Haruki Murakami

Celebrated Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, born on the 12th January 1949, is an international bestselling author whose most notable books include Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95) and IQ84 (2009–10). His work is often fatalist or surrealist in nature, featuring themes of loneliness and interpersonal connection. He has won numerous literary awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize in 2006, and has received an honorary doctorate of Letters from the University of Liège as well as doctorates from Princeton University and Tufts University in the USA.

An only child, Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan and spent his childhood in Nishinomiya, Ashiya and Kobe, where his parents were both teachers of Japanese literature. Before turning to writing, Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, and it was here that he met his future wife, Yoko, with whom he opened up a coffee house and jazz bar in Kokubunji, Tokyo called ‘Peter Cat’, which they ran together for eight years, from 1974 to 1981.

Murakami did not begin to write fiction until he was 29, describing himself as just an ordinary person up until that point, someone who did not create anything at all. He was inspired to write his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) whilst watching a baseball game and it first appeared in the June 1979 issue of Gunzo, one of the most important and influential Japanese literary magazines of the time, before being published as a novel the following month. The book won the 22nd Gunzo Prize for New Writers (in April 1979), and Murakami is said to have entered this prize because it was the only one that would accept work of the length of his novel. Hear the Wind Sing was adapted into a film in 1981 by Japanese director Kazuki Ōmori and translated into English by American translator Alfred Birnbaum in 1987. The book is the first in the ‘Trilogy of the Rat’, followed by Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), which all feature the same unnamed narrator and his friend, ‘the Rat’. These novels were not widely distributed in English-speaking countries and Murakami considers them to be part of his ‘immature period’. Before a reprinting in 2009, these novels were only available in English as A6-sized pocket editions, and they were expensive and often difficult to locate.

Murakami gained much wider recognition following the publication of Norwegian Wood in 1987, which was very popular in Japan among young people. The novel is a nostalgic story of loss and burgeoning sexuality. From the publication of Norwegian Wood his fame sky-rocketed, and he often drew crowds at airports and other public places.

In the following years, Murakami was a fellow at Princeton, Tufts and Harvard in the USA and it was during this time that he wrote South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–1995). For this novel Murakami received the Yomiuri Literary Award, which was awarded to him by one of his harshest former critics and fellow writer, Kenzaburō Ōe. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle fuses realism with fantasy, a common theme in many of Murakami’s subsequent novels. It was also more socially conscious than his previous work, which had tended to focus more on personal traumas. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle began to shift the focus onto the processing of collective trauma, dealing in part with the topic of war crimes committed in Manchukuo in Northeast China. After returning to Japan, Murakami wrote his first work of non-fiction, Underground (1997), which was made up of interviews with victims of the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and in 2000 he published After the Quake (2000) in response to the Kobe Earthquake that took place in 1995.

As well as fantastical or surrealist elements, such as 6-foot-tall frogs, many of Murakami’s novels contain references to music. For example, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is made up of three books: The Thieving Magpie, named after Rossini's opera, Bird as Prophet, after a piano piece by Robert Schumann, and The Bird-Catcher, who is a character (named Papageno) in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. Some of his novels also take their titles from songs, such as Dance Dance Dance (1988), which is named after a 1957 B-side song by The Dells, and Norwegian Wood, named after a song by The Beatles.

From an early age, Murakami was heavily influenced by Western culture and American literature. Growing up in Kobe, he would buy paperbacks from second-hand bookshops and this is how he learnt to read English. He grew up reading a wide range of American and European authors such as Kafka, Dickens and Kerouac, as well as Russian authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. His work often features allusions to Western culture; for example the title What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007) is a play on the title of Raymond Carver’s short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). In this book, Murakami draws on his own experiences as a keen marathon runner, writing about his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon.

Murakami himself has said that he is more influenced by American fiction than contemporary Japanese fiction, although he does enjoy work by Ryū Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto. The inclusion of Western influences in his writing has distinguished him from the majority of other Japanese writers. When his work became more widely read in America, critics would often compare his work more closely to American authors and would distance his work from other Japanese authors, such as Yukio Mishima or Yasunari Kawabata. American critics would celebrate this difference, often with the suggestion that his work was elevated above work by other Japanese authors because of its closer ties to American literature. This phenomenon is referred to by writer and activist Nikesh Shukla as ‘highlander syndrome’, ‘when members of the same race or minority group are pitted against one another in a manner that allows for only one winner’ (Buchanan, 2020). He initially faced similar criticism from Japanese critics who felt that his work was not aimed at Japan.

According to translator Ted Goossen, Murakami’s work was viewed as not ‘really Japanese literature’; the feeling was that it was ‘foreign literature, written in Japanese’. Ted Goossen is a Professor of Japanese Literature at York University in Toronto and has translated several of Murakami’s more recent novels into English. He has spoken about how Murakami’s inclusion of American culture can sometimes make translating his work into English more difficult. An example Goossen used was that Murakami might include a phrase such as ‘cut off your nose to spite your face’, which does not exist as an idiom in Japanese and that a Japanese reader might find interesting and novel, but if this were to be translated literally into English it might be read as trite by an English-speaking reader since the phrase would be so familiar. Goossen admires this challenge though and has spoken about how he works in order to give an English-speaking reader the equivalent sense of unfamiliarity. Goossen has described Murakami as ‘a wonderful storyteller, he really knows how to pull you in and he has a style that carries you along, seemingly in any language’ (Harding, 1994). Murakami’s latest book First Person Singular (2021) is a collection of short stories that explore nostalgic reflections of youth, childhood, love and loss.

Other books~

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (2019)

Men Without Women : Stories by Haruki Murakami (2018)

Haruki Murakami

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