Murakami Novels

[Ranee Wates]

Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹, Murakami Haruki, born January 12, 1949[1]) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages[2] and having sold millions of copies outside Japan.[3][4] He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Tanizaki Prize, Yomiuri Prize for Literature, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Noma Literary Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Princess of Asturias Awards.[5][6][7][8]

His fiction has polarized literary critics and the reading public. He has sometimes been criticised by Japan's literary establishment as un-Japanese, leading to Murakami's recalling that he was a "black sheep in the Japanese literary world".[16][17][18] Meanwhile, Murakami has been described by Gary Fisketjon, the editor of Murakami's collection The Elephant Vanishes (1993), as a "truly extraordinary writer", while Steven Poole of The Guardian praised Murakami as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his oeuvre.[19][20]

Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan, during the post-World War II baby boom and was raised in Nishinomiya, Ashiya and Kobe.[21][22] He is an only child. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest,[23] and his mother is the daughter of an Osaka merchant.[24] Both taught Japanese literature.[25] His father was involved in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and was deeply traumatized by it, which would, in turn, affect Murakami.[26]

Since childhood, Murakami, like Kōbō Abe, has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western as well as Russian music and literature. He grew up reading a wide range of works by European and American writers, such as Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac.[27] These Western influences distinguish Murakami from the majority of other Japanese writers.[28]

Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met Yoko, now his wife. His first job was at a record store. Shortly before finishing his studies, Murakami opened a coffee house and jazz bar, Peter Cat, in Kokubunji, Tokyo, which he ran with his wife,[29] from 1974 to 1981.[30] The couple decided not to have children.[22][31]

Murakami is an experienced marathon runner and triathlon enthusiast, though he did not start running until he was 33 years old, after he began as a way to stay healthy. On June 23, 1996, he completed his first ultramarathon, a 100 km race around Lake Saroma in Hokkaido, Japan.[32] He discussed running and its effect on his creative life in a 2007 memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.[33]

Murakami began to write fiction when he was 29.[34] "Before that," he said, "I didn't write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn't create anything at all."[35] He was inspired to write his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), while watching a baseball game.[36] He described the moment he realized he could write as a "warm sensation" he could still feel in his heart.[37] He went home and began writing that night. Murakami worked on Hear the Wind Sing for ten months in very brief stretches, during nights, after working days at the bar.[38] He completed the novel and sent it to the only literary contest that would accept a work of that length, winning first prize.

Murakami's initial success with Hear the Wind Sing encouraged him to continue writing. A year later, he published a sequel, Pinball, 1973. In 1981, he co-wrote a short story collection, Yume de Aimashou with author and future Earthbound/Mother creator Shigesato Itoi. In 1982, he published A Wild Sheep Chase, a critical success. Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase form the Trilogy of the Rat (a sequel, Dance, Dance, Dance, was written later but is not considered part of the series), centered on the same unnamed narrator and his friend, "the Rat". The first two novels were not widely available in English translation outside Japan until 2015, although an English edition, translated by Alfred Birnbaum with extensive notes, had been published by Kodansha as part of a series intended for Japanese students of English. Murakami considers his first two novels to be "immature" and "flimsy",[38] and has not been eager to have them translated into English. A Wild Sheep Chase, he says, was "the first book where I could feel a kind of sensation, the joy of telling a story. When you read a good story, you just keep reading. When I write a good story, I just keep writing."[39]

In 1985, Murakami wrote Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a dream-like fantasy that took the magical elements of his work to a new extreme. Murakami achieved a major breakthrough and national recognition in 1987 with the publication of Norwegian Wood, a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality. It sold millions of copies among young Japanese.[40]

Norwegian Wood propelled the barely known Murakami into the spotlight. He was mobbed at airports and other public places, leading to his departure from Japan in 1986.[41] Murakami traveled through Europe, lived in the United States and currently resides in Oiso, Kanagawa, with an office in Tokyo.[42]

Murakami was a writing fellow at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[22][43] During this time he wrote South of the Border, West of the Sun and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.[22]

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) fuses the realistic and fantastic and contains elements of physical violence. It is also more socially conscious than his previous work, dealing in part with the difficult topic of war crimes in Manchukuo (Northeast China). The novel won the Yomiuri Prize, awarded by one of Murakami's harshest former critics, Kenzaburō Ōe, who himself won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.[44]

The processing of collective trauma soon became an important theme in Murakami's writing, which had previously been more personal in nature. Murakami returned to Japan in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack.[27] He came to terms with these events with his first work of non-fiction, Underground, and the short story collection after the quake. Underground consists largely of interviews of victims of the gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system.

In 1996, in a conversation with the psychologist Hayao Kawai, Murakami explained that he changed his position from one of "detachment" to one of "commitment" after staying in the United States in the 1990s.[45] He called The Wind-up Bird Chronicle a turning point in his career, marking this change in focus.

English translations of many of his short stories written between 1983 and 1990 have been collected in The Elephant Vanishes. Murakami has also translated many works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Paul Theroux, among others, into Japanese.[22]

Murakami took an active role in translation of his work into English, encouraging "adaptations" of his texts to American reality rather than direct translation. Some of his works that appeared in German turned out to be translations from English rather than Japanese (South of the Border, West of the Sun, 2000; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 2000s), encouraged by Murakami himself. Both were later re-translated from Japanese.[46]

Sputnik Sweetheart was first published in 1999, followed by Kafka on the Shore in 2002, with the English translation following in 2005. Kafka on the Shore won the World Fantasy Award in 2006.[47] The English version of his novel After Dark was released in May 2007. It was chosen by The New York Times as a "notable book of the year".[48] In late 2005, Murakami published a collection of short stories titled Tōkyō Kitanshū, or 東京奇譚集, which translates loosely as "Mysteries of Tokyo". A collection of the English versions of twenty-four short stories, titled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, was published in August 2006. This collection includes both older works from the 1980s as well as some of Murakami's more recent short stories, including all five that appear in Tōkyō Kitanshū.

In 2002, Murakami published the anthology Birthday Stories, which collects short stories on the theme of birthdays. It includes work by Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Claire Keegan, Andrea Lee, Daniel Lyons, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux, and William Trevor, as well as a story by Murakami himself. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir about his experience as a marathon runner and a triathlete, was published in Japan in 2007,[49] with English translations released in the U.K. and the U.S. in 2008. The title is a play on that of Raymond Carver's short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.[50]

In 2015, Switch Publishing published Murakami's essay collection Novelist as a Vocation in Japan, featuring insights and commentaries on Murakami's life and career. The essay collection was later translated into English by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen and released by Alfred A. Knopf on November 8, 2022.[57]

Murakami's most recent novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls was published by Shinchosha in Japan on April 13, 2023.[59][60] His first novel in six years, it is 1,200-pages long and is set in a "soul-stirring, 100% pure Murakami world" that involves "a story that had long been sealed".[61] In promoting his latest book, Murakami stated that he believed that the pandemic and the on-going war in Ukraine has created walls that divide people, fueling fear and skepticism instead of mutual trust.[62]

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