynchon...
In fairness you could say the same about most Western 'literature'. Most people don't read Steinbeck or Roth or Atwood. Most people read Dan Brown and their Facebook feed.
I've read and enjoyed some Murakami (Norwegian Wood and Hard-boiled Wonderland), but can anyone recommend some (or one) other Japanese authors to check out? This is especially intriguing to me:
> ... Japanese stories focus on the individual adrift in seas of excessive convenience and information, obsessed with personal not political identities, and questions of the soul.
Or maybe some other Murakami. I can say I enjoyed Norwegian Wood quite a bit more then Hard-boiled Wonderland.
I would give Oe's Silent Cry a read. I think he mostly stopped writing(?) after his Nobel.
and if you're interested in a japanese Gogol-like author, Kobo Abe is generally alot of fun
Another huge standard in Japanese translated into english in Yukio Mishima. sea of fertility tetralogy is worth reading. like most readers I have kind of mixed and weird impression of the author himself.
Kauzo Ishiguro is really accessible to the western reader, maybe too much so if you're looking for the alien aspect, but I do like his work alot
Give banana yashimoto’s kitchen a go. Besides her and murakmi I am rather derelict on the Japanese authors read front tho...
Hopeful for some pointers here too.
I would highly recommend wind up bird cronicle and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage though. The latter was pretty heavily panned by the critics but the description of sudden complete alienation without reason struck a chord with me, as well as the narrative description of how such vibrant young people ended up with such mostly mundane lives so many years on.. maybe you will feel the same.
Murakami books are sort of like being in a dream where somehow you completely understand this person acting as if you were them, even when the culture and motivations are so different and then it just sort of ends. I find myself thinking about his characters long after finishing books, which is really something few authors can provide at least to me...
If you're not specifically talking about contemporary authors, the short stories of Ryunosuke Akutagawa are a must. Penguin Books has a collection that includes his best ones, including probably my favorite short story of all, "Hell Screen": https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35522/rashomon-and-seventeen...
Three Japanese authors that are wildly different from Murakami:
* Yukio Mishima. Prose is incredibly dense to the point of being baroque (there are pages of footnotes even in the Japanese originals), but there's nobody else quite like him: heavy focus on themes of sex, death and mysticism. "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" is his most famous work but the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy is also good.
What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity…
* Osamu Dazai. The F. Scott Fitzgerald of Japan in time, themes and popularity, wrote a series of heavily autobiographical novels about his struggles with money, health, family and basically everything. Fairly grim but compelling reading.
The year before last I was expelled from my family and, reduced to poverty overnight, was left to wander the streets, begging help for various quarters, barely managing to stay alive from one day to the next, and just when I'd begun to think I might be able to support myself with my writing, I came down with a serious illness. Thanks to the compassion of others, I was able to rent a small house in Funabashi, Chiba, next to the muddy sea, and spent the summer there alone, convalescing. Though battling an illness that each and every night left my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press ahead with my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life; my mental anguish and exhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of the garden appeared to me merely flicking tongues of flame...
* Murakami Ryu. Not to be confused with his namesake, Ryu's writing is very opposite of whimsical and "Almost Transparent Blue" is shockingly brutal.
This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.
I second Mishima, who has not let me down. I enjoyed "Confessions of a Mask", and plan to read "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" next and the last 2 books of his tetralogy.
By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive the Truth. And first we must know that each of the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives eighty-four thousand lights.
From Murakami Ryū I started to read a book (Parasites) about a shut-in turning downright psycho/sociopath/schizophrenic, that hits his mother and is getting involved into an online conspiracy involving symbiotic parasites. Or is there? The way the author describes the protagonist whereabouts around the world and inside his own head in a terribly cold way, and makes you enter the vacillating, deranged mind of that guy through his very point of view and thought process was putting me to such unease I could not finish the book despite being sucked in by the depth and wide array of themes.
Kafka is probably the only one I would recommend not reading first. If you were to summarise the plot it in a few sentences it would put a lot of people off, in murakami land though he can write a story about a guy killing his father and sleeping with his mother and while you’re in the book world it seems totally normal......
Murakami books are rather weird; when I first read Kafka on the Shore (my first Murakami book), there didn't seem to be anything happening in story; yet, I couldn't put it down and was up the whole night finishing it.
