Authors of Japan: Haruki Murakami

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble 

On April 1st 1978, a young jazz bar owner from Kyoto stood in the stands of the Meiji Jingu Stadium watching his beloved Yakult Swallows take on Hiroshima Carp. This baseball match launched the careers of two men, both 29 years old. One of the men was Dave Hilton, a third baseman from Texas, and the other was the young bar owner from Kyoto. That bar owner was Haruki Murakami and watching Hilton play would inspire him to write a novel that would launch him into a highly successful writing career and make him a known around the world by the end of the century. 

Murakami went home that night and began writing immediately, although, he could only afford to work for an hour each night as he had to maintain the bar he ran with his wife, Yoko. It took him four months, but he completed his first book, Hear the Wind Sing (1979) and published it a year later in 1979.  First, in the monthly literary magazine Gunzo in June and then again, as a book, in July. The book was received well; it won the 1979 Gunzo Prize for New Writers and was nominated for an Akutagawa Prize in the same year of it's release. Within Japanese literary circles, Hear the Wind Sing is understood as being an example of an 'I-Novel'. I-Novels are, unsurprisingly, always written in the first-person, and are usually a mixture of fictional prose and an autobiography. Many I-Novels are often grounded in reality; usually a fictional adaption of real events and real people, normally based to some extent on the author's own life. Murakami, however, seems to present completely fictional stories as he merges surrealist themes of the supernatural within the frame of supposedly 'real' I-Novels. Murakami followed Hear the Wind Sing up with two sequels: Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). A fourth sequel, Dance Dance Dance (1988), was released four years later, but it's status as a part of the 'Rat-Trilogy' is debated. These three, or four, books got their name by all revolving, in some way, around a young man called 'Rat'. In Hear the Wind Sing, Rat is a fellow student and close friend of the protagonist as they often go drinking together. In Pinball, 1973, he is recalled in the memories of the protagonist as friend back when they were students in the early 1970s. In A Wild Sheep Chase, Rat is a friend of the protagonist, who this time is a detective not a student, who sends the protagonist a letter explaining that he has accidently unearthed a conspiracy exposing the Japanese economic and political elite. 

Three themes can be seen in this trilogy; youth and the student movement, surrealism and the supernatural and a combination of both into historical fiction. The protagonists of Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball are both students and they both take place, specifically, during the Japanese student protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Both of these themes are found in another famous Murakami novel; Norwegian Wood (1987). The plot of all three novels revolve around the lives of the main characters during those relatively unstable times. The past remains an important theme in two other pieces of Murakami's work; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) and 1Q84 (2010). In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the main character explains to a young girl his actions in China and Mongolia during the war in the 1930s and 1940s. 1Q84 is set in an alternate version of 1984 where the protagonist, a killer-for-hire must defeat an evil cult to get back to her own timeline. Despite being set in an alternate timeline, 1Q84 still falls within the theme of the past as there are still numerous references to historical events and figures from the 'real' 1980s. 

It is in the last of these five books, however, that another of Murakami's favourite themes is most clear; surrealism and the supernatural. That which is real and that which is is not becomes extremely blurred in 1Q84. Partially because of the protagonist's struggle to return to her own timeline, the 'real' 1980s, but also because of the references to evil cults, mysterious disappearances and magical powers. Though discussing much about the past, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle also references the supernatural as a curse is suggested as an explanation for the main characters missing cat, and a clairvoyant is consulted to help find it. Whether it's mysterious disappearing twins, clairvoyants or mysterious tattooed sheep, the second third, and quasi-fourth books of the Rat-Trilogy, Pinball, 1973, A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance all contain some sort of allusion to the strange and supernatural. The most surreal of all Murakami's books, however, would be Kafka on the Shore (2002). Other than being named after the founder of the darker side of literary surrealism, Kafka on the Shore explores themes of metaphysics, the debate between free-will and determinism, and the mind-body problem. The book contains two seemingly unconnected stories; one of which is about the titular Kafka Tamura and his journey of running away from home. Whilst the other follows Satoru Nakata, an elderly and  intellectually-disabled illiterate man who goes on the run with a truck-driver after killing a cat-murderer. Nakata flees to the city of Takamatsu in Kagawa, the same place Kafka travels to after leaving home...

And still, in almost all of Murakami's work, the idea of the I-Novel still lurks in the background. Being born in 1949, Murakami would have been a student in the late 1960s and so it's possible that the events of Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973 and Norwegian Wood are all grounded, to some extent, in the memories of his time as a student. And the former soldier in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, was said to have been sent to China during the war, the same as Murakami's own father. So, excluding some of the more supernatural parts of his work, it's possible that Murakami has been greatly influenced by both his own memories, but also by the memories of those around him.

1995 was not a good year for Japan. On January 17th, a massive 6.9 MMS earthquake struck the city of Kobe in the south of Hyōgo Prefecture. This was the worst earthquake in Japan since 1925; more than six thousand people were killed and over forty thousand were injured. Then, two months later, on March 20th, the apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo released highly poisonous sarin gas onto the Tokyo subway. Thirteen people died and over six thousand were injured. Murakami had been living in the United States since 1986, but returned home in the aftermath of the two tragedies. In January 1996, he began interviewing people who been affected by the subway attack. These interviews, along with his own thoughts, were published together a year later as Underground (1997), Murakami's first non-fiction book. In his new book, Murakami criticised the Japanese press for being overly sensationalist and focusing on the perpetrators of the attack rather than the victims. It also helped to shine a light on the Japanese national psyche, as many of the victims revealed that their priority, regardless of their injuries, was to make sure they got to work on time. Three years later, Murakami released another book After the Quake (2000). This was a collection of fictional short stories all set in February 1995, after the Kobe earthquake but before the subway attack. These stories were a departure from Murakami's usual surrealist style of writing as only one contained any obviously supernatural themes. Interestingly, though, none of the characters were directly involved in the earthquake. Instead, it's only something that is mentioned in newspaper or on the television. This, combined with a move to a third-person style, away from his usual first-person, creates a strong sense of detachment from the events, perhaps reflecting Murakami's own sense of distance, as he was away living in America at the time. 

Outside of writing, Murakami's main hobby is running. He started in the early 1980s as a way to keep healthy after spending most of his time at his desk writing. He has ran numerous marathons and completed an ultramarathon around Lake Saroma in 1996. Murakami has also published a memoir of his running career, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008).