The Cult of Haruki Murakami

On March 20, 1995, members of a religious cult released toxic gas in three Tokyo subways, killing thirteen people. Some months later, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami happened to be reading the letters page of a banal Ladies’ Home Journal–type magazine in which a reader described her husband’s psychological inability to return to his job at the transit authority after surviving the terrorist attack. Murakami decided to interview survivors to examine the many traumatic effects of such a horrific event. The resulting book, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, is an oral history in the vein of Studs Terkel. In one of the few moments that come from Murakami and not the victims, he inadvertently summarises one of the core themes of his fiction. Without the ego, he explains, we lose the “narrative” of our identities, which, for him, is vital for our ability to connect with others.

The inescapable duality of human consciousness—that is the terrain of much of Murakami’s fiction. What drew him to this work of reportage also animates his inventions. Murakami’s approach to consciousness is less representational than literal, with many of his characters literally being transported to a realm created by (or wholly inside of) their minds.

These places often appear underground, in inky darkness. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it’s a vast, cavernous world crawling with creatures called INKlings. The nether realm in Killing Commendatore is referred to as the Path of Metaphor, and the narrator finds the entrance with the help of two figures from a painting. Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, features a library with a chilly office deep below the main building, where the narrator converses with the ghost of the previous librarian. And later, after the narrator merges with another character, they can only “meet” as separate people in a “small square room” inside his mind, lit with a single flickering flame. Wells, too, are a recurring motif.

In every instance, the existence of these impossible locations prompts bewilderment from the characters. The reader, too, is left just as confounded. How can a person go inside of himself? How are these characters traveling to these worlds? Are these other worlds real? Why are all these women vanishing all the time? And what’s with all the goddamn cats?

The world of Murakami is a land of mysteries, but perhaps the most pressing enigma has less to do with the meaning of any of his novels and more to do with the unlikeliness of his literary rise. Born in Kyoto in 1949, Murakami came of age in the complicated decades following the devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His middle-class family, as John Wray put it, had a “vested interest in the national culture: his father was a teacher of Japanese literature, his grandfather a Buddhist monk.” He grew up in Kobe, a port city teeming with American sailors, where he developed his love of Western popular culture: the eclectic forms of jazz, the unadorned minimalism of dime-store genre fiction, the romantic pop of Hollywood movies, the bright and splashy corporate iconography. In the late sixties, he left home to attend Waseda University in Tokyo, at the height of a tense period of student unrest.

In his book Novelist as a Vocation, Murakami characterises the expectations of men at the time and his own acceptance of those norms. “Most guys graduated from college,” he writes, “found work, and then, when things levelled off, got married.” He assumed the exact same future for himself: “It was the way of the world, after all. I had no intention to contravene (for better or for worse) what seemed to be the dictates of common sense.” Instead, Murakami married young, ran a jazz café called Peter Cat for much of his twenties, dragged his (admittedly tired) heels before finally graduating after seven years, and accepted that “our futures, it seems, don’t always unfold the way we expect.”

For Murakami, this is an understatement. Consider the story of his transformation from jazz-café proprietor to experimental novelist. It began, as he tells it in Vocation, like this: In April 1978, Murakami attended a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in Tokyo. An American player named Dave Hilton hit a double into left field, and when the “satisfying crack” of Hilton’s bat arrived at Murakami’s ears, he thought to himself, apropos of nothing, I think I can write a novel.

And he was right.

Since that moment at the baseball game, Murakami has published fifteen novels, five short-story collections, and five works of nonfiction, which have sold millions of copies, been translated in more than fifty languages, and won numerous major prizes. A cinematic adaptation of one of his short stories, “Drive My Car,” won Best International Film at the 2022 Academy Awards. His stories have also been adapted into a video game and in manga form. And ever since the publication of 1Q84 in English in 2011, there have been midnight parties held around the world to celebrate the release of new Murakami novels.

Mind you, this is an artist whose work, as John Updike put it, possesses “a bewildering overflow of possible meanings.” Steeped in Japanese symbolism, literary allusion, and American pop culture, his fiction isn’t exactly the stuff typical best-sellers are made of.

How, then, does a demure jazz-club owner become not only Japan’s perennial Nobel Prize contender but also a sensation the world over?

