The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan

and the United States

Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

Monumenta Nipponica, Volume 64, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp.

219-223 (Review)

Published by Sophia University

DOI: 10.1353/mni.0.0050

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mni/summary/v064/64.1.hijiya-kirschnereit.html

Access Provided by Lick-Wilmerding High School at 04/08/11 8:03PM GMT

 BOOK REVIEWS 219
Chapter 5, “The Japanese Woman’s Film of the 1950s,” focuses directly on a group
of films that were largely based on popular novels and stories serialized in magazines
of the time, thus doubly situating Naruse within everyday mass culture. Naruse’s mar-
riage films of this period sparked a public debate on gender roles, and his emphasis
on the desiring female subject is most visible in his adaptation of Kawabata Yasunari’s
Sound of the Mountain, which in Naruse’s hands privileges the female, rather than
the male, point of view. Considering the 1960s, when television and the Japanese New
Wave made older directors like Naruse seem out of touch, Russell argues in chapter
6 for the relevance of his continued “vernacular modernism.” She demonstrates
Naruse’s skill as an “ethnographic” director in her analyses of Whistling, a thought-
ful treatment of Japanese colonialism and the Ainu, and When a Woman Ascends the
Stairs, which details the life of Ginza hostesses. Naruse’s film noir thriller of 1966,
Stranger Within a Woman, makes sense in the context of similar films by Kurosawa
and Teshigahara Hiroshi, as does his renewed focus on class issues. Naruse remained
open to new technologies to the very end of his life, and Russell has exposed this
quiet, unassuming director as a brilliant innovator and experimentalist.
This book will be useful to undergraduates and older scholars alike, whether they
are studying Japanese film history, feminist film criticism, or the roles of women in
twentieth-century Japanese society. A comprehensive study of Naruse in English has
long been needed, and this book does not just fill that gap, it adds greatly to our over-
all understanding of Japanese mass media and popular culture in the twentieth cen-
tury.

The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the

United States. By Rebecca Suter. Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.
236 pages. Hardcover $39.95/£29.95/€36.00.
IRMELA HIJIYA-KIRSCHNEREIT
Freie Universität Berlin

Murakami Haruki is doubtless among the best known of Japanese authors; one
observer has even gone so far as to call him “the most successful and influential cult
author in the world today.”1 According to the UNESCO Index Translationum,
Murakami is fourth among Japanese language authors, behind Toriyama Akira,2
Mishima Yukio, and Kawabata Yasunari, with 189 book translations into numerous
languages.3 This circumstance alone is reason enough to study this author and his

1 See Stephen Armstrong, “Ten things you need to know about Haruki Murakami: The key

facts about the coolest writer in the world today,” The Sunday Times, 20 July 2008.
2
This manga author, born in 1955, creator of Dr. Slump (1980–1984), Dragonball
(1984–1995), and other popular manga series and video games, is one of the most successful
authors of comics of all times with more than 250 million copies sold all over the world so far,
according to his German publisher, Carlsen Verlag.
3 See UNESCO, “Index Translationum Statistics,” http://ftp.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransList.a

(accessed 22 February 2009). The “Japanese Literature in Translation Search” available in the
“Useful Data” section of the Japan Foundation’s Web site lists more than four hundred titles for
Murakami, among them 159 in English, but it includes numerous reprints of the same translation
and does not distinguish between books and shorter works. http://www.jpf.go.jp/e/db/index.html
(accessed 22 February 2009).
220 Monumenta Nipponica 64:1 (2009)

