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Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) |
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Japanese novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and translator, whose work combine postmodern techniques and fantasy with influences from American literature. Haruki Murakami is one of the most popular and widely translated of all contemporary Japanese authors. It's possible for a first-timer to produce a fine novel if he or she is blessed with a just a little talent. When I started, for example, I had zero training. True, I had majored in drama and film in university, but times being what they were—it was the late 1960s—I had seldom attended class. Instead, I grew long hair and a scruffy beard and hung around in clothes that were less than clean. I had no special plans to become a writer, never even tried to scribble something down for practice, until one day the bug suddenly bit me and I wrote my first novel (if you want to call it that), Hear the Wind Sing, which ended up winning a literary magazine's prize for new writers. I went on to become a professional writer without ever having had to study the craft. "Is this really all right?" I asked myself, shaking my head in wonder. It all seemed way too easy. (from Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, New York: Vintage, 2022, pp. 6-7, original title: Shokugyō to shite no shōsetsuka, 2015) Murakami Haruki was born in Kyoto, but he grew up in Ashiya, Hyogo. His father, Ciaki, the son of of a Kyoto Buddhist priest, had fought in China in his youth, and prayed every morning at the Buddhist altar in their house for the people who had died in the war. Murakami's mother, Miyuki, was the daughter of an Osaka merchant. Both of his parents taught Japanese literature. Murakami himself became a voracious reader and was permitted to buy books on credit at the local bookstore. However, he was more interested in American hard-boiled detective stories and science fiction than Japanese classics. "Alone in my room I would listen to American jazz and rock-and-roll, watch American television shows and read American novels," Murakami has recalled in an interview. (New York Times, September 27, 1992) In
1968 Murakami moved to Tokyo to study theater at Waseda University,
Before graduating in 1975, Murakami opened with his wife, Yoko
Takahashi, a jazz club, named "Peter Cat" after an old pet of his. They managed it until 1981; its specialty was stuffed
cabbage.
Originally the club was a windowless undergroud
place, which had Spanish-style white walls, wooden tables and
chairs. His friend, the photographer Eizo Matsumura has recalled, that
it was a place "where time stood still." In 1977, the couple moved the club to a central downtown
location. The interior was decorated all over with cat theme; even
chopstick wrappers had cat designs. Murakami himself has owned
several cats and felines appear frequently in his fiction as
"delegates from another world". (John Updike, in Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism,
2007, pp. 433-435) Murakami started to write at the age of 29. His first novel, Kaze
no uta o kike
(1979, Hear the Wind Sing) won the Gunzo New Writer's Award. This
130-page story, where nothing much happens, was followed by Sen
kyuhyaku nanaju san nen no pinboru (1980, Pinball 1973), which
featured a possibly sentient pinball machine. It was awarded Kondansha
publisher's Shinjin Bunkaku prize for best newcomer in 1980. These
works introduced Murakami's protagonist, known as Boku, whose character
owes debt to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and the existentialist
antiheroes of the nouveau roman. He was also the narrator in Hitsuji
o meguru boken
(1982, A Wild Sheep Chase), in which he searched for a mysterious
sheep. Before disappearing, the creature had "lived" inside a powerful
businessman as the embodiment of his Nietzschean will-to-power. In Murakami's stories, there
is no clear line between fantasy and the real world, whether or not there is a first-person point of view. A Wild Sheep Chase
was awarded the Noma
Literary Award
for New Writers and sold over 100,000 copies in the six months after it
was published. Murakami has
regarded this novel as his real debut work. It was also his first book
in English published outside Japan. To learn more about sheep, Murakami
traveled to Hokkaido, but the story contains fantastic elements, too: a
woman whose bewitching ears have sexual powers, a ghost, and a
mysterious sheep that can inhabit a human body. The Sheep Man, a sort
of spirit, appeared again in Dansu, dansu, dansu
(1988) as a shadow on a wall, saying:."Here'sdifferent. You'renotready,
notforhere. Here'stoodark, toobig. Hardtoexplain. Likewesaid,
wedon'tknowmuch. Butit'sreal, allright. Youandustalkinghere'sreality.
Butit'snottheonlyonereality. Lotsofrealitiesoutthere.
Wejustchosethisone, because, well, wedon'tlikewar.
Andwehadnothingtolose. Butyou, youstillgotwarmth. Sohere'stoocold.
