The rebel cult of Murakami He rejected Japan's literary establishment

Realising that all this had left him unable to write fiction in his native language, Murakami composed his early lines in English and then translated them back into Japanese. His relatively modest English vocabulary compelled him to write in short, simple sentences. A style was born, with which millions of readers around the world would one day become intimately familiar.

To Murakami’s legions of young fans, Norwegian Wood felt bracingly contemporary and cosmopolitan. It tells the story of a man in his mid-thirties, Toru Watanabe, who hears a rendition of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” and is transported back to his youth in the Sixties: a heady era of student protests and intense and tragic friendships. The listlessness and longing that permeate the novel, as a group of young people try to make sense of their lives amid political turmoil and disappointment, struck a chord with readers not just in Japan but in Taiwan and South Korea, too: they had been through similar experiences during their countries’ democracy movements in the Eighties.

Murakami’s Japanese detractors, particularly those wedded to the country’s highbrow “pure literature” genre, dismissed his work as “odourless” and lacking any sense of place. With his interest in beer, coffee and jazz, and the relative absence of Japanese reference points in his work, Murakami seemed to be, as Theresa May might have put it, a citizen of nowhere. For Kenzaburō Ōe, winner of Japan’s coveted Akutagawa Prize in 1958 and the country’s second Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, the problem was partly generational. Ōe singled out both Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto as young authors who, unlike their literary forebears who wrote about the tragedies of war, sold hundreds of thousands of books by pandering to a disaffected youth, “content to exist within a late adolescent or post-adolescent sub-culture”.

Views like these probably prevented Murakami from winning the Akutagawa Prize and being accepted into Japan’s literary establishment. He seems to have felt the rejection keenly, choosing to leave Japan in the mid-Eighties when a combination of critical hostility and growing popular celebrity became too much. He relocated first to Europe and later to the United States. Meanwhile, his fame spread from Japan and East Asia to the West, as readers of Norwegian Wood and his magical realist A Wild Sheep Chase thrilled at their encounter with cool and rebellious Japan. It was a far cry from the stereotype among Westerners at the time about Japan’s conformism.

But perhaps more important than Murakami’s rebellion was his universalism. He has a talent for depicting human relationships as uncertain and half-formed, forged and held together by silences and bemusement as much as by real meetings of minds. You don’t read Murakami for the quality of his dialogue but, when reading Norwegian Wood, there’s a sense that you understand both Japan and yourself a little better in the process.

A few years later, those who had charged Murakami with indulging in whimsy, while novelists such as Ōe reckoned with Japan’s wartime past, received a response of sorts. His 1995 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle traversed scenes inspired by Japanese mythology and history: abandoned houses, old wells and the transcendent breaking into human life amid the mud and din of the Second World War’s battlefields.

This was the first time that Murakami had shouldered the kind of social responsibility that was expected of a Japanese novelist. Writing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle from his home in the United States, he credited his turn towards his home country to the opportunity he had to view it from a distance. Kenzaburō Ōe thoroughly approved, serving on the committee that awarded Murakami the Yomiuri Literary Prize in 1995.

It was this sense of responsibility that brought Murakami back to Japan that same year, after two disasters that came within weeks of each other. In January, an earthquake killed more than 6,000 people. Then two months later, the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyō released sarin gas onto the Tokyo underground. Although far less deadly than the earthquake, the attack had a disturbing impact on Japan — the members of the cult turned out to be ordinary, intelligent young people who had become profoundly disillusioned with life in Japan. Interviewing victims of the attacks, Murakami reflected on what it meant for Japan in Underground (1997). It is perhaps his finest work of non-fiction to date and part of what he described as his mid-Nineties turn from “detachment” to “commitment” as a novelist. He began to take an interest in how social and political systems ensnare people, likening such systems in a 2009 speech to high walls against which people throw themselves like eggs.

As a young writer, Murakami never dreamt that he would become so big in the West, that bookshops would stage midnight openings to celebrate the release of his books. Much of the credit for this goes to his English translators, including Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin. European audiences followed suit, via translations that were often made from the English rather than the original Japanese versions of Murakami’s work. His books have now been translated into more than 50 languages. Hardcore Murakami fans — “Harukists”, as they are known — will be pleased to discover that in Taiwan there is even a research centre dedicated to studying his oeuvre.

Across the late Nineties and early Noughties, Murakami continued to produce critically acclaimed novels. Eagerly awaited though each of these books were, commentators began to note a tendency for Murakami to return to favourite themes — inspiring a New York Times cartoonist to create Haruki Murakami Bingo, with entries including cats, cooking and ear fetishes.

Less likely to find a place in Murakami Bingo was “fleshed-out female character”. Even fans of Murakami’s work have noted that women in his novels are often lonely, broken or somehow mysterious in the eyes of male protagonists. They are there, it seems, primarily to serve the men: clarifying something for them or functioning like “mediums… harbingers of the coming world”, as Murakami himself put it.

It is safe to say that Murakami’s new book, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, does little to address these criticisms. We are once again inside the head of a gently unsettled, faintly nostalgic male narrator, who discovers that the boundaries between his world and another can be diaphanously thin. In Japan, where Murakami remains a big deal — albeit never accepted into the country’s literary establishment — the book has received mixed and occasionally slightly confused reviews. But the Murakami magic remains intact. Re-immersing myself in his dream-like pacing feels like slipping back into a warm bath. The old images and emotions return, some of them heightened now that I have enough years on the clock to share Murakami’s bewilderment at the passing of time.

Fortunately, for those of us who find ourselves using fogeyish phrases like “back in the Nineties”, Murakami suggests that “truth is not found in fixed stillness but in ceaseless change and movement”. This reads to me like an encouragement not to remain too long in Murakami’s signature nostalgia mode and instead to embrace what is around us now — with the possible exception of J-Pop. Fresh consolation, then, from an old master.

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Christopher Harding is a cultural historian of India and Japan, based at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is The Light of Asia (Allen Lane). He also has a Substack: IlluminAsia.

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