Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹, Murakami Haruki, born January 12, 1949[1]) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages[2] and having sold millions of copies outside Japan.[3][4] He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the Princess of Asturias Awards.[5][6][7][8]
Haruki Murakami
村上 春樹
村上 春樹
January 12, 1949
Fushimi-ku, Kyoto, Japan[a]
- Novelist
- short-story writer
- essayist
- translator
- Fiction
- Bildungsroman
- picaresque
- Norwegian Wood (1987)
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95)
- Kafka on the Shore (2002)
- 1Q84 (2010)
- Men Without Women (2014)
Growing up in Ashiya near Kobe before moving to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, he published his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) after working as the owner of a small jazz bar for seven years.[9] His notable works include the novels Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka on the Shore (2002) and 1Q84 (2009–10); the latter was ranked as the best work of Japan's Heisei era (1989–2019) by the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun's survey of literary experts.[10] His work spans genres including science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction, and has become known for its use of magical realist elements.[11][12] His official website cites Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan as key inspirations to his work, while Murakami himself has named Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy and Dag Solstad as his favourite currently active writers.[9][13] Murakami has also published five short story collections, including First Person Singular (2020),[14] and non-fiction works including Underground (1997), an oral history of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), a memoir about his experience as a long distance runner.[15]
His fiction has polarized literary critics and the reading public. He has sometimes been criticised by Japan's literary establishment as un-Japanese, leading to Murakami's recalling that he was a "black sheep in the Japanese literary world".[16][17][18] Meanwhile, Murakami has been described by Gary Fisketjon, the editor of Murakami's collection The Elephant Vanishes (1993), as a "truly extraordinary writer", while Steven Poole of The Guardian praised Murakami as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his oeuvre.[19][20]
Biography[edit]
Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan, during the post-World War II baby boom and raised in Nishinomiya, Ashiya and Kobe.[21][22] He is an only child. His father was the son of a Buddhist priest,[23] and his mother is the daughter of an Osaka merchant.[24] Both taught Japanese literature.[25] His father was involved in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and was deeply traumatized by it, which would, in turn, affect Murakami.[26]
Since childhood, Murakami, like Kōbō Abe, has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western as well as Russian music and literature. He grew up reading a wide range of works by European and American writers, such as Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac.[27] These Western influences distinguish Murakami from the majority of other Japanese writers.[28]
Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he met Yoko, now his wife. His first job was at a record store. Shortly before finishing his studies, Murakami opened a coffee house and jazz bar, Peter Cat, in Kokubunji, Tokyo, which he ran with his wife,[29] from 1974 to 1981.[30] The couple decided not to have children.[22][31]
Murakami is an experienced marathon runner and triathlon enthusiast, though he did not start running until he was 33 years old, after he began as a way to stay healthy. On June 23, 1996, he completed his first ultramarathon, a 100 km race around Lake Saroma in Hokkaido, Japan.[32] He discussed running and its effect on his creative life in a 2007 memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.[33]
Writing career[edit]
Trilogy of the Rat[edit]
Murakami began to write fiction when he was 29.[34] "Before that," he said, "I didn't write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn't create anything at all."[35] He was inspired to write his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), while watching a baseball game.[36] He described the moment he realized he could write as a "warm sensation" he could still feel in his heart.[37] He went home and began writing that night. Murakami worked on Hear the Wind Sing for ten months in very brief stretches, during nights, after working days at the bar.[38] He completed the novel and sent it to the only literary contest that would accept a work of that length, winning first prize.
Murakami's initial success with Hear the Wind Sing encouraged him to continue writing. A year later, he published a sequel, Pinball, 1973. In 1981, he co-wrote a short story collection, Yume de Aimashou with author and future Earthbound/Mother creator Shigesato Itoi. In 1982, he published A Wild Sheep Chase, a critical success. Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase form the Trilogy of the Rat (a sequel, Dance, Dance, Dance, was written later but is not considered part of the series), centered on the same unnamed narrator and his friend, "the Rat". The first two novels were not widely available in English translation outside Japan until 2015, although an English edition, translated by Alfred Birnbaum with extensive notes, had been published by Kodansha as part of a series intended for Japanese students of English. Murakami considers his first two novels to be "immature" and "flimsy",[38] and has not been eager to have them translated into English. A Wild Sheep Chase, he says, was "the first book where I could feel a kind of sensation, the joy of telling a story. When you read a good story, you just keep reading. When I write a good story, I just keep writing."[39]
Wider recognition[edit]
In 1985, Murakami wrote Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a dream-like fantasy that took the magical elements of his work to a new extreme. Murakami achieved a major breakthrough and national recognition in 1987 with the publication of Norwegian Wood, a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality. It sold millions of copies among young Japanese.[40]
Norwegian Wood propelled the barely known Murakami into the spotlight. He was mobbed at airports and other public places, leading to his departure from Japan in 1986.[41] Murakami traveled through Europe, lived in the United States and currently resides in Oiso, Kanagawa, with an office in Tokyo.[42]
Murakami was a writing fellow at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[22][43] During this time he wrote South of the Border, West of the Sun and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.[22]
From "detachment" to "commitment"[edit]
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) fuses the realistic and fantastic and contains elements of physical violence. It is also more socially conscious than his previous work, dealing in part with the difficult topic of war crimes in Manchukuo (Northeast China). The novel won the Yomiuri Prize, awarded by one of Murakami's harshest former critics, Kenzaburō Ōe, who himself won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.[44]
The processing of collective trauma soon became an important theme in Murakami's writing, which had previously been more personal in nature. Murakami returned to Japan in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack.[27] He came to terms with these events with his first work of non-fiction, Underground, and the short story collection after the quake. Underground consists largely of interviews of victims of the gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system.
