Some Thoughts on Murakami

1. Some Thoughts on Murakami From various sources

2. Alienation Alienation is key to Murakami’s books and from them one comes to understand Japan a little better. Externally we see a nation conforming in dress and looks and attitudes. We see pictures of teens girls with crazes, buying millions of copies of one object or another. There appears to us to be a national will to conform and that is why Murakami’s characters seem to be so strange and yet so popular with the Japanese. They are about people who cannot fit in, or make sense of the society they live in. They struggle to obey the rules and reject normal life, even when claiming to be ordinary.

3. Murakami’s Method Murakami’s own protagonists are not unlike detectives. They find clues by speaking to peculiar people in out-of-the-way places: under cities, down deep wells. This reflects the visionary way Murakami himself goes about writing. “If I knew everything before I wrote, it would be boring. The things and the people come to me automatically. I don’t ‘make up’ anything.”

4. More on Method It is more a case of “finding something.” To generalize, Murakami’s main character tends to be a man who is somewhat out of touch with his own feelings. Through his encounters with women, he discovers clues as to how his sense of self became unraveled. The man is a detective, but the crime has somehow happened within himself. The hero’s unpicking of a Hitchcock-style mystery dovetails with Murakami’s own self-analysis through writing. As he puts it: “I’m looking for my own story in myself....That’s why I like Joseph Campbell. People are looking for their tales inside themselves. Without tales people can’t live their lives.”

5. Murakami and Translation • MY MOST INTENSE EXPERIENCE with translation, thus far, has involved a Japanese author. Like Javier Marías and W.G. Sebald, Haruki Murakami is a writer who is intimately acquainted with Anglo-American culture even as he remains outside it. (I think writers of this kind may well make the most interesting test cases for translation; at any rate, I find myself repeatedly drawn to them.) Murakami, who has translated Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paul Theroux into Japanese, is quite attached to the Beatles, jazz, Scotch whiskey, Marx Brothers movies, and many other products of Western culture. He repeatedly injects something akin to an American sensibility -- a rebellious, non-salaryman's sensibility -- into his hapless fictional protagonists. Yet the novels are written in Japanese and set, for the most part, in Japan, so when we read them in English, we get (as with Marías and Sebald) a strange sensation of foreignness mixed with familiarity, of worlds collapsing in on each other.

6. Translation by Rubin • Here, submitted as Exhibit A, are the opening sentences of the Rubin translation: • "When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta. • "I wanted to ignore the phone, not only because the spaghetti was nearly done, but because Claudio Abbado was bringing the London Symphony to its musical climax.“ • Not bad, eh? Perfectly good English sentences presented by a reasonably interesting narrator.

7. Translation by Birnbaum • But now listen to Exhibit B by Arthur Birnbaum: • "I'm in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls. Another moment until the spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to Rossini's La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti-cooking music. • "I hear the telephone ring but tell myself, Ignore it. Let the spaghetti finish cooking. It's almost done, and besides, Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony Orchestra are coming to a crescendo.“ • What’s the difference? Which one is better? Why?

8. And postmodernism No longer merely passive victims, the main characters in Murakami's major novels during this period--which include Sheep Chase and its sequel, Dance Dance Dance, and (perhaps his masterpiece to date) Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World-were now presented as questors seeking not merely romantic and nostalgic connections to the past but also a more active means of making sense of their lives and the bewildering plurality of hyperrealities around them.

9. And Consumerism No longer content, as he had been in Pinball 1973 and Norwegian Wood, to tell a story about the conflict between self and environment in terms of daily, surface reality, Murakami devised a kind of "simulation approach" in which the conflicts existing within his protagonists' personal consciousnesses were immulated and then projected into the surreal, labyrinthine regions of dream and personalized, Jungian unconsciousness. Fully aware of the confusing, often banalizing impact that hyperconsumerism was having on Japan, these novels are all cautionary parables about the dangers of life under late capitalism--dangers which included information overload, the irrelevance of human values and spirituality in a world dominated by the inhuman logic of postindustrial capitalism, and the loss of contact with other human beings.

