
Japanese Writing After Murakami - whatami
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/japan-cultural-life-kelts/
======
gringoDan
For those in the West who haven't read Japanese literature, I highly recommend
it.

When I first read Murakami, I had mixed feelings. I struggled to relate with
his characters; their outlook on the world seemed so alien compared to mine. I
also was frustrated that "nothing happened". His writing seemed much more
driven by the underlying emotion of the narrative ("foreboding" is the best
description that comes to mind) than plot.

However, when I traveled to Tokyo for the first time I realized that the
feelings that I had reading his novels captured the essence of the city - the
sense of duty, the isolation, the assertion of individuality in a place that
epitomizes collectivism. His writing provided a window into a worldview that
could not have been more different from my own.

I'm glad to have run across this article; I'll add these other authors to my
reading list.

~~~
atombender
To be fair, "nothing happening" can equally well describe much of the Western
post-modern literary tradition.

I think one thing that sets Murakami apart is the earnest simplicity of his
writing. His writing seemingly doesn't attempt to manipulate the reader, and
it doesn't seem to aim beyond high school English in complexity. It's
workmanlike, unaffected, and personal. To me, it brings to mind John Williams
(Stoner) and Karl Ove Knausgaard (who is admittedly a much more capable prose
stylist).

In his earlier works, the simplicity feels a bit... simple. But in hi later,
more mature works, he doesn't shy away from going into detail about the sheer
_mundaneness_ of living. I haven't read 1Q84, but the first book to really
deserve the stereotype of Murakami as being about single guys with cats
lounging about in empty apartments while waiting for the pasta to boil is The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the core theme of which is figuring out reality, and
by the extension, life. It's a work where the economy of style meets an
economy of plot (even though it's actually a complex plot!) perfectly, and
it's a masterpiece.

I've never been to Japan, but I find his other concerns you mention —
isolation and so on — to be just as relevant in other social-democratic
cultures (perhaps the US less so).

~~~
siidooloo
Most of the postmodern fiction I’ve read (Pynchon, Foster-Wallace, etc) seems
to have the opposite problem: too much stuff happening.

~~~
efigle2501
Agreed. I think a better comparison is with modern author's like Hemingway..
Forget which story, but there is a Murakami short that is directly influenced
by a Hemingway short.

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iamatworknow
>The sex and race-driven identity politics currently animating and, to my
mind, diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West are either
muted or non-existent in Japan, where postmodern aesthetics are the outer skin
of a modernist backbone. Japanese stories focus on the individual adrift in
seas of excessive convenience and information, obsessed with personal not
political identities, and questions of the soul.

Oh boy, this puts into words how I've felt about Japanese vs. Western media
for a few years now.

~~~
GuiA
This paragraph is deliberately left vague - a Rorschach test of sorts.

I am not quite sure what he is referring to exactly. I do know that my local
bookstore has much more books from authors who are gay, trans, black, Asian,
etc than it did 15 years ago. If you value diversity in your media - which I
do - then this is wonderful. We had a NY Times best seller last year about
black women mathematicians working at NASA in the mid 1900s - it’s very hard
to imagine who would have published that book in the 90s or 2000s.

If that constitutes _“diminishing the literature and cultural products of the
West”_ in the author’s mind, so be it, but perhaps he should be a tad more
upfront about what he really means.

~~~
lmm
My reading would be: contemporary western literary culture is excessively,
stiflingly concerned about authenticity. I want to read books about a wide
range of experience, far wider than any individual is likely to have in
reality; the best fiction is at least partly an exercise in imagination as
well as observation.

It's great that authors from different racial/sexual/... backgrounds are
writing, but with contemporary culture focused heavily on racial/sexual/...
identities, we need novels that can engage with that and show us different
perspectives within a unified narrative. So we need to be ok with authors
writing from the perspective of identities other than their own, even-
especially- when that inevitably leads to some inaccuracies. The push for
diversity may have lead to greater inter-novel diversity, but it has,
ironically, heavily damaged intra-novel diversity in the west, as many authors
(understandably) no longer dare to attempt to represent other identity-
perspectives in their work.

