Tomoki Wakatsuki

The Haruki
Phenomenon
Haruki Murakami as Cosmopolitan Writer
The Haruki Phenomenon
Tomoki Wakatsuki

The Haruki Phenomenon

Haruki Murakami as Cosmopolitan Writer
Tomoki Wakatsuki
Tokyo, Japan

ISBN 978-981-15-7548-8 ISBN 978-981-15-7549-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7549-5

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Foreword: Breaking Down the Wall of Japanese
Literature

To me, this monograph represents the first attempt in English to apply a systematic
and plausible approach to explain what has come to be known as the “Murakami
Haruki genshō,” better known in English as the “Murakami phenomenon” or simply
the “Haruki phenomenon.” Our current parlance has taken on some bizarre expres-
sions, including (alas) “Murakami-mania” (does this mean there is such a thing as a
“Murakami-maniac?”) and even “Harukist.”
These gruesome neologisms express, however, something very real that is hap-
pening today: Murakami Haruki’s books are being read globally, by what must be
one of the most diverse readerships in history. As the author of this volume notes,
echoing numerous preceding scholars (Jay Rubin, for one; myself for another),
Murakami is read by people around the world, from every social stratum (butcher,
baker, and candlestick maker), from all religious backgrounds, from every age
group. He is read, perhaps more importantly, by Japanese and non-Japanese alike.
And this leads to one of the most common questions I hear—usually from bewil-
dered Japanese news reporters—about this author: why is he so popular outside of
Japan? What is his secret?
My strategy is sometimes to turn the question back on itself: how do we explain
Murakami’s success in Japan? What accounts for his readership here, in his home
country, where he seems to break every literary rule, thumbs his nose at tradition, at
the literary establishment (commonly known here as the Bundan or “literary guild”),
at everything that Japanese literature is supposed to be? How, in short, does he get
away with all that and still have Japanese readers lined up for miles to buy a million
or more copies of his latest tome?
The answer may be the same for both questions, though in slightly different ways.
Just as an increasingly globalizing world has been hunting for a more cosmopolitan
flavor in its reading matter—cosmopolitan, but without being snotty about it, what
Wakatsuki will term “everyday cosmopolitanism”—Murakami happens onto the
stage. As the world seeks out what, for want of a better term, we might call “global”
literature, Japanese today seem to be looking for something more than the usual lip
service given to catchphrases like kokusaika (“internationalization”) and gurōbaruka

v
vi Foreword: Breaking Down the Wall of Japanese Literature

(“globalization”). And this is, and always has been, tied to the intricate question of
identity in Japan.
Japan (as a nation) has always struggled with a sense of dual identity: curious
about the outside world, yet insular, even xenophobic, toward that same world.
Certainly, since the Meiji period (1868–1912), and perhaps even before that, there
has been an apparently contradictory urge to be (and be recognized as) the “equal” of
industrialized nations around the world and at the same time to maintain a clear and
unshakeable sense of “being Japanese.” It is a kind of tightrope of identity; let us be
“international,” but let us be cautious not to become too international. The well-
documented efforts of the Japanese government over the past three decades to bring
about the internationalization and globalization of Japanese society are, in fact,
barely concealed attempts to gain respect and market share from the rest of the
world, but on strictly Japanese terms. Japanese schoolchildren are ordered to learn
English and exposed to native English speakers from primary school onward
(witness the growth of the JET Program(me)), but always under carefully controlled
conditions, like studying foreign cultures and languages in a laboratory. Not that I
mean to put this down; at least Japanese schoolchildren are being exposed to some
foreign culture. By contrast, how many American schoolchildren run around trying
to greet foreign visitors to their country in their own languages?
But these efforts are beginning to wear thin. Young Japanese are no longer shying
away from learning real English (and other foreign languages), and they are begin-
ning to do something that many in the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science,
Sports, and Technology (MEXT, for short) probably never envisioned: they are
using their foreign languages to encounter the “other,” a term that will arise often in
this volume to signify cultures and peoples different from themselves. It is a
cornerstone for the cosmopolitan identity, a willingness to meet the difference in
the world and, rather than remark on its foreignness and exoticism, actually join with
that difference, be affected, forever altered, by that encounter. In this spirit, young
Japanese respond positively to the cultural bounty that surrounds their islands; they
travel abroad, live in (as opposed to visit or tour) other countries, picking up what the
world has to offer. And they do this not just to bring new ideas and technologies back
to Japan (as was the practice in the Meiji period, relieving other Japanese of the
burden of going abroad themselves), but to internalize this multicultural knowledge
and understanding, making it a part of themselves, as truly cosmopolitan Japanese.
This is the new Japanese “subject,” and s/he is a rapidly increasing commodity.
Today’s Japanese are different from any of the past; culturally savvy, multilin-
gual, curious about the outside world, and with one additional advantage to their
forebears: access to that world, through technology, and also through opportunity to
go abroad. They are, admittedly, confused about their identity, but rather than
undergoing a “crisis” over this, they revel in their confusion. I see this sense of
delighted confusion every day on my university campus, among students who are
born to Japanese parents, yet have grown up or studied for extended periods abroad.
I see it in others who have one or more non-Japanese parents, yet were born and
raised in Japan. And I hear that same confusion echoed in more conservative visitors
Foreword: Breaking Down the Wall of Japanese Literature vii