In 1996, in a conversation with the psychologist Hayao Kawai, Murakami explained that he changed his position from one of "detachment" to one of "commitment" after staying in the United States in the 1990s.[45] He called The Wind-up Bird Chronicle a turning point in his career, marking this change in focus.
English translations of many of his short stories written between 1983 and 1990 have been collected in The Elephant Vanishes. Murakami has also translated many works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Paul Theroux, among others, into Japanese.[22]
Murakami took an active role in translation of his work into English, encouraging "adaptations" of his texts to American reality rather than direct translation. Some of his works that appeared in German turned out to be translations from English rather than Japanese (South of the Border, West of the Sun, 2000; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 2000s), encouraged by Murakami himself. Both were later re-translated from Japanese.[46]
Since 1999[edit]
Sputnik Sweetheart was first published in 1999, followed by Kafka on the Shore in 2002, with the English translation following in 2005. Kafka on the Shore won the World Fantasy Award in 2006.[47] The English version of his novel After Dark was released in May 2007. It was chosen by The New York Times as a "notable book of the year".[48] In late 2005, Murakami published a collection of short stories titled Tōkyō Kitanshū, or 東京奇譚集, which translates loosely as "Mysteries of Tokyo". A collection of the English versions of twenty-four short stories, titled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, was published in August 2006. This collection includes both older works from the 1980s as well as some of Murakami's more recent short stories, including all five that appear in Tōkyō Kitanshū.
In 2002, Murakami published the anthology Birthday Stories, which collects short stories on the theme of birthdays. It includes work by Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Claire Keegan, Andrea Lee, Daniel Lyons, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux, and William Trevor, as well as a story by Murakami himself. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir about his experience as a marathon runner and a triathlete, was published in Japan in 2007,[49] with English translations released in the U.K. and the U.S. in 2008. The title is a play on that of Raymond Carver's short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.[50]
Shinchosha Publishing published Murakami's novel 1Q84 in Japan on May 29, 2009. 1Q84 is pronounced "ichi kyū hachi yon", the same as 1984, as 9 is also pronounced "kyū" in Japanese.[51] The book was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011. However, after the 2012 anti-Japanese demonstrations in China, Murakami's books were removed from sale there, along with those of other Japanese authors.[52][53] Murakami criticized the China–Japan political territorial dispute, characterizing the overwrought nationalistic response as "cheap liquor" which politicians were giving to the public.[54] In April 2013, he published his novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. It became an international bestseller but received mixed reviews.[55][56]
Killing Commendatore (Kishidancho Goroshi) was published in Japan on February 24, 2017, and in the US in October 2018, the novel is a historical fiction that has caused controversy in Hong Kong. The novel was labeled under "Class II – indecent" in Hong Kong.[57] This classification led to mass amounts of censorship. The publisher must not distribute the book to people under the age of 18, and must have a warning label printed on the cover.