The most cited reason for Murakami’s global success is his writing style, which stands out in two major ways. First, he eschews some of the conventional elements of Japanese literature. His prose is hip, rhythmic, talky, unadorned, even disaffected. He employs informal pronouns not typically found in “serious” fiction. As an experimental stylist, he caused a bit of a stir when he arrived on the literary scene.

But it was more than just his inventiveness with his native language. Murakami scholar Matthew Carl Strecher describes what he’s alternately referred to as the author’s “nationality-less” style or his “translationese tone,” which he cites as reasons Murakami’s novels seem to work so well in other languages. But these are also backhanded ways of noting, as the Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe said outright, that even though Murakami writes in Japanese, “his writing is not really Japanese.”

To be sure, many of Murakami’s strongest influences came from outside his home country. For instance, he learned English reading American best-sellers, and he came to particularly admire Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler, and J.D. Salinger, all of whom he eventually translated into Japanese. When Murakami toiled over his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, he felt unsatisfied with his initial effort, so he pulled out a typewriter and rewrote it in English; at the time, he had only an elementary grasp of the language. Then he translated his simpler English sentences back into Japanese, cleaning them up as he did so. This resulted in what Murakami calls “a rough, uncultivated kind of prose.” Combine this stripped-down approach with his irreverent syntax and pop-culture fixations and you’ve got what could be considered an anti-Japanese style. Certainly many of his critics thought so. And for the first fifteen years of his career, as Strecher points out, Murakami “preferred living in Europe, the Mediterranean, or America, anywhere but Japan.”

During the writing of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the mid-nineties, however, Murakami became newly committed to his home country. “I’m forty-five years old, you know,” he told Strecher in October 1994, “and I can’t be a rebel all my life. I think right now may also be a turning point for me.”

No matter his geographical or philosophical loyalties, Murakami has always written about Japanese characters, often in Japanese settings. “I don’t want to write about foreigners in foreign countries,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. “I want to write about us.” Murakami does not read his books in their English translations despite his fluency, telling the writer Roland Kelts, “My books exist in their original Japanese. That’s what’s most important, because that’s how I wrote them.”

Despite their supposedly “nationality-less” affect, Murakami’s novels are not circumstantially Japanese but rather fundamentally so—at least in his interpretation of what that identity means. One thing he does share with his countrymen is kata, meaning “form,” which manifests itself most vividly in his narrative conclusions, such as they are. Reviewing Murakami’s novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Tim Parks notes that the trajectory for most of the writer’s protagonists involves them “returning, or preparing to return, to some more recognisably traditional community.” Parks continues, “For all the surreal adventure of the loner’s alternative world, it is the world we are familiar with that reassuringly reasserts its dominance. In that sense, these stories are perhaps less revolutionary than they might seem.”

Murakami’s global appeal, then, might exist in the heightened contrast between the unruly, traumatising, consciousness-splitting, ghost-filled world beyond and the comforting, drama-less certitude of the conventional life.

But the pleasures of Murakami aren’t all so high-minded—in fact, the author is beloved for his embrace of familiar tropes, some of which have become so charmingly ubiquitous as to inspire a comic strip called “Murakami Bingo.” Here, a non-exhaustive list of features you will probably find in a Murakami novel:

The story will oscillate between two unconnected narratives that ultimately bridge together. At least one of the narrators will be a single male who lives alone, because of either a recent breakup or a lifestyle not suited to romance. He will listen to and spend a not inconsiderable amount of time thinking about classical music and jazz. At some point, he’ll have sex with a woman for whom he has affection but nothing more; perhaps she’s married. Somewhere in this (often unnamed) narrator’s life, there is a young girl (usually sixteen) who vanishes from his life, either mysteriously or tragically. He might search for her, a quest that takes him into strange underworlds. Some cats will be there, too, that’s for sure. One might get lost. And sometimes they’ll be able to talk. Other supernatural, mythological, and metaphorical beings—ghosts, unicorns, monsters, figures from paintings—abound. Characters with metonymic names like the Sheep Man, Johnnie Walker, and the Man with the White Subaru Forester menace the background. All of this is recounted with a matter-of-factness that belies the absurdity it’s often describing.

