Like a lot of good ideas, this book originated over a cup of coffee (or was it something stronger?) and an idle conversation with a friend. I was in Tokyo, getting some reading done after the departure of my language students, fourteen of whom had come with me for a two-week “travel study” program at Tōyō University. My friend, an NHK television producer who not only works on NHK’s special programming on Murakami but is a serious fan in her own right, had just asked me whether I thought Murakami would win the Nobel Prize in Literature that year and what I thought of his latest novel, 1Q84, which was still only two volumes at the time.
I must have talked for a long time, because at the end of my apparently endless commentary on Murakami, my friend opened her eyes wide and said, “It’s time for you to write another book.” She was right, of course. It was time. I had known it for a while but first had to get past the idea that it was somehow wrong—immoral, even—to write yet another book on this man. In the years since my Dances with Sheep was published in 2002, there have been no less than four new books written in English on Murakami Haruki (one of them a little reader’s guide of mine that probably doesn’t really count, but still . . .). At least once every year or two I am asked to sit on an examination committee for a master’s thesis or Ph.D. dissertation on Murakami. I referee articles about him all the time. Part of me feels a profound sense of guilt at my energetic role in focusing so much attention on just one Japanese writer.
And yet . . . what a writer! Murakami’s work has, in the past decade or so, gone completely global, and thanks to a small army of brilliant and dedicated translators he is now read in about sixty languages around the world. He has stirred up controversy, especially when critics try to categorize his work, but he has also bridged cultural and political divides. He is the first Japanese writer in a long while to develop major fan bases in countries like China and South Korea, where animosity to Japan runs as deep as memories of Japanese colonialist oppression run long. He is so big that Tokyo University hosted a gathering of his various translators from around the world for a symposium in 2006, inviting the public to come and listen in, and more than a thousand people turned up. In 2008, the University of California, Berkeley, held a symposium on Murakami and invited the author to speak; tickets to the event—held in a massive auditorium—sold out in fifteen minutes. And aside from the Nobel Prize in Literature, Murakami has won almost every major literary award the world has to offer. What was once facetiously called “Murakamimania” is quite real.
This being the case, immoral or not, it dawned on me in the summer of 2009 that I still have a lot of unfinished business with Murakami, partly because he continues to write so prolifically but also because my mind continues to work on him. And while I stand behind my various past writings on him—writing that has spanned nearly two decades—a great many fresh insights have occurred to me, not only about the author’s recent works but about his earlier texts as well, and these are included in this monograph. I am also unwilling to rule out another book in ten or fifteen years. Murakami once told me that he considered Raymond Carver to be “his writer.” Well, Murakami is my writer, in the sense that I feel a connection with his work that I cannot seem to break. I am, as I have admitted to more than one audience, a Murakami addict. This book reflects my ongoing fascination with his writing, along with my belief that Murakami’s writing continues to develop and change and that these changes are important enough to the overall field of Japanese (and even world) literature to merit detailed description and discussion.
While the title of this book gives the name of its subject in Western order, that is, Haruki Murakami, in order to render it more easily recognizable to English readers on first encounter, Japanese names within the main text, both real and fictitious, are given in Japanese order, surname first, given name second. Macrons over vowels indicate long vowel sounds, as in Hādo-boirudo wandārando.
As is my long-standing custom, I have worked from and quoted only original Japanese source materials. This means that all quoted passages, including those from Murakami’s works, are my own English renderings, even when published translations exist. This is not intended as a slight toward the translators, whose renditions of Murakami’s work in English are unvaryingly accurate and well wrought. But there are two good reasons to work from my own translations: first, it allows me to maintain a uniform style throughout the volume; and second, it helps to reduce the gap, or distance, between the texts and my analyses of them, which are, after all, based not merely on the words on the page but on how they reverberate in my head as I read them, rewriting in my mind as I go. Having taught courses in translation theory and practice, I am acutely conscious when working with translations of being at a third remove from the text, of interpreting an interpretation, and this is not ideal for the sort of close reading that grounds this work. I hope, then, as always, that Murakami’s various translators will not take offense.
As a result, throughout this text readers will find that I have initially given the original title of each work, followed by its official translated title, except in cases where the work has not been translated or has been in some way combined with other works (as in Murakami’s two nonfiction works on the Aum Shinrikyō incident and certain short story collections). Following the initial introduction of those works, they are mentioned in the text by their English titles. All citations are from the originals, including page numbers, and this is signaled in the notes by inclusion of the original title. The bibliography contains both versions.