We don't know Haruki Murakami yet.
I recently reread Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood in an excellent English translation by the Jay Rubin. The unsettling aftertaste has left me thinking and soul-searching. My conclusion at this moment is clear: We don't know Haruki Murakami yet.
For a Tokyo resident like me, the journey of Haruki Murakami has been a quite interesting one at close sight, with ups and downs, traveling along the long and winding road of world literature.
I was at college when Norwegian Wood came out. It became such a huge social phenomenon. Well before this epic love story of Toru, Naoko, and Midori shot up in the popular imagination, people did know Murakami, but Norwegian Wood broadened the novelist's fan base (and his opponents) multiple tens of times, at the least. I vividly remember, as a graduate student in the Physics department at The University of Tokyo, how I was fascinated upon discovering the green and red covers of the original Japanese hardcovers in the co-op bookshop on the University's Hongo campus. It was love at first sight, followed by the joy of reading the story, in Japanese at that time.
Many waters have flown under the bridge since then, and the novelist's reception both in Japan and worldwide has been quite a sparkling phenomenon in itself. In Japan, the perceived contrast of mood between the avid readers of Murakami and his critics was interesting. The general image was that the fans of Murakami were new kids on the block in literature, and were often ridiculed by the self-proclaimed literature connoisseurs (unjustifiably, in my humble opinion) that they did not read anything else of substance. The gatekeepers of traditional literature in Japan, described under the umbrella term bundan ("literary circle"), were perceived to give Murakami the cold shoulder, although Murakami did win the prestigious Gunzo prize for newly emerging novelists for his debut work Hear the Wind Sing. Such an atmosphere was perhaps the reason, although the novelist (to the best of my knowledge) never expressed his explicit opinion on this, why Murakami has generally shied away from press interviews in his native land of Japan.
Then quite magical and ultimately justifying shift of mood happened. There was a global Murakami boom, and his novels were welcomed by readers in every corner of the globe. Murakami received major international literary awards, including the Franz Kafka prize, named after the legendary Austrian-Czech author with whose works Murakami's novels are sometimes compared. Murakami became a regular in the popular media's and bookmakers' predictions of likely winners of Nobel Prize for Literature, often heading the shortlist.
Interestingly, with the global rise of Murakami's reputation, the reception of Murakami by the mainstream bundan literary circle in Japan has changed. Some people attribute this change of hearts to the kurofune (black ships) effect in Japanese culture, where major influences from abroad would affect and bring about pivoting attitude changes in the Japanese psyche, just as the black ships (warships from the United States of America) in the last days of the samurai era kickstarted the rapid modernization of Japan, which later came to be known as the Meiji Restoration.
For many years now, Murakami's reputation in his home country appears to have been inscribed in solid gold. Murakami's novels are read by the younger generations, too, helped in part by such adaptations as the film Drive My Car.
Quite recently, there has been some newly emerging dialogues about the Haruki Murakami novels. I hear conversations on the gender implications of the Murakami works. Although I personally do not necessarily agree with such views, I do see some soul-searching among the Murakami fans and critics. In the popular discourses, Murakami is being compared with more recent Japanese novelists, especially female authors, e.g. Sayaka Murata, Mieko Kawakami, Yoko Tawada, Miri Yu, and Yoko Ogawa, and that's where attempts at Murakami reinterpretations are being conducted. Although there is always a danger of generalization, it would appear that the female authors, seen from the present day's social climate of political correctness, diversity, equity, and inclusion, have more appropriate standing, compared to male authors like Haruki Murakami. Japanese males might be considered to be something equal to white males in the United States—constituting the majority demographically, enjoying quite a few privileges, and therefore, by default, are suspect, although, needless to say, there are variabilities among individuals.
It is precisely in this cultural climate that some Haruki Murakami lovers are nudged to do soul-searching, to come to a possible revision of their views about the beloved author. In particular, after the awarding of Nobel Prize in Literature to South Korean female author Han Kang, a shift in the world literally mood seems to be generating currents in which Haruki Murakami works are drifting. Indeed, some predict that if the next winner of Nobel Literature Prize is to come from Japan, it would be a female author.
It was with such a rather tense awareness of possible tide shift surrounding Murakami that I recently set about reading Norwegian Wood again, this time in English. Naturally, I have read almost all Haruki Murakami novels in my native tongue Japanese. (That might make me a Murakami fan but I am not writing this essay particularly as one.). A few decades after the first encounter with Norwegian Wood as a college student, reading this magnum opus in English translation gave me a series of revelations.
