Haruki Murakami Returns
Master Shelf Introduction
Master Shelf: Murakami
Reading and Ranking an Author’s Entire Bibliography
Haruki Murakami is one of the most popular literary novelists still working today, and remains astonishingly popular even as he enters his fifth decade of writing fiction. This week his 15th novel (and 23rd book overall) The City and Its Uncertain Walls published in English. Several New York bookstores celebrated with midnight release events. These midnight releases attest to how the 75-year-old Japanese writer has continued to find audiences in multiple generations that were born long after his first novel was published (1979). I’m one of those fans, having read Murakami’s every work of fiction and most of the nonfiction ones too. With such a large catalog, we’re going to take this ranking slow unlike the other master shelves we’ve done so far and do this master list over the next couple of months in a few parts. For now, let’s just talk about Murakami, why he remains an anomaly among literary writers, his flaws, and the reason readers connect with his novels on such a deep level that they’re willing to sit in a bookstore until midnight.
Why Haruki Murakami Persists
It’s not exactly shocking why Murakami’s readership translates across oceans and speaks to generations of readers. One of the primary reasons is that there are not many other writers like Murakami. But if you have to analyze Murakami’s appeal and some of the elements that make up his specialness as a writer, there are three important factors to his enduring success.
Murakami is an international sensation (his work has been translated into 50 languages) and widely read for a literary writer because of his extremely fluid and simple style. Decades ahead of his time in many ways for what would become the standard style among literary writers in the 21st century, Murakami writes in an extremely straightforward way for someone who is often floated as a frontrunner for the Nobel prize. His style is influenced by many popular 20th century American writers that started to bring the spare and colloquial into vogue—Hemingway, of course, but also the more experimental, but effortless fluid and causal Vonnegut to the terse, hardboiled writers like Raymond Chandler. For a time, Murakami also wrote first drafts in English and then translated his writing back into Japanese (and then had an English translator translate it back into English)—his reasoning was that writing in his second language forced him to use a more limited vocabulary and be more direct out of necessity. Here’s the opening paragraph from Murakami’s third novel A Wild Sheep Chase (picked at random off my shelf) and it is a typical Murakami setup in this style:
“It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition. A friend rang me up and read it to me. Nothing special. Something a rookie reporter fresh out of college might’ve written for practice.”
The second most notable quality of Murakami, a large part of his uniqueness, is marrying this realistic style with a sense of the uncanny. Many a reviewer over the decades has noted the dreamlike quality of his novels. And it is one of his true gifts to be able to have such a firm, flat-footed way of writing that he is able to bring his readers along on almost any ride. Talking sheep people, Jonnie Walker (yes, the guy on the whiskey bottle) personified, and being able to walk off a highway into an alternate universe are just a few things that Murakami inserts into his novels without it somehow ever feeling confusing or illogical. Yet these unreal imaginations are not fantasy because Murakami has the ability to, if not make it plausible, then make it feel natural. Like Gabriel García Márquez, Murakami knows how to emphasize the realism first in the canon of magical realism. This skill makes Murakami a rarity, and the fully immersive, surprising imaginative, yet not-divorced from real life mixture is one that has captured and entranced the minds of many readers.
The final hallmark of Murakami, and the reason he continues to find new audiences, is that he is a man of remarkably consistent themes. And despite the fact he has continued to age, much of his fiction has to do with coming-of-age and first loves. Many, if not most, of his novels are centered on this classic theme of young people trying to figure out what the hell the world is about and their place in it. In fact, the log line of Murakami’s latest novel could be swapped out with different names and ages for many novels throughout his career: “The new novel begins with a lonely, nameless 17-year-old boy falling in love with a lonely, nameless 16-year-old girl.”
Murakami like a transcendent pop musician (he’s also a big fan of The Beatles) is the peak of a writer who makes something look exceptionally easy that is exceptionally hard. If you look at these individual elements it seems like there are just a few easy steps to follow in order to be canonized and beloved by readers across the globe, but yet no one has combined these elements — straightforwardness, imagination, coming-of-age —quite in the way Murakami has.
