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Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler, Tim O’Brien, and Paul Theroux into
Japanese. Finally, Murakami’s significant contributions as a journalist should not be overlooked, particularly Andaguraundo (1997; Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, 2000), his moving account of the 1995 sarin gas attack in a Tokyo subway by members of the religious group Aum Shinrikyo. Considered to be journalistic lit-
erature, Underground includes a series of interviews with victims and perpetrators of the attacks.
Achievements
In 1994, for his three-volume novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
won the Gunzo Literature Prize; he also won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers for
his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, and the Yomiuri Prize for Literature—a prestigious Japanese literary award whose previous recipients included Yukio Mishima and Kobo
Abe. The Yomiuri Prize was awarded to him by Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, who
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had long been critical of Murakami. Murakami also received the Tanizaki Prize in 1985
for Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and he was a teaching fellow at Princeton University and Tufts University in the United States.
Murakami was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize from the Czech Republic in 2006 for
Kafka on the Shore, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award from Ireland in 2006, the Asahi Prize from Japan in 2006, and honorary doctorates from the University of Liège in 2007 and Princeton in 2008. In 2007, Murakami won the Kiriyama Prize—a literary award given annually to books that encourage greater understanding of and among
the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia—for his collection of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman; he declined the award “for reasons of personal principle.” Murakami’s works have been translated into more than forty languages, including
Arabic, Estonian, Icelandic, Russian, Thai, and Vietnamese.
Biography
Born in Kyoto in 1949, Haruki Murakami spent most of his youth in Kobe. Both his fa-
ther and mother taught Japanese literature, igniting a passion for literature early on in their son. Murakami’s father was also a Buddhist priest (meditations on religion and spirituality are key themes in Murakami’s work), and his mother was the daughter of a merchant.
Murakami showed an affinity for Western culture from an early age, particularly Western
literature and music. His favorite writers were Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and his favorite musicians were the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Radiohead, Charlie Parker, and
countless jazz and classical musicians, particularly Ludwig van Beethoven. Murakami
graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo in 1973, where he studied theater arts, and
his first job was at a record store. Just before graduating, Murakami opened a coffeehouse (which served as a jazz bar in the evenings) called Peter Cat in Okobunji, Tokyo, with his wife, Yoko. He is a collector of vinyl records, a full-marathon runner and triathlete, and obsessed with cats (all interests that weigh heavily on his fiction).
Murakami did not start writing until he was twenty-nine years old. Legend has it that
he was attending a baseball game in Tokyo when he had a revelation regarding writing.
Murakami suddenly realized that he was capable of writing a book after seeing American
ballplayer Dave Hilton (playing for the Hiroshima Carps) hit a double. Murakami started
working on a novel immediately following the game. After several months he had finished
Hear the Wind Sing, a short, fragmented book (modeled on Brautigan and written in fits and starts) that introduced many elements that would come to dominate Murakami’s style:
an embrace of Western influences (especially writers Brautigan and Vonnegut, and West-
ern music), dark humor, anonymity, relationships, loss, and alienation. His success—he
won the Gunzo Literature Prize for the novel—encouraged him to keep at it. He next pub-
lished Pinball, 1973 and then A Wild Sheep Chase, the last two works of what came to be known as the trilogy of the rat.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World marked the beginning of Mura-
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kami’s career as a writer of international reputation, but it was Norwegian Wood that made him a star of the literary world. Initially published in two installments, Norwegian Wood sold millions of copies among the youth of Japan, catapulting Murakami to superstar status. Murakami initially was not pleased with the sort of fame he had attained, and he left Japan to travel through Europe, before settling in the United States. He became a writing fellow at Princeton and Tufts, where he worked on and completed South of the Border, West of the Sun and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Murakami returned to Japan after the Hanshin earthquake and the poison gas attack in
the Tokyo subway in 1995. He worked on two nonfiction books about the gas attack,
which were combined to form the English edition of Underground. Sputnik Sweetheart, Kafka on the Shore, and After Dark cemented Murakami’s reputation as one of the world’s most popular and critically successful novelists. Several of his stories and novels have been adapted into films, and Hashiru koto ni tsuite kataru toki ni boku no kataru koto (2007; What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir, 2008), Murakami’s
memoir about his life as a marathon runner and triathlete, was a highly anticipated step in a new direction for the successful novelist.