to my campus, who ask me, “how many of your students are Japanese?” To which I
usually reply, “How do you define ‘Japanese’?”
There is usually no coherent response to this.
And just as there is no clear definition of what it means to “be Japanese” (despite
decades of discussion through the Nihonjinron (“theory of Japanese”)) debates, there
is no longer any sense of what constitutes “Japanese literature.” Is this supposed to
be merely fiction written by Japanese people? How “Japanese” do they need to be?
Are the thoroughly English novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (who was born in Nagasaki)
actually “Japanese literature”? Should we exclude the novels of Hideo Levy, who
has not a drop of Japanese blood in him, yet writes in Japanese? What about the
various writers of Chinese or Korean ethnicity who have lived their lives in Japan
and write in Japanese as their own mother tongue? Do they count?
What I am trying to say is that the “Haruki Murakami phenomenon” is not a
“Haruki” phenomenon at all, but a global literature phenomenon. It is part of a wider
breakdown of clear-cut cultural and ethnic boundaries in the globalized world. This
phenomenon is familiar enough to many of us who come from diverse, multicultural
societies—the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation, or the USA, to
name only a few—but it scares Japanese conservatives half to death. We might argue
that the phenomenon is named after Murakami in part because the idea of a full-on,
no-holds-barred cultural and ethnic free-for-all is simply not something we are ready
to face in Japan at this time. The “Haruki phenomenon” is still, for many, a Japanese
show, still something in which the Japanese can take pride as the originating culture.
Its localization also allows us, for a moment longer, to ignore its ontological status as
a mere part of something much bigger: the cultural “wave” of the cosmopolitan
sphere that is engulfing the entire planet, Japan along with everywhere else.
But we must also be fair in assigning considerable responsibility to Murakami as
a leading voice in this wave. He did not invent multiculturalism, nor cosmopolitan-
ism, nor the global novel. What he did do—and this may have been purely a stroke of
luck—is to bring the question of cultural heritage and nationalism to the forefront of
the literary debate in Japan. Perhaps it is doubly fortunate that Murakami is a
Japanese writer: in the first place, the world does respect and appreciate Japanese
art; in the second, that same art has always been kept at arm’s length from the world,
hidden behind a jealously guarded wall of cultural mystery. Wakatsuki writes of the
“Big Three” Japanese writers—Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, and Yukio
Mishima—as authors sanctioned for foreign consumption, both by the sincere efforts
of their translators and by virtue of their thoroughly “Japanese” nature. Put another
way, the Japanese literary establishment was happy to have these three writers
represent Japanese literature as a whole, for they were “exotic,” and in some
instances, “unintelligible” to all but a handful of their non-Japanese readers. It was
an idea that appealed to the conservative idea that Japan is a unique culture, truly
accessible only to Japanese. All the world was welcome to have a look, to marvel at
the uniqueness; but further penetration was to be carefully controlled.
Murakami broke down that carefully guarded the cultural wall. And now he
throws eggs at it. It is difficult not to draw analogies with Mikhail Gorbachev,
breaking with his Soviet hardliners and obliging Ronald Reagan’s challenge to “tear
viii Foreword: Breaking Down the Wall of Japanese Literature