~~~
bytematic
But is it worth it to have less volume and more authenticity?

~~~
lmm
It's not less volume though, it's no volume. No-one can write authentically as
black and white, straight and gay, cis and trans, but we need books that
incorporate all of those and more. Conceivably collaborative novels could be
an answer, but I haven't seen them be very successful either.

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majos
For thise interested in Murakami's contemporaries, Banana Yoshimoto is an
interesting case. I've only read one of her works, _Kitchen_ , but the
similarity is almost astonishing. They both cover themes of loss, a strong
sense of a mystical undercurrent right underneath everyday life, and
independent (but not necessarily rebellious) protagonists -- and, while it may
be an artifact of translation, they have similarly uncluttered but lively
prose. She came a bit after he did, in the late 80s, so maybe he influenced
her.

In Chinese, Ge Fei's _Invisibility Cloak_ \-- while a much more recent work --
also comes to mind, although there's something harder and less dreamy about
it. _Invisibility Cloak_ is about a niche audio technician and hobbyist who
gets involved with a strange underworld customer, and I'll leave it at that :)

If you like Murakami and want to dip a toe into "deeper" (or at least more
prestigious and less popular) Japanese fiction, Kenzaburo Oe ( _Changeling_ ,
_A Personal Matter_ ) is a good starting point. If you want to go darker, a
little more unhinged, and on the opposite end of the political spectrum, Yukio
Mishima ( _Confessions of a Mask_ ) is also good.

If you want to go even further back, Junichiro Tanizaki's _The Makioka
Sisters_ is an oddly enjoyable story of adult sisters and their shifting
relationships -- if Proust is like a jungle, alive and profligate and almost
obscenely lush, then Tanizaki is more like fresh-cut wood, clean and with a
certain reserve and neutrality, but still alive.

I find Yasunari Kawabata the least accessible of all these writers, but he
seems to be held in high esteem in Japan. His _Snow Country_ is I'm guessing
making references to things I don't understand, but it's at least pleasant to
read, and the ending is (I'm told, and at least kind of feel, but not with any
sophistication) a very nice example of _ma_ , which Wikipedia tells me roughly
means negative space.

Finally, to end an overlong post, I first heard of most of these things in
Brian Phillips' excellent longform article connecting modern Japanese sumo,
older Japanese literature, and Yukio Mishima's very strange attempted
coup/suicide: [http://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-
hak...](http://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-hakuho-yukio-
mishima-novelist-seppuku/)

------
resoluteteeth
> It’s impossible to overestimate the depth of his influence on contemporary
> Japanese literature and culture,

This is complete 100% pure grade A nonsense. It's like saying "it's impossible
to overestimate the depth of Dan Brown's influence on contemporary America
literature and culture." Haruki Murakami has lots of obsessive fans, but he
has had almost zero influence on Japanese literature or culture because nobody
other than his rabid fans cares about his writing.

> Japan’s current literary and cultural scene takes in “light novels”, brisk
> narratives that lean heavily on sentimentality and romance and often feature
> visuals drawn from manga-style aesthetics, and dystopian post-apocalyptic
> stories of intimate violence, such as Natsuo Kirino’s suspense thrillers,
> Out and Grotesque.

This is also total garbage. "Light novels" are specific (terrible) genre of
young adult novels with anime style illustrations (yes, illustrations, not
just "aesthetics") that are probably aimed chiefly at middle schoolers. Natsuo
Kirino’s books are not "light novels." This article is intentionally trying to
conflate these completely different things in order to misleadingly suggest
that actual Japanese literature has been influenced by "manga-style
aesthetics."

> Music plays a prominent role in much contemporary Japanese literature; but
> it is not mere metaphor. Murakami...

Yes, Haruki Murakami loves to litter his books with references, Ready Player
One style, but this is not something that is normal in Japanese literature.

> But there are larger currents at work that make today’s Japanese stories,
> poems, animations and manga so vivid as domestic cultural artefacts, and so
> ripely attractive to the rest of the world.

> Ten years ago I wrote in my book Japanamerica:

So basically, "Having written a book about the popularity of anime in the US
makes me an expert on Japanese literature." Please.