Analysis
If it is true that writers and artists should spend their entire lives and careers investigat-ing, examining, and trying to understand the same themes, then Haruki Murakami is a
prime example of how to do this successfully. Like a jazz musician building on the same
note, Murakami has—from the start—been obsessed with issues of sexual identity and
love, loss and detachment, history and war, and nostalgia and fate. He has been deeply influenced by Western culture, and his themes, in some ways, are distilled from his favorite writers and musicians. Murakami changed the face of Japanese fiction. He was the first to incorporate Western influences in such an immediate way and he introduced a broad,
spare, and raw style that Japanese readers had never before seen. His flirtation with Magical Realism, surrealism, and the fantastic is evidence of his fearlessness as a writer. Never one to be pigeonholed, Murakami is that rarest of literary figures, a writer who revels in telling a good and exciting story without sacrificing his severe vision of what literature is and should be.
Notably, Murakami’s novels often have musical themes and often speak of the power
and beauty of music. More than that, his titles are often taken directly from songs. The three volumes comprising The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle refer to works by Gioachino Antonio Rossini, Robert Schumann, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Norwegian Wood,
possibly Murakami’s most famous work, is named after a song by the Beatles, and Dance Dance Dance, a sort of sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, is named after a song by the Beach Boys.
Murakami’s work is the highwater mark at the intersection of popular culture and seri-
ous literature. As a writer who has filtered such a variety of influences into his work, he is a 173
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complete original. He is also a writer who has sought to understand Japanese history (especially Japan’s role in World War II), but he has done so without attempting to make political statements. He examines, explores, and dissects history, war, love, and identity with the same complex (and sometimes confusing) gracefulness. Murakami, like Georges
Simenon and Charles Bukowski, has become his own brand name. Though his work has
been described in many different ways—as Magical Realism, surrealism, hard-boiled
mystery, love story, cyberpunk—it is almost entirely impossible to identify one of his
books as anything other than a “Murakami.”
Murakami goes where a novel takes him, where history takes him. He goes to the place
where love and memory and fear take him. As an independent artist with a singular vision, he is unrivaled in this generation of world writers.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and
the End of the World
A complex and playful novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World features two separate narratives. The odd-numbered chapters are set in the Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and feature a narrator who is a Calcutec, a human data-processing system.
The even-numbered chapters take place in a strange, walled-off village called The End of the World, removed from the rest of civilization. The narrator of this story becomes the village’s dream reader. Eventually, the two stories merge, and the deep influences here—
American hard-boiled detective fiction, cyberpunk, Franz Kafka—come together to make
this one of the most complex and yet accessible examples of Magical Realism in world
literature.
Norwegian Wood
Norwegian Wood, the book that made Murakami into a superstar, is a nostalgic story of love and loss. It is also Murakami’s most straightforward work. Told from the perspective of Toru Watanabe, who looks back on his days as a college freshman, the novel details Toru’s relationships with two beautiful, electric, and unusual women, Naoko and Midori. The title of the book is taken from a 1965 song by the Beatles—“Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has
Flown),” which appears several times in the novel’s narrative (alongside other allusions to Western music and literature). Set in Tokyo in the late 1960’s, the novel also portrays a changing Japan, as students protest against the establishment. While Murakami identifies the student movement as naïve and phony, the setting is just the backdrop for a real and complex love story that—while not supernatural or fantastic like much of Murakami’s other
work—nonetheless reveals a unique vision of how to live and survive in the world.
South of the Border, West of the Sun
South of the Border, West of the Sun also takes part of its title from a song, this time from one sung by Nat King Cole, “South of the Border.” The title comes to mean some-174
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thing wholly mystical and mysterious to the novel’s two main characters, Hajime and
Shimamoto. The second part of the title is a psychological condition known as “hysteria siberiana,” which is, as Shimamoto explains to Hajime, something that happens to Siberian farmers when they lose their minds and walk west toward the setting sun until they fall down and die. A melancholic novel rooted in the same sense of nostalgia as Norwegian Wood, South of the Border, West of the Sun is a meditation on love, choices, and mystery.
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Widely considered to be Murakami’s finest achievement, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
tells the story of Toru Okada, an unemployed man whose cat disappears. Toru is married
to Kumiko, who has a successful career in the publishing business. A bizarre chain of
events leads him to strange encounters with May Kasahara, a young girl who is obsessed
with death and deterioration, and Nutmeg Akasaka, a writer who shares a few strange co-
incidences with Toru. The novel explores typical Murakami themes, and it is also a story of war and history. Particularly relevant to the story are the Manchukuo war crimes before and during World War II and their deep significance in Japanese history. As always,
Murakami revels in mystery—both the mystical and hard-boiled varieties—and his crisp,
sharp, and accessible style is at its peak here.
Kafka on the Shore
Kafka on the Shore is another epic Murakami novel with two different narratives—told in alternating chapters—that eventually come together. The odd-numbered chapters tell
the story of Kafka, a fifteen-year-old runaway bent on escaping an Oedipal curse, who
takes shelter in a library until police arrest him in connection with an unsolved murder.