impact. In the wake of works by Jay Rubin, Matthew Strecher, and Michael Seats,4
Rebecca Suter’s The Japanization of Modernity is the fourth book-length study on
Murakami to appear in English.5 But whereas Rubin offered a fan’s guide to the
author’s life and works, Strecher focused on exploring identity and ideology in
Murakami’s fiction, and Seats interpreted his works as a critique of orthodoxy and as
symptomatic of the postmodern destruction of “referential meaning,” Suter has cho-
sen as her theme Murakami’s role as mediator between Japanese and American liter-
ature and culture. Murakami, she claims, not only influences Japanese views of
American literature, life, and culture through his translations of writers such as F.
Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, Tim O’Brien, J. D. Salinger, and Raymond Carver,
through his translated works he also represents contemporary Japan to a growing num-
ber of U.S. readers. By looking at Murakami’s work as “Japanese-American cultural
cross-representation,” however, Suter also aims to gain original insight into two major
interrelated contemporary debates, namely, “issues of modernity and postmodernity”
and “theorizations of the concepts of postcoloniality and globalization” (p. 1).
Consequently, her book deals with conceptual issues as well as with Murakami’s
works. Leaving aside his translations from English into Japanese, Suter focuses
mainly on Murakami’s short stories, because, she holds, they are “less widely known
and less translated in the West than the novels,” on the one hand, and “because they
are free from the coherent and organic narrative structure of his longer works” (p. 9)—
reasons that may leave readers slightly perplexed given Suter’s overall objective as
well as the ample evidence that might be adduced in favor of propositions to the con-
trary. But let us see how she develops her theme.
Suter’s first chapter, “The Japanization of Modernity,” sketches some of the debates
over the terms modernism, modanizumu, and kindaishugi and over postcolonial the-
ory. She refers to a wide range of key figures in Japanese intellectual history, from
Maruyama Masao to Kobayashi Hideo, and to scholars from Harumi Befu to Naoki
Sakai, Richard Minear, Yoshioka Hiroshi, Seiji Lippit, and Edward Said, and con-
cludes this outline by stating, after Koichi Iwabuchi, that “Japan’s transnational cul-
tural power is reasserted and articulated in terms of indigenized modernity” (p. 34).
Next, in chapter 2, Suter deals with both American and Japanese views of Murakami,
summarizing and quoting from a number of reviews of his books. In the case of U.S.
voices, she observes that they “invariably insist on Westernization and un-
Japaneseness as the defining features of his fiction” (p. 42), whereas Japanese crit-
ics—including U.S.-based scholars such as Masao Miyoshi and Hosea Hirata—are
represented as more varied in their views of Murakami’s works. The significant dif-
ferences in how Murakami is perceived by American and Japanese audiences relate
partly to the way in which this author actively presents himself to his respective read-
erships, Suter contends, and she concludes this chapter with hints at Murakami’s
avoidance of a clearly defined position, his “playing on his double positioning” in
interviews and statements about his work (p. 60).
4 Matthew Strecher, Dances with Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami

Haruki (University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 2002); Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami
and the Music of Words (London: Harvill, 2002); and Michael Seats, Murakami Haruki: The
Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2006).
5
Apart from the above-mentioned comprehensive studies, Matthew Strecher has also pub-
lished Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Reader’s Guide (London, N.Y.:
Continuum, 2002).
 BOOK REVIEWS 221
Chapter 3 deals with what Suter sees as “one of the main intercultural strategies of
Murakami’s texts”: the use of language and writing, particularly of foreign vocabu-
lary and of katakana (p. 63). Taking short stories such as “Rêdâhôzen” (“Lederhosen”)
and “Tairando” (“Thailand”) as examples, she points out a “double operation of domes-
tication and estrangement of Western languages and cultures” (p. 73). Murakami’s
parodic treatment of the detective story is also a theme in this and the next chapter,
where Suter is concerned with his references to pop culture, commercialization, and
Western influence used “as the basis for . . . play and irony” (p. 133). Chapter 5 takes
up “Nemuri,” another short story, to show the “dynamics of the formation of indi-
vidual identity . . . through the use of foreign culture/literature” (p. 140). For Suter,
this work “summarizes the main intertextual and metatextual strategies present in the
works of Murakami” (p. 140). She shows his parodying of Western feminist libera-
tion narratives through “striking similarities to [Kate] Chopin’s The Awakening” (p.
142) as well as his use of literalized metaphors and parallel or imaginary worlds. In
her conclusion, Suter reads Murakami’s introduction to a recent edition of translated
Akutagawa stories as an indication of his growing importance as mediator of a new
image of Japanese literature and Japan abroad. She sums up Murakami’s role and
“positioning across cultures” by stating that, in his fiction, he “provides a very origi-
nal perspective on the issue of national and international social relations in the era of
globalization . . . [as his] texts do not represent Western influences as something dan-
gerous and corrupting, but instead use Western culture as a basis to construct a mul-
tilayered image of reality” (p. 189). She also regards him as a socially committed
author in the sense that he makes us aware of “the constructed nature of identity and
reality” (p. 190).
The originality of this book lies, perhaps most of all, in its effort to map Murakami’s
position as mediator between cultures and Suter’s decision to frame this mapping
under the rubric “Japanization of Modernity.” Unfortunately, however, her approach
and procedures do not allow her to address adequately the questions implicit in such
an interpretation. Much space in the book is dedicated to summarizing the work of
others, beginning with an infelicitous jumble of statements concerning key concepts
in the modernity/modernism and orientalism debates. Condensing almost necessarily
leads to simplification, and Suter would have done better simply to refer readers to
the original texts. To posit a discussion of Murakami within the context of these
debates is a bold and potentially worthwhile venture, but to carry it off requires a bal-
anced and highly sophisticated analysis incorporating recent theoretical arguments
not considered here, such as the international debate on “multiple,” “entangled,” and
“shared” modernities, and excluding aspects not of direct relevance to the subject at
hand.
Suter’s discussion of the way in which Murakami is viewed in the United States
and in Japan is likewise disappointing, as it is not clear to what extent the critical state-
ments she summarizes are representative of more general trends. She offers no sta-
tistical data, no reasons why, out of the many reviews of and essays on this author,
she chose to focus on the ones she has. For a minimally valid picture of “American”
and “Japanese” views, other sources of information should have been tapped. It should
have been possible, for instance, to make use of indicators such as the distribution of
books; translations published in anthologies and journals; the respective prestige of
publication venues; Murakami intertexts and transmedial representation; and
222 Monumenta Nipponica 64:1 (2009)
institutional permeation, including passages from works by Murakami incorporated in
school textbooks and the like. Regrettably, Suter relies mostly on impression and hearsay
concerning Murakami’s “influence” and weight in the United States and in Japan.6
In her close readings in chapters 3 through 5 of a number of Murakami short sto-
ries, Suter concentrates on their references to Western commodities and texts. By iden-
tifying polygraphy, parody, identity, and imagination as interpretive keys to
Murakami’s works, she validates earlier research done by Strecher, Seats (whom she
does not mention), and many others who have dealt with Murakami’s works as post-
modern creations. But Suter seems to ignore the fact that some characteristics, such
as the adoption of a large number of katakana terms, as well as certain particular usages
of them, are features typical of many contemporary texts. What makes Murakami
stand out in this respect against, say, Yamada Eimi, Itô Hiromi, or Mizumura Minae?
Graphematic and lexicographical analyses of Murakami texts can be found even in
Western languages, with one dating as early as 1990.7 Interestingly enough, such stud-
ies tend to relativize the oft-claimed particularity and originality of Murakami’s use
of language and script. Suter also makes sweeping statements (which then are left dan-
gling) on Murakami’s employment of different languages in his texts, demarcating
him, for instance, from Joyce, Pound, Nabokov, and Beckett in this regard, “since it
involves not simply the relationship between different cultures, but the relationship
between East and West, with all of its historical, political, and philosophical impli-
cations” (p. 79). We repeatedly get the impression that to better serve the author’s
argument, this study is recreating the age-old East-West divide that generations of
scholars, even before the days of postcolonial studies, have worked hard to prob-
lematize and dismantle.
Perhaps one factor contributing to this impression is that Suter tends to frame the
issue under discussion too broadly, as when she begins chapter 3 with a description
of language and writing in Japan going all the way back to the introduction of Chinese
script and its adaptations to Japanese. The general readership for whom such back-
ground is presumably intended might have been better served by a note listing rele-
vant overviews. Specialists in Japanese language and literature will wince at a number
of Suter’s generalizations.
In presenting Murakami, Suter often relies on his own statements, which she adopts
more or less uncritically. Sometimes she also appears to assign too much symbolic
weight to his activities. Her reading of his introduction to the new English-language
edition of works by Akutagawa, in which Murakami styles himself an heir to the clas-
sical modern writer, certainly overinterprets his modifying influence on a Western
readership. Suter also mentions Murakami’s introduction to a new edition of Jay
Rubin’s translation of Natsume Sôseki’s Sanshirô (p. 182), and it would have been
enlightening had she compared the two.8 Yet as in both cases the translator is Jay
6
It is a pity that Suter does not follow some of the interesting paths suggested by the insider
information she supplies. The fact that Murakami retranslated his story “Lederhosen” into
Japanese on the basis of Alfred Birnbaum’s English version (p. 216, note 1) would be a truly orig-
inal vantage point from which to discuss issues of translation and transformation in this context.
The reader would have appreciated bibliographical information for the retranslated text.
7 See Jürgen Stalph, “Sprache im Wandel: Eine graphematische und lexikographische Analyse