down” the Berlin Wall, for Murakami was, in effect, breaking faith with a century of
Japanese literary tradition, redefining the Japanese novel as something that was not
steeped in mysterious cultural signs, nor written in obscure language, but something
clear and accessible even to readers who knew nothing about Japan or its people.
Is it any wonder, then, that the world stepped up to “claim” Murakami as their
own, even as the Japanese literary establishment was busy casting him out? And
Murakami was ready to join with a global readership. The “wave” of his popularity
radiated outward, from a core of readers in Japan to a mass of readers in East Asia,
North America, and Europe, and this was no accident, but a carefully planned
strategy on the part of translators, publicists, and of course, the author himself.
The strategy has worked. Murakami is the recipient of a laundry list of major literary
awards around the world, even as he remains unanointed by the coveted Akutagawa
Prize in his homeland. He probably ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature, if only for what he has done to break down the separating walls of national
literature. But this may also be exactly the reason he will never win it. And as
speculation on this subject arises every year around the beginning of October, it may
well be that the Japanese literary establishment would like him back—perhaps if
they offered him the Akutagawa Prize now? But he probably will not come back. For
he now belongs to the world: a global writer who happens to write in Japanese.
The volume that follows, written by a scholar not of Japanese literature but of
social theory, cultural studies, and cosmopolitanism, take important steps toward
explaining the “Haruki phenomenon” from the perspective of a changing global
cultural scene. It confronts honestly and boldly the identity conflict of “Japanese”
versus “other,” outlines frankly the ambivalence of today’s Japanese subject, and
explores Murakami’s impact on both the Japanese and the global cultural spheres.
Wakatsuki looks unblinkingly at the so-called Nihonjinron debates that sought to
uphold the concept of Japanese uniqueness and was in many cases used to valorize
the Japanese race and culture vis-à-vis the rest of Asia, if not the whole world.
Most importantly, in this volume Wakatsuki positions Murakami himself as a
cosmopolitan; not merely as a Japanese who appreciates the trappings of foreign
cultures (as one might say of Tanizaki or Mishima), but as a human subject who
encounters the cultural “other” in a spirit of openness, hospitality, and tolerance, and
who welcomes the “other” into his own identity, his own worldview, and on a
practical level, into his own professional work as an author.
This is what made Haruki Murakami the ideal writer to break the closed circle of
Japanese literature—to break down the wall, so to speak—and offer himself up as a
voice for the entire world. He may not be the first Japanese writer to exhibit this
quality of openness, but he is the first of his kind to catch the full attention of the
world, as well as his own people, and to “speak” in a language that is intelligible to
all. And this may be the true “phenomenon” of Haruki Murakami.

Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan Matthew C. Strecher

November, 2019
Acknowledgements

Like many monographs of this kind, this work began life as a doctoral dissertation. I
am deeply indebted to Paul Jones and Claudia Tazreiter at the University of New
South Wales in Sydney for their valuable advice in the fields of cultural studies and
sociology. I extend thanks as well to Jocelyn Pixley and Kimiko Kimoto for their
help and encouragement during my postdoctoral research. I would like to express my
gratitude to some former colleagues at the Embassy of Canada in Tokyo, particularly
to Deborah Lyons and Christine Nakamura, for their encouragement to pursue my
academic studies. Understanding multiculturalism in Australia and Canada has led
me to investigate cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization. Thanks are due to my
dear friends Karl Vollmer, Kyung-Ae Han, Russell, Maria, Atsuko, and Tae-Yong,
for always being there for me, from various parts of the world. I also wish to express
my appreciation to the members of various graduate seminars in contemporary
Japanese literature at Sophia University, who were my real-life inspirations and
models of everyday cosmopolitanism.
I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the instructor of that seminar,
Professor Matthew Strecher at Sophia University, without whom this monograph
would never have materialized. His continued support throughout the course of
preparing the manuscript empowered me to carry out and complete this journey. I
am also deeply grateful to editors Rebecca Zhu, Carolyn Zhang, Chino Hasebe, and
Yoshio Saito at Springer for their constant advice and support and for their appar-
ently endless patience as I moved through the painstaking process of revising the
final manuscript.
On a personal note, my interest in cultural identity goes back to the early
childhood of living abroad, and my late mother’s war-time experience as a Japanese
girl born in Sakhalin was what inspired me to pursue the idea of identity and
belonging. I thank my parents and family for their trust and encouragement. And
last, but certainly not least, I am truly grateful to my husband, Noboru, for always
believing in me. Thank you for being my personal cheerleader all along, even though
you have never read Haruki Murakami!

ix
Notes

Pronunciation and Name Order

Conforming with the publisher’s standards, macrons have not been used in this text
to indicate Japanese long vowels, except in the titles of Murakami’s works, names of
Japanese authors, including their works, and Japanese literary terms of relevance.
Those of Murakami’s works which have been translated are initially given with their
original Japanese titles (written phonetically) and thereafter are cited using their
English titles. Works not yet translated are given with their Japanese titles.
Japanese names are given in the Western order, with a given name followed by
surname. However, citations of Japanese-language sources and of scholarly English-
language sources in which the original Japanese order is used are shown in their
original order.

Translation of Japanese Sources

All translations from Japanese sources are done by the author of this manuscript,
unless noted otherwise.

Permissions

Portions of Chap. 4 are reprinted here with the kind permission of Sense Publishers.
The original material appeared in ‘The Haruki Phenomenon and Everyday Cosmo-
politanism: Belonging as a “Citizen of the World”’. In: M. Strecher and P. Thomas
(eds) Haruki Murakami: Challenging Authors, pp. 1–16.

xi
xii Notes

Portions of Chap. 5 originally appeared in “Haruki Murakami as a Cosmopolitan

Phenomenon: from ‘Ordinary’ to ‘Celebrity’.” Celebrity Studies Journal 9(2) (April
2018), pp. 248–254, and are used with permission.
Contents

1 Introduction: A Cosmopolitan Roadmap to the Haruki

Phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Is Murakami World Literature? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and the “Other World” . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3 Introducing the Chapters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and Haruki-Mania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.1 The Haruki Phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2 Identity and Belonging, as a Cosmopolitan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.3 After the Speeches in Jerusalem and Barcelona . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.4 Murakami’s Cosmopolitan Commitment in Colorless Tsukuru
Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.5 Le Mal du Pays: Past Memories and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.6 In Search of the “Right Place” of Belonging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3 Is Murakami “un-Japanese”?: The Myth of “Japaneseness” . . . . . . . 33
3.1 The Myth of “Japaneseness” and the Nihonjinron Discourse . . . . . . 34
3.2 The watakushi shōsetsu and the Japanese Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.3 The Language of the New Meiji Subject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.4 Novel Subjects for a New Nation-State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
3.5 Lost Identity: Westernization and Japanization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
4 A Friend of the “Egg”: Murakami Speaks in Jerusalem . . . . . . . . . . 55
4.1 As a Novelist and an Individual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.2 From Cosmopolitan Exile to Cosmopolitan Commitment . . . . . . . . 58
4.3 What Is the System? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
4.4 Representations of the System in Murakami’s Works . . . . . . . . . . . 63

xiii
xiv Contents

4.5 “The System Is Being Created by Us” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