Murakami wields cultural references as literary devices as deftly as Quentin Tarantino. There’s the Proust’s madeleine-esque usage of a Beatles song in Norwegian Wood, instantly transporting the narrator in his memory to his youth. Murakami’s short story “Samsa in Love” reverses the famous transformation in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis so that the protagonist awakens “to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.” In the George Orwell–haunted IQ84, Janáček’s orchestral piece Sinfonietta is a catalyst for the character Aomame’s realisation that she’s in an alternate dimension. Art, for Murakami, makes the worlds go ’round.

Remember, the creator of these allusive and thorny and non-English works is a global sensation. The odds, it would appear, are stacked against Murakami and yet he thrives internationally. But perhaps it’s not as unlikely as it seems. In an email interview with Philip Gabriel, one of Murakami’s translators, I asked about the author’s ascent, and he said that those unlikely qualities—translated magical-realist fiction filled with unfamiliar symbology and ambiguous endings—“do not, I think, disqualify a writer from international acclaim. Quite the opposite.”

In the U.S., books in translation sell far fewer copies than those written in English, but many of the handful of foreign authors whose work is critically lauded and lives forever in backlists do, superficially at least, share many qualities with Murakami. For one, they often write with either a magical-realist or postmodern bent—think Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Olga Tokarczuk, Orhan Pamuk, Umberto Eco, Han Kang, et al. They also, as Murakami does, incorporate into their novels the cultural iconography and folklore of their native countries. Some would say this makes their writing somehow representative of their respective nationalities, while others might argue that our fascination with them is more about our tendency to exoticise foreign lands than it is about our desire to learn about them. Regardless, we have a surprising tolerance for the strange and the alien in our translated literature.

Gabriel also points out the historical circumstances that can occur to encourage Murakami’s popularity. For instance, the translator says, “As [Murakami] has noted himself, his work was surprisingly popular in East Europe in the early 1990s, when the collapse of the old Cold War regimes made people feel like the ground beneath them was unstable, as if the boundaries between real and unreal were blurred.” Sometimes someone else’s awareness of the strange and alien can be a source of reassurance.

While wholly true, these explanations alone don’t quite cover it. After all, there are plenty of writers the world over writing magical realism, and there are plenty of regions dealing with dark political ramifications. In unraveling the chain of events that led to Murakami becoming a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature and a global industry unto himself, it’s important to remember that such an occurrence requires the complicity and talents of translators, editors, and publishers. David Karashima’s Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami depicts the trajectory of transmogrifying Murakami’s magic into English.

In addition to the vital contributions from Murakami’s trio of translators—Gabriel, Alfred Birnbaum, and Jay Rubin—the person whom Karashima cites as particularly integral to Murakami’s ascension is Elmer Luke, a Chinese American editor at the Japanese publisher Kodansha International, whose role at the company was to help its books “break into the U.S. market.” Luke deftly oversaw the editing and promotion of Murakami’s 1982 novel A Wild Sheep Chase, generating no small amount of literary buzz in New York City with a series of events, interviews, book reviews, and appearances (especially a feat considering Murakami’s extreme reticence as a public figure). He also gave Robert Gottlieb, then the editor of The New Yorker, a copy of Murakami’s short story “TV People”—the first of many to be printed in the magazine, which was a real boon, personally and professionally, for an author hoping to find an English-speaking readership. Murakami himself gives Luke a lot of the credit: “Luke started the engine.”

When it comes to translating, there’s also the general predicament of doing the actual work, which, as Gabriel explained via email, is extremely nuanced. “Besides the usual challenging aspects of Japanese language you'd expect in any Japanese novel—differences between male and female speech, honorifics, onomatopoeia—Murakami seems to be always pushing himself as a writer, and you find new elements,” he said. One such element is the unusual speech patterns of some of Murakami’s, let’s say, eccentric characters. “These are a challenge, for sure,” Gabriel told me. “I’ve read papers by linguists in Japan analysing the unusual speech patterns of, for instance, Nakata in Kafka on the Shore, and the Commendatore in Killing Commendatore. And what voice do you adopt for non-human characters, for talking cats in Kafka, and a very polite, talking monkey (“A Shinagawa Monkey”)?”