~~~
hudibras
Ah, there it is. It wouldn't be an online discussion of Murakami without at
least one person vehemently arguing that his work is garbage, that most
Japanese people don't care about him, and that his novels don't reflect Real
Japan.

~~~
euske
I actually think that most people in Japan don't really care about him. Grew
up in Japan as a native, very few of my friends actually read his novel.
Everyone knows he's a famous author, but that doesn't mean his work is popular
among the masses. I wouldn't say it's garbage, but I tend to think he's famous
mostly because all the critics praise him.

~~~
hudibras
I didn't mean that he was wrong, only that they were trite observations that
somebody always mentions. Even the fact that his work is not popular among the
masses doesn't add much to the conversation, any more than pointing out that
the average American doesn't care about Jeffrey Eugenides, Toni Morrison,
Jonathan Franzen, or Thomas Pynchon...

------
westoncb
I've read and enjoyed some Murakami (Norwegian Wood and Hard-boiled
Wonderland), but can anyone recommend some (or one) other Japanese authors to
check out? This is especially intriguing to me:

> ... Japanese stories focus on the individual adrift in seas of excessive
> convenience and information, obsessed with personal not political
> identities, and questions of the soul.

Or maybe some other Murakami. I can say I enjoyed Norwegian Wood quite a bit
more then Hard-boiled Wonderland.

~~~
jpatokal
Three Japanese authors that are wildly different from Murakami:

* Yukio Mishima. Prose is incredibly dense to the point of being baroque (there are pages of footnotes even in the Japanese originals), but there's nobody else quite like him: heavy focus on themes of sex, death and mysticism. "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" is his most famous work but the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy is also good.

 _What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless
sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who
wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural,
spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed
in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a
hunter because of its own stupidity…_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima)

* Osamu Dazai. The F. Scott Fitzgerald of Japan in time, themes and popularity, wrote a series of heavily autobiographical novels about his struggles with money, health, family and basically everything. Fairly grim but compelling reading.

 _The year before last I was expelled from my family and, reduced to poverty
overnight, was left to wander the streets, begging help for various quarters,
barely managing to stay alive from one day to the next, and just when I 'd
begun to think I might be able to support myself with my writing, I came down
with a serious illness. Thanks to the compassion of others, I was able to rent
a small house in Funabashi, Chiba, next to the muddy sea, and spent the summer
there alone, convalescing. Though battling an illness that each and every
night left my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press
ahead with my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the
only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life; my mental
anguish and exhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of
the garden appeared to me merely flicking tongues of flame..._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai)

* Murakami Ryu. Not to be confused with his namesake, Ryu's writing is very opposite of whimsical and "Almost Transparent Blue" is shockingly brutal.

 _This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs
and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just
before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school
student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%AB_Murakami](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%AB_Murakami)

~~~
ctchocula
I second Mishima, who has not let me down. I enjoyed "Confessions of a Mask",
and plan to read "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" next and the last 2 books of
his tetralogy.

 _By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus
flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an
agent whereby we may perceive the Truth. And first we must know that each of
the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives eighty-four
thousand lights._

------
Ar-Curunir
Murakami books are rather weird; when I first read Kafka on the Shore (my
first Murakami book), there didn't seem to be anything happening in story;
yet, I couldn't put it down and was up the whole night finishing it.

I think his appeal is his ability to describe surreal events and commonplace
events in the same sentence without a hiccup; it feels very natural.

~~~
iamgopal
Same. For recommendation, Which one did you read next ?

~~~
teh_klev
My introduction to Murakami was Hard-Boiled Wonderland [0]. It was unlike
anything I'd read before and thought it was really bloody good. I think I read
it over a couple of evenings, was quite hard to put down.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard-
Boiled_Wonderland_and_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard-
Boiled_Wonderland_and_the_End_of_the_World)

------
mratzloff
I own pretty much everything Murakami has ever written, including his non-
fiction, and while I enjoy them all, _Dance Dance Dance_ might be my favorite.
I also never see anyone recommend it, which seems odd to me. An old hotel
elevator that opens to a void where the Sheep Man waits for you. It's utterly
bizarre. I love it.