von Murakami Harukis Erfolgsroman Norway-no mori,” Japanstudien, vol. 1 (1990), pp. 321–62.
8 Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any further information about this new edition of

Sanshirô.
 BOOK REVIEWS 223
Rubin, one of Murakami’s main translators, should we not first of all assume that his
contribution was a service to a friend?
Yet another problem is Suter’s tacit premise that by dealing with Murakami in Japan
and the United States she has painted a picture of a globalized Murakami. Her efforts
serve to remind us, of course, of the fact that to many Japanese, the United States is
still the most important foreign “Other,” and she also, quite relevantly, quotes
Murakami’s dislike of “Europe,” where people “are stiff, and we are always foreign-
ers” (p. 59). To inquire into issues of the “Japanization of Modernity” in our entan-
gled, globalized world, however, would certainly require us to take a look as well at
Murakami in regions outside the United States. Judging from the number of trans-
lated books alone, English, with its 9 entries in the Index Translationum, is far behind
Suter’s native Italian, which has 15 titles, French (with 20), and German (with 34), to
say nothing of translations of Murakami into other East Asian languages.9
Rebecca Suter deserves credit for opening up a new window on Murakami with her
study. She has whetted our appetite for more, and more systematic, inquiries that will
shed light on issues of globalization and cultural translation regarding both Murakami
Haruki and other Japanese writers.
9
Readers are once more referred to the Index Translationum, even if these figures, like the data
in the aforementioned Japan Foundation list, are to be treated with caution and must be supple-
mented by solid research.

Alles nur Theater? Gender und Ethnizität bei der japankoreanischen Autorin
Yû Miri. By Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt. Munich: Iudicium, 2008. 473
pages. Hardcover €39.60.
MATTHEW KÖNIGSBERG
Freie Universität Berlin

“Nothing but playacting?” This is one possible English translation of the title of
Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt’s monograph (based on her doctoral dissertation sub-
mitted to Trier University). The subtitle, which could be translated “Gender, Ethnicity,
and the Japanese-Korean Author Yû Miri,” underlines two points: First of all, fol-
lowing the example of the first German-language study on the subject,1 Iwata-
Weickgenannt uses the term “Japanese-Korean” (japankoreanisch) and not, for
instance, the designation zainichi adopted in Japanese and some Anglo-American
research. Iwata-Weickgenannt thus situates her study within the German tradition of
research on the Korean minority and its literature, scholarship that has received little
attention outside of Germany. Secondly, and more importantly, the book is not about
gender and ethnicity in the works of Yû Miri. Instead, Iwata-Weickgenannt points to
a subtle interconnection between literature and life: “Not only [Yû’s] literature, but
she herself is considered, in the final analysis, a ‘work’” (p. 423; translations from
German by the reviewer).

1 Matthew Königsberg, Literatur der koreanischen Minderheit in Japan: Assimilation und

Identitätsfindung (Hamburg: Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens, 1995).