10. Sinda Gregory: You adopt an interesting version of the hard-boiled style in your novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland. What about the hard-boiled style appeals to you? • Its authenticity. But I wasn't really interested in writing a hard-boiled mystery; I just wanted the hard-boiled mystery structure. I'm very interested in structure. I've been using other pop structures in my writing as well--science fiction structures, for example. I'm also using love-story or romance structures. But as far as my thinking about the hard-boiled style, I'm interested in the fact that they are very individualist in orientation. The figure of the loner. I'm interested in that because it isn't easy to live in Japan as an individualist or a loner. I'm always thinking about this. I'm a novelist and I'm a loner, an individualist. I think that's why I came to this country. It's my dream to write hard-boiled mysteries.

11. LM: Some critics, both in the U.S. and Japan, have said that your work is not really Japanese. Do you yourself think of yourself as having a distinctly Japanese sensibility--or as writing specifically about Japanese experience versus just writing about universal experiences? • The opinion that my books are not really Japanese seems to me to be very shallow. I certainly think of myself as being a Japanese writer. I write with a different style and maybe with different materials, but I write in Japanese, and I'm writing for Japanese society and Japanese people. So I think people are wrong when they are always saying that my style is really mainly influenced by Western literature. As I just said, at first I wanted to be an international writer, but eventually saw that I was nothing but a Japanese writer. But even in the beginning I wasn't only borrowing Western styles and rules. I wanted to change Japanese literature from the inside, not the outside. So I basically made up my own rules.

12. Could you give us some examples of what you mean? • Most literary purists in Japan love beautiful language and appreciate sensitivity rather than energy or power. This beauty is admired for its own sake, and so their styles use a lot of very stiff, formal metaphors that don't sound natural or spontaneous at all. These writing styles get more and more refined, to the point where they resemble a kind of bonsai. I don't like such traditional forms of writing; it may sound beautiful, but it may not communicate. Besides, who knows what beauty is? So in my writing, I've tried to change that. I like to write more freely, so I use a lot of long and peculiar metaphors that seem fresh to me.

13. Murakami’s reception in Japan • Beginning with the publication of his first novel, Murakami has enjoyed literary success in Japan, attracting younger readers by the millions with his linguistic playfulness and indeterminate narratives. However, Murakami has also baffled Japan's World War II generation for many of the same reasons. While most professional Japanese critics of jun-bungaku have favorably received Murakami's writings, praising his fusion of conventional Japanese literary aesthetics with postmodernism, other critics have expressed skepticism about his "American" language and cinematic plotting techniques.

14. Murakami and the West • Murakami's skillful recognition of the irony that pervades grave situations and his ability to create strong characterizations. Although his fiction is often noted for its distinctly postmodern devices, most reviewers have agreed that these devices are not mere gimmicks, but rather valuable keys to understanding his fiction. Several Western critics have traced Murakami's influences from a range of contemporary American writers, often speculating upon the role of his Japanese translations of their works in shaping his style and narrative techniques.

15. Perhaps, more universally . . . • Other commentators have noted the "confluence" of Eastern and Western literary traditions in Murakami's writings. In addition, Murakami is often credited with introducing a new type of jun-bungaku hero, one that reflects the author's own politically aloof and cutting-edge public persona, which, critics note, are tendencies exhibited and emulated by Murakami's generation in Japan. Critics have also referred to Murakami as the Japanese equivalent of American novelist Jay McInerney or Bret Easton Ellis. Despite these comparisons and the rampant consumerism of Murakami's characters, many reviewers have acknowledged a psychic or spiritual dimension to his writings.

16. Western Influences or a Japanese Original? • Reflecting on Murakami's body of work, Lin observed, Despite the discrete concerns of each work, he essentially writes about one thing: there is, in his books, a familiar world full of the living specifics of music, weather, books, food, marriage, and sex; and then there is its shadow, invariably dark and dreamlike, which intrudes upon the original with intent to harm. The intersection of the familiar and the menacing forms the core of Murakami's interest. Coupled with sheer nerve, this obsession spawns a kind of fantasy literature that has no real precedent." And Jamie James pointed out in the New York Times Book Review that "Western critics searching for parallels have variously likened [Murakami] to Raymond Carver, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Pynchon--a roster so ill-assorted as to suggest that Murakami may in fact be an original."