Year Ten of Haruki Murakami
Once upon a time I joked that I could tell a lot about someone new by telling them that I liked Murakami and seeing what associations one had. Would they think of Takashi, the visual artist and occasional Kanye collaborator? Would they think of Ryū, the late twentieth-century author? Or would they, as most people do, think of Haruki, another Japanese author born a few years before Ryū? Whenever I recounted this anecdote, my friends would ask me what I would think of each response. I never really judged the person’s taste based on their answer, only their interests and which stage of life they were in. But this blog post is about Haruki.
I have a complicated relationship with Haruki. I first encountered him at an airport in Rome, nearly ten years ago now. He sat on the bookshelves in front of the window, iterated in the way I will always think of him, as a copy of his most recent novel, IQ84. I had an hour before my flight, owing to my parents’ fanaticism about arriving at the airport well before we needed to. I don’t know why I picked up the book. I remember there was a translucent plastic book sleeve in matte white. I started reading, stopped only when I had to board my flight, and then took out a copy from the library when I arrived back home. It was incredible, one of the first great contemporary novels I had read, and it blew my adolescent mind. This is high praise, but this was also my Ayn Rand era, so I really wouldn’t take it too seriously.
Later that year, two of my closest friends started reading Murakami as well. I had always been an avid reader, owing mostly to my parents insistence that I not spend time on electronics, but for my friends, it was an eye-opening experience. Murakami was the gateway drug that got them into reading again. I remember they provided the next Murakami I read, South of the Border, West of the Sun. Though not nearly as powerful as IQ84, it was still a fun read, and then I followed up with his two most well-known, Kafka on the Shore and Norwegian Wood a few weeks later. I outgrew Murakami a few years after that. His only writing that I’ve read after that was What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, an essay collection on running, and recently I’ve started his debut novel, translated into French.
There is a reason the only Murakami novel I’ve read in the past nine years has been one to practice French. I fell out of favour with Murakami and started reading Kundera and Marquez soon after. But like Rand, though I stopped reading Murakami’s books, he continued to influence my thinking for longer than I’d like to admit now. I started thinking about romance, and what love meant. I gave Fitzgerald another shot. I wondered if I’d meet a girl who would influence me in the way that a Murakami girl does. I joked about seeing two moons with friends, like in IQ84. I started associating romance with certain wistful aimlessness, a vague interest in the arts, and an unwavering noncommittal attitude.
Recent criticism of Murakami is pretty typically leveled against male artists: that their misogyny is visible through the work that they’ve produced. Better artists than he have fallen into disfavour recently because of this complaint: Brando, Picasso, Tarantino, and Hemingway. I recently saw a discussion of a Murakami interview that discusses his predilection for writing females as two-dimensional foils to his male protagonists, where he is asked if he does it to emulate adolescent male thinking, to which he responds, “no”. To be honest, that was never a complaint that I had about Murakami. Perhaps because I read his novels as an adolescent male who identified too wholly with the protagonists and lost sight of how the other characters were portrayed. Perhaps there was some internalized misogyny I needed to work on. Whatever it was, when I read his novels, they were magical experiences that made me want to see the magical in everyday life.
When I stopped reading Murakami, I was still an adolescent male, but well-grounded enough that I could dismiss his books as pretentious and pandering to the adolescent male such as myself. I rejected them because they had no substance; my denigrating moniker was “sadboi Twillight”. There wasn’t much special about his magical realism, his characters, or his writing. Despite how his books made me feel when I read them, I can’t remember what a single one was about, only a vague feeling of longing. And perhaps that was their intention, to leave the reader with a sense of unease and want, but confused. A commercial hit. But, I never criticized anything that he’s written: I’d mention to close confidents that I didn’t know where I stood with Murakami, that it was sadboi Twillight, but when people I didn’t know that well spoke excitedly about Murakami, I’d nod along, and chime in. I knew well what sort of person I was speaking to when they said that Murakami was their favourite author, and they were usually not only quite likeable, but quite like me.
For several years now, Murakami has been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I never knew what to think of that. On one hand, I don’t think that his lifetime of contributions towards the field really constitutes a Nobel prize, for see all the reasons previously discussed. At the same time, I see how he has managed to encourage many young men to pick up books and explore their emotional sides in droves. But does the literary world need more authors who write like this? It’s long been a stereotype that the first novel of a male author is always an authorial stand-in where a young man meets a woman who helps them learn more about themselves and turns them whole. I don’t doubt he is adding to the literary canon, but what novel material he is contributing is up for debate.
I’d like to leave with one final anecdote. Last summer, I was perusing the shelves at an independent bookstore in Roncesvalles and noticed a sign that said “Ask for Murakami behind the counter”. So, I went to the counter and I inquired what that was all about. Did the bookmonger have some rare editions? Were Murakami sadbois most likely to be thieves? I went to the storekeeper and he said that shoplifters know that they can always find a market for Murakami novels, so they were a likely target. Perhaps the literary community does owe him some measure of credit for moving the masses away from the Clancys and Pattersons of the world. Only time will tell.