 _Norwegian Wood_ is also very good, but it doesn't have my favorite trait of
Murakami's other writing: the easy surreality of it. An unseen world pushes
into the world of his characters, and they underreact. In terms of overall
concerns, the Sheep Man is as pressing as a date with an attractive woman.

In a similar vein, _CivilWarLand in Bad Decline_ by George Saunders is both
lightly funny and surreal. _Strange Weather in Tokyo_ by Hiromi Kawakami
reminded me a bit of the meloncholy of _Norwegian Wood_. _The New York
Trilogy_ by Paul Auster is also very reminiscent of Murakami.

~~~
atombender
It's worth warning that Dance Dance Dance is a sequel to his Rat trilogy
(which ends with A Wild Sheep Chase, which for many years was the only in the
trilogy available in English). It makes references to characters and events in
those books.

Personally, I read it after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is his
masterpiece. Compared to WUBC, Dance feels like a unfinished dress rehearsal
by a middle-schooler. Dance is full of ideas, but never builds a cohesive
universe. There are killers and shared dreams and/alternate universes and so
on, but none of it adds up to a very satisfying whole. WUBC, on the other
hand, actually constructs, in quite masterly fashion, a mythology. Murakami is
able to hold himself back and keep things mysterious, but the mysteries don't
seem random, and the drama around to unravel them unfolds organically. It
feels like a very carefully planned novel, unlike some of his other ramshackle
plots. And the dream magic isn't there for weirdness; it actually serves a
very important narrative point, one that leads to plot resolution and real
catharsis, and the magical aspects don't seem so magical as David Lynchian,
like something out of Twin Peaks (especially the revival series!). Some of his
books, including Dance, seem full of intentional weirdness where Murakami is
throwing everything at the wall to see if it would stick, but everything in
WUBC just works.

~~~
mratzloff
Thanks for the reply. I agree with your assessment but not your
characterization.

You seem very plot-focused. One of the things I like about Murakami's writing
is the somewhat random, unfinished quality. It's like life in that respect.
The plot is generally incidental; his novels seem like they're meant to evoke
an atmosphere and a feeling.

In other words, we are frequently dropped into the middle of an otherwise
unremarkable character's life where they experience a turning point in their
view of the world and (in many cases) reality. And then life goes on. In other
words, the plot is only there to support the character's internal journey.

~~~
atombender
It's not that I'm plot-focused — some of my favourite novels don't have much
of a plot at all — but I expect a novel to provide a certain structure that
has a point to it.

To me, Dance comes across as an immature sketch, an example where Murakami had
lots of things he wanted to include, but he didn't know to create the
architecture around which themes could come together. Some of the plot points
seem like Murakami wanting to burrow into a kind of Lynchian Hollywood
reality, with serial killers and weird hotels. I didn't find those as being
interesting ways to explore the character's "internal journey".

Dance doesn't "click", whereas the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is extremely
satisfying in the way it does.

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runevault
If you're interested in Murakami in general, his book What I Talk About When I
Talk About Running is really interesting, showing the intersection of
Marathons and writing in his life.

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hkmurakami
IMO Japanese writing before Murakami is worth looking at, staring with the
greats of the early 20th century.

~~~
Herodotus38
I liked "The Woman in the Dune" by Abe, which was my first book by a Japanese
author. Any particular recommendations?

~~~
hkmurakami
I liked Takasebune by Mori Ougai as a short parable that's written very
powerfully.

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martijn_himself
I think one of the things I like about Murakami is that his writing doesn't
feel pretentious and is matter-of-factly, even though most of it is quite
fantastical.

I really can't bear pretentiousness in writing (or music).

------
Markoff
i strongly suggest everyone to watch subtle family dramas from Koreeda, very
relaxing, you can start with Still walking or After the storm, it's odd how
can we relate to people living in completely different culture so much