Nothingtoeat. Nottheplaceforyou." (Dance, Dance, Dance, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, Tokyo, Kodansha Internatonal, 1994, p. 86) Following his success as a writer, Murakami sold his jazz club and devoted himself full time to writing. Murakami kept a disciplined schedule throughout the day, woke up at 4 a.m. without an alarm, wrote for five to six hours in his office, ran or swam in the early afternoon, and spent the evening reading or listening to music of all kinds: jazz, classical, folk, rock. From early on, music has been an essential part of his life and writing. "My style boils down to this: First of all, I never put more meaning into a sentence than is absolutely necessary. Second, the sentences have to have rhythm. This is something I learned from music, especially jazz. In jazz, great rhythm is what makes great improvising possible. It's all in the footwok" (quoted in Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words by Jay Rubin, London: Harvill Press, 2002) Between 1986 and
1989 Murakami lived in Greece. He was a visiting fellow in East
Asian studies at Princeton University (1991-93) and taught at Tufts
University in
Medford, MA. After spending years abroad, Murakami returned to Japan in
1995, where an earthquake had struck Kobe, his hometown, and members of
the cult group Aum Shinrikyo carried out the sarin gas attacks on the
Tokyo subway system. Murakami's fourth novel, Sekai no owari to hadoboirudo wandarando (1985, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World), a kind of science fiction novel built on two separate but intricately related stories, won the Tanizaki Prize. At the end, the both protagonists have to decide, whether to reject or accept the world the live in. Kafka on the Shore (2002), which also alternated between two storylines, was a tribute to the power of imagination, containing several riddles, "but there aren't any solutions provided," as Murakami said. Mostly his narrators had been bystanders or passive victims, who are alienated from society, but in this work the central characters, Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway from his home in Tokya, and Satoru Nakata, searching for a lost cat named Goma, began to take responsibility for their dreams and subconscious attitudes. The Steppenwolf Theatre Company produced in 2008 a stage version of the book, written and directed by Frank Galati. In Noruwei no mori (1987, Norwegian Wood), named after the Beatles song, Murakami's approach was untypically realistic and straightforward. The two-volume love story set in the 1960s became a highly popular novel in Japan, selling over four million copies. Until Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru (1994-95, Wind-up Bird Chronicle) Murakami had not touched political subjects in his imaginative novels, but in this work he also dealt with the Japanese campaign in Manchuria during the Pacific War. "In trying to depict a fragmented, chaotic and ultimately unknowable world, Mr. Murakami has written a fragmentary and chaotic book," said the literary critic Michiko Kakutani. (The New York Times (October 31, 1997) When Murakami accepted the prestigious Jerusalem Prize in 2009, he told in his speech that he stands on the side of unarmed civilians, not "The System" that sometimes takes on a life of its own, and "then begins to kill us and cause us to kill others – coldly, efficently, systematically." Murakami has also criticized Japan's nuclear industry. After the Quake (2000), a collection of short fiction,
took its material from the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Underground: The
Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (1997-98),
Murakami's
first book on non-fiction, was about the bioterror attacks on the Tokyo
subway system. For this work, he interviewed the victims of the
incident of 1995 as well as a few members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult.
Its leader Shoko Ashara, and
six other members, who had released sarin gas on several subway trains,
were executed in July 2018. One member said in court, "The results were
bad, and we regret them. However, the basic aims of Aum Shinrikyo
are not flawed, and we don't feel there's any need to reject them
outright." (Understanding
Apocalyptic Terrorism: Countering the Radical Mindset by Frances
L. Flannery, 2016, p. 230) Despite being an opponent of the
death penalty, Murakami wrote in an essay published in the Mainichi Shimbun that "I cannot
publicly state, as far as this case is concerned, 'I am opposed to
death penalty.'" (The
Guardian, Mon 30 Jul 2018) Yakusoku sareta basho de: underground 2 won Murakami the Kawabata Takeo Prize. Selections from Andaguraundo and Yakusoku sareta basho de were combined to form the English Underground (2000). Murakami returned to the theme of strage cults in 1Q84 (2009-2010), originally published in three volumes in Japan. The long tale told of a man, Tengo, and a woman, Aomame, searching for each other after parting at the age of 10. "Please remember," says a taxi driver in the beginning, "things are not what they seem." The title refers to the alternate world, into which Aomame stumbles. Though Mukakami's critics have blamed him for writing un-Japanese works, this book was also a bestseller, selling sold immediately 1.5 million copies. In Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013) the title character is a young man searching his friends, to discover the answer for the question 'Who am I'. The existential quest takes him as far as Finland, where one of his female friends is living and making pottery. "No great writer writes as many bad sentences as Murakami does," said Nathaniel Rich in his review of the book. (The Atlantic, August 13, 2014) Murakami has translated into Japanese works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Paul Theroux, John Irving, Tim O'Brien, and others. At the age of 33, Murakami began to run regularly for exercise. He has ran the classic route from Athens to Marathon, completed dozens of marathons and participated in triathlons. His fastest marathon was in New York City in 1991 with a time of 31:31:27. From 2011 onwards, Murakami has been rumored to be among the front-runners for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It's "kind of nuisance," he has said. "It's not a horse race!" ('Haruki Murakami gives readers further advice on writing, adultery and cats' by Alison Flood, The Guardian, 20 January, 2015) By the 2020s, his record collection had expanded to include over 10,000 vinyl records. In 2023 Murakami won the Princess of Asturias Award for literature. For further reading: Murakami Haruki on Film by Marc Yamada (2024); Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage, edited by Gitte Marianne Hansen and Michael Tsang (2022); Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-therapy: Stories from the Second Basement by Jonathan Dil (2022); The Existentialist Vision of Haruki Murakami by Michael Ackland (2022); Murakami Haruki and His Early Work: the Loneliness of the Long-distance Running Artist by Masaki Mori (2021); Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami by David Karashima (2020); The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami by Matthew Carl Strecher (2014); 'Cat Imagery in Haruki Murakami's Fiction' by Adelina Vasile, in Annals of Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University (2012); 'Murakami, Haruki' by Ilana R. Simons, in The Facts on File Companion to the World Novel: 1900 to the Present, edited by Michael Sollars (2008); Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture by Michael Robert Seats (2006); Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words by Jay Rubin (2005); Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary Japanese Culture: A Reading of Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kojin by Murakami Fuminobu (2005); Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle: A Reader's Guide by Matthew Strecher (2002); 'Murakami, Haruki,' in Encyclopedia of Wold Literature in the 20th Century, Volume 3., edited by Steven R. Serafin (1999) Selected works:
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