Murakami's most recent novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls was published by Shinchosha in Japan on 13 April 2023.[58][59] His first novel in six years, it is 1,200-pages long and is set in a "soul-stirring, 100% pure Murakami world" that involves "a story that had long been sealed".[60] In promoting his latest book, Murakami stated that he believed that the pandemic and the on-going war in Ukraine has created walls that divide people, fuelling fear and skepticism instead of mutual trust.[61]
Writing style[edit]
Most of Haruki Murakami's works use first-person narrative in the tradition of the Japanese I-novel. He states that because family plays a significant role in traditional Japanese literature, any main character who is independent becomes a man who values freedom and solitude over intimacy.[38] Also notable is Murakami's unique humor, as seen in his 2000 short story collection, After the Quake. In the story "Superfrog Saves Tokyo", the protagonist is confronted with a 6-foot tall frog that talks about the destruction of Tokyo over a cup of tea. In spite of the story's sober tone, Murakami feels the reader should be entertained once the seriousness of a subject has been broached. Another notable feature of Murakami's stories are the comments that come from the main characters as to how strange the story presents itself. Murakami explains that his characters experience what he experiences as he writes, which could be compared to a movie set where the walls and props are all fake.[38] He has further compared the process of writing to movies: "That is one of the joys of writing fiction—I'm making my own film made just for myself."[62]
Many of his novels have themes and titles that evoke classical music, such as the three books making up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: The Thieving Magpie (after Rossini's opera), Bird as Prophet (after a piano piece by Robert Schumann usually known in English as The Prophet Bird), and The Bird-Catcher (a character in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute). Some of his novels take their titles from songs: Dance, Dance, Dance (after The Dells' 1957 B-side song,[63][64] although it is often thought it was titled after the Beach Boys' 1964 tune), Norwegian Wood (after The Beatles' song) and South of the Border, West of the Sun (after the song "South of the Border").[65]
Some analyses see aspects of shamanism in his writing. In a 2000 article, Susan Fisher connected Shinto or Japanese shamanism with some elements of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,[66] such as a descent into a dry well. At an October 2013 symposium held at the University of Hawaii,[67] associate professor of Japanese Nobuko Ochner opined "there were many descriptions of traveling in a parallel world as well as characters who have some connection to shamanism"[68] in Murakami's works.
In an October 2022 article for The Atlantic, Murakami clarified that nearly none of the characters in his work has been created based on individuals in real life, as many people alleged. He wrote: "I almost never decide in advance that I’ll present a particular type of character. As I write, a kind of axis forms that makes possible the appearance of certain characters, and I go ahead and fit one detail after another into place, like iron scraps attaching to a magnet. And in this way an overall picture of a person materializes. Afterward I often think that certain details resemble those of a real person, but most of the process happens automatically. I think I almost unconsciously pull information and various fragments from the cabinets in my brain and then weave them together." Murakami named this process "the Automatic Dwarfs." He continued: "One of the things I most enjoy about writing novels is the sense that I can become anybody I want to be," noting that "Characters who are—in a literary sense—alive will eventually break free of the writer’s control and begin to act independently."[69]
Archives[edit]
In 2018 Waseda University in Tokyo agreed to house the archives of Haruki Murakami, including his manuscripts, source documents, and music collection. The collection is intended to be open to scholars,[89] and is set to open in October 2021.[90]
In September 2021, architect Kengo Kuma announced the opening of a library dedicated entirely to Murakami's works at Waseda University. It will include more than 3,000 works by Murakami, including translations into more than 50 other languages.[91]
Films and other adaptations[edit]
Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing (Kaze no uta o kike), was adapted by Japanese director Kazuki Ōmori. The film was released in 1981 and distributed by Art Theatre Guild.[92] Naoto Yamakawa directed two short films, Attack on the Bakery (released in 1982) and A Girl, She is 100 Percent (released in 1983), based on Murakami's short stories "Bakery Attack" and "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning", respectively.[93] Japanese director Jun Ichikawa adapted Murakami's short story "Tony Takitani" into a 75-minute feature.[94] The film played at various film festivals and was released in New York and Los Angeles on July 29, 2005. The original short story, translated into English by Jay Rubin, is available in the April 15, 2002 issue of The New Yorker, as a stand-alone book published by Cloverfield Press, and part of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Knopf. In 1998, the German film The Polar Bear (German: Der Eisbär), written and directed by Granz Henman, used elements of Murakami's short story "The Second Bakery Attack" in three intersecting story lines. "The Second Bakery Attack" was also adapted as a short film in 2010,[95] directed by Carlos Cuarón, starring Kirsten Dunst and as part of a segment in the South Korean omnibus film Acoustic.
Murakami's work was also adapted for the stage in a 2003 play entitled The Elephant Vanishes, co-produced by Britain's Complicite company and Japan's Setagaya Public Theatre. The production, directed by Simon McBurney, adapted three of Murakami's short stories and received acclaim for its unique blending of multimedia (video, music, and innovative sound design) with actor-driven physical theater (mime, dance, and even acrobatic wire work).[96] On tour, the play was performed in Japanese, with supertitle translations for European and American audiences.