I think his appeal is his ability to describe surreal events and commonplace events in the same sentence without a hiccup; it feels very natural.
My introduction to Murakami was Hard-Boiled Wonderland [0]. It was unlike anything I'd read before and thought it was really bloody good. I think I read it over a couple of evenings, was quite hard to put down.
I own pretty much everything Murakami has ever written, including his non-fiction, and while I enjoy them all, Dance Dance Dance might be my favorite. I also never see anyone recommend it, which seems odd to me. An old hotel elevator that opens to a void where the Sheep Man waits for you. It's utterly bizarre. I love it.
Norwegian Wood is also very good, but it doesn't have my favorite trait of Murakami's other writing: the easy surreality of it. An unseen world pushes into the world of his characters, and they underreact. In terms of overall concerns, the Sheep Man is as pressing as a date with an attractive woman.
In a similar vein, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders is both lightly funny and surreal. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami reminded me a bit of the meloncholy of Norwegian Wood. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster is also very reminiscent of Murakami.
It's worth warning that Dance Dance Dance is a sequel to his Rat trilogy (which ends with A Wild Sheep Chase, which for many years was the only in the trilogy available in English). It makes references to characters and events in those books.
Personally, I read it after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is his masterpiece. Compared to WUBC, Dance feels like a unfinished dress rehearsal by a middle-schooler. Dance is full of ideas, but never builds a cohesive universe. There are killers and shared dreams and/alternate universes and so on, but none of it adds up to a very satisfying whole. WUBC, on the other hand, actually constructs, in quite masterly fashion, a mythology. Murakami is able to hold himself back and keep things mysterious, but the mysteries don't seem random, and the drama around to unravel them unfolds organically. It feels like a very carefully planned novel, unlike some of his other ramshackle plots. And the dream magic isn't there for weirdness; it actually serves a very important narrative point, one that leads to plot resolution and real catharsis, and the magical aspects don't seem so magical as David Lynchian, like something out of Twin Peaks (especially the revival series!). Some of his books, including Dance, seem full of intentional weirdness where Murakami is throwing everything at the wall to see if it would stick, but everything in WUBC just works.
Thanks for the reply. I agree with your assessment but not your characterization.
You seem very plot-focused. One of the things I like about Murakami's writing is the somewhat random, unfinished quality. It's like life in that respect. The plot is generally incidental; his novels seem like they're meant to evoke an atmosphere and a feeling.
In other words, we are frequently dropped into the middle of an otherwise unremarkable character's life where they experience a turning point in their view of the world and (in many cases) reality. And then life goes on. In other words, the plot is only there to support the character's internal journey.
It's not that I'm plot-focused — some of my favourite novels don't have much of a plot at all — but I expect a novel to provide a certain structure that has a point to it.
To me, Dance comes across as an immature sketch, an example where Murakami had lots of things he wanted to include, but he didn't know to create the architecture around which themes could come together. Some of the plot points seem like Murakami wanting to burrow into a kind of Lynchian Hollywood reality, with serial killers and weird hotels. I didn't find those as being interesting ways to explore the character's "internal journey".
Dance doesn't "click", whereas the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is extremely satisfying in the way it does.
If you're interested in Murakami in general, his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is really interesting, showing the intersection of Marathons and writing in his life.
I think one of the things I like about Murakami is that his writing doesn't feel pretentious and is matter-of-factly, even though most of it is quite fantastical.
I really can't bear pretentiousness in writing (or music).
i strongly suggest everyone to watch subtle family dramas from Koreeda, very relaxing, you can start with Still walking or After the storm, it's odd how can we relate to people living in completely different culture so much
When I first read Murakami, I had mixed feelings. I struggled to relate with his characters; their outlook on the world seemed so alien compared to mine. I also was frustrated that "nothing happened". His writing seemed much more driven by the underlying emotion of the narrative ("foreboding" is the best description that comes to mind) than plot.
However, when I traveled to Tokyo for the first time I realized that the feelings that I had reading his novels captured the essence of the city - the sense of duty, the isolation, the assertion of individuality in a place that epitomizes collectivism. His writing provided a window into a worldview that could not have been more different from my own.
I'm glad to have run across this article; I'll add these other authors to my reading list.