The even-numbered chapters tell the story of Nakata, a mystical cat finder. Nakata and
Kafka move toward each other until their stories combine in a thunderclap.
Murakami examines many of the prominent themes readers have come to expect from
him—love, loss, spirituality, dreams, the power of music, redemption, and sexual iden-
tity—but he also further investigates Japan’s World War II heritage, the notion of reality, and the authority of prophecy, fate, and nature.
William Boyle
Other major works
short fiction: The Elephant Vanishes, 1993; Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru, 2000 ( After the Quake: Stories, 2002); Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, 2006.
nonfiction: Andaguraundo, 1997 ( Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, 2000); Hashiru koto ni tsuite kataru toki ni boku no kataru koto, 2007
( What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir, 2008).
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Bibliography
Amitrano, Giorgio. The New Japanese Novel: Popular Culture and Literary Tradition in the Work of Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana. Boston: Cheng and Tsui, 1996.
An accessible introduction to the work of Japan’s most famous contemporary novel-
ists, Murakami and Yoshimoto Banana.
Japan Foundation. A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World. Berke-
ley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 2008. A collection of essays exploring the “Murakami
phenomenon,” namely, how Murakami is read and translated throughout the world.
Napier, Susan J. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity. Florence, Ky.: Routledge, 1996. An examination of the fantastic in contemporary Japanese fiction, film, and comics and how it relates to the nation’s anxieties and fears.
Part of the Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies series.
Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. New York: Random House, 2001.
Rubin, a professor of Japanese literature at Harvard and one of Murakami’s transla-
tors, takes an exhaustive look at Murakami’s life and works. A concise and complete
critical introduction to Murakami’s books.
Seats, Michael. Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture.
Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006. Seats discusses the relationship between con-
temporary Japanese culture and Murakami’s fiction, concluding that there are glaring
comparisons to be made between Murakami’s works and Japanese modernity and
technology.
Strecher, Matthew. Dances with Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki. Flint: University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 2002. Strecher’s critical study argues for Murakami’s relevance (rejecting the notion of Murakami as a
pop author). Relying heavily on theory, Strecher aims to begin a serious critical discussion of Murakami’s work.
_______. Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”: A Reader’s Guide. New
York: Continuum International, 2002. An accessible and informative guide and com-
panion to Murakami’s best-received novel.
Suter, Rebecca. The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki Between Japan and
the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Asia Center, 2008. Dis-
cusses Murakami’s role as a kind of “mediator” between Japanese and American liter-
ature.
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JUAN CARLOS ONETTI
Born: Montevideo, Uruguay; July 1, 1909
Died: Madrid, Spain; May 30, 1994
Principal long fiction
El pozo, 1939, 1965 ( The Pit, 1991)
Tierra de nadie, 1941 ( No Man’s Land, 1994; also known as Tonight, 1991) Para esta noche, 1943 ( Tonight, 1991)
La vida breve, 1950 ( A Brief Life, 1976)
Los adioses, 1954 (novella; Goodbyes, 1990)
Una tumba sin nombre, 1959 (novella; better known as Para una tumba sin
nombre; A Grave With No Name, 1992)
La cara de la desgracia, 1960 (novella; The Image of Misfortune, 1990)
El astillero, 1961 ( The Shipyard, 1968)
Tan triste como ella, 1963 (novella)
Juntacadáveres, 1964 ( Body Snatcher, 1991)
La muerte y la niña, 1973
Dejemos hablar al viento, 1979 ( Let the Wind Speak, 1997)
Cuando ya no importe, 1993 ( Past Caring? , 1995)
Other literary forms
“Los niños en el bosque,” one of Juan Carlos Onetti’s unpublished novels, dates from
1936. “Tiempo de abrazar,” a novel written in 1933 and circulated in manuscript form
among Onetti’s friends, was not published, despite the praise it received from respected writers such as Roberto Arlt. The manuscript was entered in the contest for the Rinehart and Farrar Prize in 1941. After coming in second, it disappeared, except for a number of fragments, which were published in various journals over the years. In 1974, the Uruguayan critic Jorge Ruffinelli gathered these fragments, a good portion of the original, along with “Los niños en el bosque” and Onetti’s uncollected short stories dating from
1933 to 1950, into one volume titled Tiempo de abrazar, y los cuentos de 1933 a 1950.
There are to date at least eleven short-story collections, with overlapping items. The most complete of these is Cuentos completos (1967; revised 1974), edited by Ruffinelli.
Onetti’s Obras completas (1970) is far from complete, the title notwithstanding. Still uncollected are the many literary essays written by Onetti for Montevideo’s weekly