Two stories from Murakami's book After The Quake – "Honey Pie" and "Superfrog Saves Tokyo" – have been adapted for the stage and directed by Frank Galati. Entitled after the quake, the play was first performed at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in association with La Jolla Playhouse, and opened on October 12, 2007, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.[97] In 2008, Galati also adapted and directed a theatrical version of Kafka on the Shore, which first ran at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company from September to November.[98]
On Max Richter's 2006 album Songs from Before, Robert Wyatt reads passages from Murakami's novels. In 2007, Robert Logevall adapted "All God's Children Can Dance" into a film, with a soundtrack composed by American jam band Sound Tribe Sector 9. In 2008, Tom Flint adapted "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning" into a short film. The film was screened at the 2008 CON-CAN Movie Festival. The film was viewed, voted, and commented upon as part of the audience award for the movie festival.[99]
It was announced in July 2008 that French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung would direct an adaptation of Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood.[100] The film was released in Japan on December 11, 2010.[101]
In 2010, Stephen Earnhart adapted The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle into a two-hour multimedia stage presentation. The show opened January 12, 2010, as part of the Public Theater's "Under the Radar" festival at the Ohio Theater in New York City,[102] presented in association with The Asia Society and the Baryshnikov Arts Center. The show had its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival on August 21, 2011.[103] The presentation incorporates live actors, video projection, traditional Japanese puppetry, and immersive soundscapes to render the surreal landscape of the original work.
Memoranda, a 2017 adventure video game, is based on various short stories from After the Quake, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, and The Elephant Vanishes, and features several Murakami characters, with Mizuki Ando as the protagonist.[104]
In 2018, "Barn Burning" from Murakami's short story collection The Elephant Vanishes was adapted into a film titled Burning by director Lee Chang-dong.[105] The film was awarded the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Prize for best film, receiving the highest score to date.[106] It was also South Korea's submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2019.
A film based on the short story "Drive My Car" premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where it won Best Screenplay, the FIPRESCI Prize, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.[107] The film went on to win the Academy Award for Best International Feature and received three other nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.[108] Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, it also takes inspiration from Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya as well as "Scheherazade" and "Kino," two other stories in the collection Men Without Women.[109]
In 2022, director Pierre Földes adapted six short stories from Murakami's books After the Quake, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and The Elephant Vanishes into an animated feature film. The film, titled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, is an international co-production of Canada, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.[110] The film premiered in the feature film competition at the 2022 Annecy International Animation Film Festival,[111] where it was awarded a Jury Distinction.[112]
In 2022, Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey was translated into Yorùbá by Nigerian linguist Kola Tubosun, making it the first time a Murakami story would be translated into an African language.[113]
In 2023, Jean-Christophe Deveney began adapting nine of Murakami's short stories into a three-volume original English-language manga series illustrated by PGML and published by Tuttle Publishing.[114] The first and second volumes of Haruki Murakami Manga Stories adapt Super-Frog Saves Tokyo, The Seventh Man, Birthday Girl, Where I'm Likely to Find It, The Second Bakery Attack, Samsa in Love, and Thailand, while the upcoming final volume will adapt Scheherezade and Sleep.
Personal life[edit]
After receiving the Gunzo Award for his 1979 literary work Hear the Wind Sing, Murakami did not aspire to meet other writers. Aside from Sarah Lawrence's Mary Morris, whom he briefly mentions in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running alongside Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison, Murakami was never a part of a community of writers, his reason being that he was a loner and was never fond of groups, schools, and literary circles.[38] When working on a book, Murakami states that he relies on his wife, who is always his first reader.[38] While he never acquainted himself with many writers, among the contemporary writers, he enjoys the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, Lee Child and Dag Solstad.[115] While he does not read much contemporary Japanese literature,[115] Murakami enjoys the works of Ryū Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto.[38]
Murakami enjoys baseball and describes himself as a fan of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows. In his 2015 essay for Literary Hub 'The Moment I Became a Novelist', Murakami describes how attending a Swallow's game in Jingu Stadium in 1978 led to a personal epiphany in which he decided to write his first novel.[116]
Haruki Murakami is a fan of crime novels. During his high school days while living in Kōbe, he would buy paperbacks from second hand book stores and learned to read English. The first book that he read in English was The Name is Archer, written by Ross Macdonald in 1955. Other writers he was interested in included Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.[38]
Murakami also has a passion for listening to music, especially classical and jazz. When he was around 15, he began to develop an interest in jazz after attending an Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers concert in Kobe.[117] He later opened the Peter Cat, a coffeehouse and jazz bar. Murakami has said that music, like writing, is a mental journey.[38] At one time he aspired to be a musician, but because he could not play instruments well he decided to become a writer instead.[38]
In an interview with The Guardian, Murakami stated his belief that his surreal books appeal to people especially in times of turmoil and political chaos.[118] He stated that "I was so popular in the 1990s in Russia, at the time they were changing from the Soviet Union – there was big confusion, and people in confusion like my books" and “In Germany, when the Berlin Wall fell down, there was confusion – and people liked my books.”[118]