For example, it read genuinely as an authentic narrative of the growing pains of a young college student, Toru Watanabe, in Tokyo, without any frills or distortions typically associated with a Haruki Murakami novel in Japan. One point of both praise and criticism directed towards Murakami works has been his unique Japanese prose style, which has been likened by some to be similar to Japanese texts translated from English.This does make sense since Murakami himself has testified that he wrote the beginning of his debut novel Hear the Wind Sing in English first and then translated into Japanese. Although the uniquely Murakami style that was thus originated has attracted a majority of Murakami lovers, the particular prose style has also been seen as a possible obstacle in appreciating the Murakami works at their face values, especially by traditionally-minded critics in the bundan. Reading in an English translation by Jay Rubin, all those additives disappeared, and Norwegian Wood tasted like a good Japanese sake, which leaves only a genuine and unobtrusive fragrance. Needless to say, a majority of Haruki Murakami readers in the world appreciate his works through translations in languages other than Japanese, and this distillation effect might have been the reality behind the global popularity of the novelist, somewhat akin to the reception of the Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki or Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky by world readers.
In addition to beneficial effects through translation, I noticed something perhaps more essential, which is why I am writing this essay. Norwegian Wood made me very uneasy. There was something deeply unsettling in how the story developed, and the feeling was paradoxically not at all unpleasant. I had the feeling that a certain glimpse of the human nature could be attained only through this throwing off of balance from our preconceived ideas about gender, sex, life, and death. Such an epiphany attained through a perturbation of the otherwise fixed mind is a hallmark of great literature, and seemed to be particularly true for Norwegian Wood.
Of particular importance is the gender issue, perhaps the elephant in the room walking around the realm of Murakami novels today. In Norwegian Wood, women, as well as men, are uncertain about the border between love and lust, to Murakami's credit. It is not boy meets girl and boy seduces girl. It is often the other way round. To be sure, some characters, most notably Nagasawa, seems to take advantage of the weaker sex. The ego of Nagasawa inflates itself to fit the hollow cave of the bright lights, big city of Tokyo. Even then, there is something deeply sad and poignant about the way Nagasawa goes about girl hunting in Tokyo streets at night. What Nagasawa does is very far from toxic masculinity. It is more mono no aware than catch me if you can.
The protagonist of the novel, Toru Watanabe, most likely based on the author himself, is ultimately sincere about love although occasionally frivolous about lust. In all, the aftertaste of the novel is an endorsement of humanity, with such wonderful details as Toru eating a cucumber rolled with nori seaweed with Midori's terminally ill father, revealing a deep understanding of life's full spectrum by the author. The cucumber scene is such a great ikigai moment, on par with the madeleine moment in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
In appreciating Norwegian Wood, it is of course legitimate to ask if a work has aged well. We don't need to sink into cultural relativism in which a work of a particular period is to be appraised only in the context of that time. For a work like Norwegian Wood, which continues to be read by new generations, it is entirely appropriate to measure it up against the best contemporary values and practices. However, it would be inappropriate to make hasty judgments on the work, in the current climate concerning gender, diversity, and equality, precisely because Norwegian Wood has the rare quality of taking us to places where the accepted norms and customs no longer hold.
Oscar Wilde wrote in his virtual swan song, a long private letter which came to be published posthumously under the title De Profundis, something quite relevant to the reception of Norwegian Wood and Haruki Murakami works in general: "People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going."
Murakami does not know where he is going, at the best moments in his creative writing. His novels, Norwegian Wood, Hear the Wind Sing, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, IQ84, Killing Commendatore, and so on are all great unsettlers of reason, shaking our prefixed values from the root and setting us on journeys in uncharted territories. The zeitgeist of our time might be that works that neatly fit into the accepted values of the time are given good marks. Murakami can certainly do and has done that, but his forte is perhaps something much more. If some part of Haruki Murakami makes the readers somewhat uneasy today, it is not because his works have not aged well. It is because Murakami is dealing with generic human truths, in which we cannot grasp ourselves so easily, because there are unfathomable undercurrents in human existence. Such a sensitivity of the human unconscious, reminiscent of works by Freud and Jung, is increasingly important in this age of rising artificial intelligence.
Requiring humans to fit into particular sets of evaluation functions, no matter how unquestionable they may appear, is like turning ourselves into inferior copies of AI agents. Maybe it is already happening, if you are sensitive of the symptoms, here, there, and everywhere.
A great work of fiction is an antidote for a dominant system of the day, in that it tells us that we are actually wider than the sky. If we are true to our nature, and we desire solely for self-realisation, we never know where we are going.
We don't know Haruki Murakami yet.
Figure: Picture drawn by ChatGPT with the prompt "Draw a thoughtful child wandering in a Norwegian Wood"