Gabriel, for his part, has one aim with his translations: “As far as maintaining a ‘Murakami voice’ in the translation, the goal is to convey, as honestly as you can, the voice you hear when you read the original.” Jay Rubin, another of Murakami’s translators, communicated a slightly different result to Roland Kelts, saying, “When you read Haruki Murakami, you’re reading me, at least 95 percent of the time.” This is not hubris on Rubin’s part but rather a quirk of linguistics, meaning that Murakami’s translators were just as crucial in creating the “Murakami voice” in the global scene as the author himself. Rubin recalls asking Murakami about the colour of a character’s glasses in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. (“In one scene, a character had black-framed glasses. In another, the frames were brown.”) As Kelts writes in The New Yorker:

In order to “stand on a level playing field with other American authors,” Murakami writes in Vocation, he found his own translators, then brought the completed English version directly to publishers. He began this strategy after his agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban at ICM, told him that “she doesn’t deal in works she can’t read in English.” One cannot underemphasise Murakami’s business savvy, a characteristic not often shared by his fellow novelists.

By now his books have been translated into more than fifty languages—meaning that a large cadre of linguistic adventurers have joined the campaign to spread the gospel of jazz, cats, and other worlds.

They come out at night, it turns out, these Murakami people. As a capper on the end of two months spent embroiled in his disorienting realm, I attended a midnight release party for The City and Its Uncertain Walls in Columbus, Ohio. It happened at Prologue Bookshop, an independent bookstore with what is probably my favourite slogan for such an institution: “Never Skip the Prologue.” At 10:00 p.m. on Monday, November 18, the place was packed. Dan Brewster, the owner, told me he was anxious about the turnout when he first scheduled the event, but the response was so great that he had to fill his car with items from the store to make room for all the attendees. It’s no wonder. Prologue is a small boutique, so when it’s filled, it’s filled.

On a table sat Sapporo beers, hōjicha tea, and “Murakami muffins” (what exactly makes them Murakami, I’m not quite sure). Abbey Corcoran, one of Prologue’s booksellers, handed out Murakami totes full of swag: stickers, some Beatles-esque sunglasses, a party-hat-style unicorn horn, the aforementioned Murakami bingo cards, and a lovely pin. Caroline Angell, the assistant buyer, and Tara Ryan-Gallagher, the marketing and events manager, both expressed surprise at how many people were milling about their store. Prologue closes at 8:00 on weeknights, so there was an after-hours sense of fun to the whole evening. Dan emceed two rounds of trivia (which, save for a couple overly obscure questions, the audience completely slayed), then he randomly selected winners of some pretty nifty door prizes: One was a bottle of Japanese whiskey, while another was a signed copy of the new novel.

Murakami has been publishing for almost half a century, yet the release of a new novel—not even a public appearance—can still pack a bookstore in central Ohio on a Monday night. That almost seems as far-fetched as anything from one of his novels.

What struck me most is the irrepressible sense of how normal everyone here is. Murakami, too, repeatedly insists that he’s a completely ordinary person, a totally regular guy. So do his protagonists. The narrator of The City and Its Uncertain Walls says when he’s a teenager that there isn’t much to say about his life or his “average, everyday kind of parents” who did “ordinary, run-of-the-mill” things. Murakami sees these characters as long-lost twins: “And when I was two years old, one of us—the other one—was kidnapped. He was brought to a faraway place and we haven’t seen each other since.” His heroes, then, are himself if a few things had gone a different way. But they remain normal nonetheless. This brings us back to the terrain of Murakami’s fiction: the duality of consciousness, the corporeal and the shadow. Normality can only be defined by what isn’t normal. Definitions require parameters. Murakami, in depicting such contrasts of fantasy and reality, places each idea in sharp relief.

And maybe this explains his literary prominence. Readers can journey along with his cavalcade of oddities, his sheep men, his unicorns, his magical towns surrounded by high walls, but they do so with the reassurance of a narrator (and a novelist) who emphasises that he is just like them. They can witness the world in all its inexplicability, its unrepentant unfairness, its history of cruelty and trauma, and feel comfort in a protagonist who is just as overwhelmed by all of it. Perhaps, then, it is not Murakami’s strangeness that accounts for his success; maybe it’s the world’s.

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