Why Murakami Has Some Problems
A few years ago, during the pandemic, I watched Woody Allen’s Manhattan for the first time. I was curious, Woody Allen being the Ur person to start many discussions about bad men in art that were going on then as they are now. What struck me was how good Diane Keaton was in the movie, and also conversely how much Woody Allen making himself the hero to justify his personal behavior just completely didn’t work on any level. He’s by far the worst part of his own movie, rarely funny or charming or insightful. And yet, the city looks great, there are little moments, funny side characters, and Keaton, which are all easy to appreciate and enjoy in the film. And it’s uncomfortable but true that Allen had his hand in both the bad and the good. I found something similar with Moby-Dick, a book that generally has so much weird stuff to like, but also some glaring racism that isn’t good morally or artistically. At some level, the things that don’t work in Manhattan or Moby-Dick don’t work because they are fundamentally dishonest; self-justification and self-serving narrow-mindedness. But it doesn’t mean we, as viewers, need to be equally dishonest and refuse to admit that parts of the art (Diane Keaton, Melville’s verbal madness) do work and still do work on us.
On a less extreme end of the spectrum, I feel the same way about the work of Murakami. He has one glaring, unignorable flaw in most of his fiction. Despite a huge breadth of work and many moments where the reader feels no other author could have imagined something he’s imagined, Murakami has always had problems writing women. Rarely are his protagonists women, and when they are, they usually lack the implied inner dimensions or growth of his male characters. Typically, the women in Murakami’s fiction serve as objects of desire for the main character (the man). Some of Murakami’s best characters are his secondary ones where he shows a remarkable perceptiveness for different ages, professions, and socioeconomic background, but, again, all of the ones that come to mind are men.
At worst, Murakami passages could be used in a classroom as examples of the male gaze. Many longtime readers have remarked on his fascination with the beauty of women’s ears in A Wild Sheep Chase. But the beauty of a woman’s ear might not be so bad if it weren’t a perfect illustration of how Murakami and his protagonists typically treat women in his novels. Here’s the full passage from A Wild Sheep Chase:
“She was twenty-one, with an attractive slender body and a pair of the most bewitching, perfectly formed ears. She was a part-time proofreader for a small publishing house, a commercial model specializing in ear shots, and a call girl in a discreet intimate-friends-only club. Which of the three she considered her main occupation, I had no idea. Neither did she.
Nonetheless, sizing up her essential attributes, I would have to say her natural gifts ran to ear modeling. She agreed. Which was well and good until you considered how extremely limited are the opportunities for a commercial ear model, how abysmal the status and pay. To your typical P.R. man or makeup artist or camera-man, she was just an ‘earholder,’ someone with ears. Her mind and body, apart from the ears, were completely out of the picture disregarded, nonexistent.”
Now this might not seem like an egregiously misogynistic passage to some, but having read Murakami’s entire body of work, I can confidently say this is not a one-off incident, nor one that can be hand waved by him writing under the guise from a young man’s perspective. And it’s a fairly big flaw not to be able to skillfully write about one half of the population.
Why We Still Love Murakami
There are queer women who take inspiration from Hemingway and others who enjoy Entourage. For critics who are women born in a certain era and place, contending with their love of Woody Allen has become an epic battle of critical thought. You don’t have to love everything about an artist or their art to love an artist’s art. In today’s era of super fandom, I’m here to say that it’s okay critique an artist you’re a fan of while loving other parts of the art unapologetically, being always weary not to conflate and fold them together (i.e. Hemingway was a great writer because he was a drunk who liked to hunt animals). If many have to leave Murakami at the door because of his flaws as a writer, that’s more than understandable. But there are many reasons why readers, despite his flaws, from so many different backgrounds keep falling in love with Murakami’s work.
Even if Murakami is quite flawed in some places, he is also a writer of profound universal truth in others. After reading Murakami many years ago for the first time, I often went around saying that I liked fiction that was “philosophical” because that’s what Murakami’s fiction often feels like. Only later did I realize that there are extraordinarily few fiction writers who are able to pull off putting philosophy on modern life into fictional prose. Of course, there are many novelists who observe life and teach us about the world—that’s a lot of what fiction is for and can do. But Murakami has a special way of finding such a large scope of universal observation in a tidy, matter of fact way (Cormac McCarthy is the only other author that comes immediately to mind who does this). Here’s just a few random lines of the numerous I’ve jotted down over the years:
“You can put a lid on memory, but you can’t hide history.” (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage)
“I can write off expenses, but I can't pay off my debts.” (Dance, Dance, Dance)
“Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just like Yeats said: in dreams begin responsibilities” (Kafka on the Shore)
“Say we have a concept. It goes without saying that there will be slight exceptions to that norm. Now, over time these exceptions spread like stains until finally they form a separate concept. To which other exceptions crop up. It was that kind of building, some ancient life-form that had evolved blindly toward who knows what end.” (A Wild Sheep Chase
So, stay turned, curl up with your cat, and drop the needle on your vinyl, we’ll be ranking and discussing Murakami’s every work of fiction (including the new book!) this coming winter.