4.6 Breaking Through the Wall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
5 An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
5.1 The Haruki Phenomenon and the Question of Japaneseness . . . . . . 76
5.2 A New Cosmopolite Japaneseness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
5.3 The Two Currents of the Haruki Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5.4 An Array of Gatekeepers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
5.5 To Be Engaged in a Silent Conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
6 Conclusion: In Search of Belonging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
6.1 Investigating the “Everyday” and “Otherness” in Murakami
and Shaun Tan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
6.2 The “Other World” or “Another World” in Between? . . . . . . . . . . . 101
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Chapter 1
Introduction: A Cosmopolitan Roadmap
to the Haruki Phenomenon

Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) is one of the most renowned Japanese authors in the
world today. Since his debut in 1979, Murakami has been at the forefront of
innovation in contemporary Japanese literature. His works are translated into over
50 languages, and his increasing popularity on a global scale is often referred to as
the “Haruki Murakami phenomenon” (Murakami Haruki genshō). The Haruki
phenomenon is not just a literary phenomenon surrounding a popular writer, but
mirrors a social phenomenon in progress on a global scale. It also harmonizes with
“the emergence of cosmopolitanism within everyday spheres” (Kendall et al. 2009,
p. 101), which I term “everyday cosmopolitanism.” By everyday cosmopolitanism I
mean an approach to one’s place in the world that admits to a sense of belonging
anywhere—the essence of cosmopolitanism in general—but without the elitist over-
tones of “frequent travelers” that regularly taint that concept (Calhoun 2002).
Calhoun’s argument that cosmopolitan liberals are elitists, whose views represent
their privileged position, while those without the resources may be compromised, is
understandable. Cosmopolitanism, however, has diversified over the years with
variations that focus upon the lives of people in the “real world,” such as “banal
cosmopolitanism” (Beck 2002), “rooted cosmopolitanism” (Appiah 1997), and
“everyday cosmopolitanism” (Rantanen 2005). As a reflection of this trend, the
cosmopolitan project today promotes communication and understanding at every
level of society; not only by elite cosmopolitan travelers but increasingly among
more ordinary people who migrate, travel, or meet in virtual space or gain experience
through various media.
The word “cosmopolitan” is derived from the Greek word kosmos, meaning
“universe” or “world,” and polis, meaning “city” or “state,” and the ideal of being
kosmopolites is traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope
(404–323 BCE), who claimed to be a “citizen of the world.”1 Little is known about
Diogenes, an exile who sought a “new way of living as a kosmopolites” (Yamakawa

1
There are other views that the birth of Diogenes is 412 BCE.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 1

T. Wakatsuki, The Haruki Phenomenon,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7549-5_1
2 1 Introduction: A Cosmopolitan Roadmap to the Haruki Phenomenon

2015, p. 15), which, in his case, probably meant one who is virtually independent
from city-state affiliations. Diogenes left no written texts, but his ideal of cosmo-
politanism was advanced by Zeno (334–262 BCE), the founder of Stoicism, whose
interpretation of universal citizenship established the foundation of Roman Stoicism,
and was probably somewhat closer to the concept of cosmopolitanism known to us
today.
The concept resurfaced some two millennia later, in the latter years of the
eighteenth century, when Immanuel Kant effectively reconstructed the legacy of
cosmopolitanism in moral and political terms, asserting in his 1795 essay, Perpetual
Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, that the establishment of a cosmopolitanism ideal
was critical for bringing peace to the European nations after centuries of recurring
conflict. This Kantian spirit of cosmopolitanism was reinvigorated in the late
twentieth century, owing to the prevalence of globalization and subsequent decline
of the nation-state system.
It may seem astonishing, yet it probably should not be, that more than 2000 years
after the idea of kosmopolites was conceived, Diogenes’ “original image of the world
citizen” (Yamakawa 2015) remains critical in the modern era. His declaration of
belonging to the world as an “individual” is, in fact, more apt today than ever, as the
world goes global and people turn ubiquitous. Indeed, the idea of belonging to a
“world without borders” is highly pertinent today, for we live in a world where
borders shift, disappear, and re-appear. Increasingly, people are participating in
cross-border activities represented by global NGOs such as Doctors Without Bor-
ders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Reporters Without Borders, Democracy
Without Borders, and many more, each in their individual capacity. The ever-
growing inter-connectedness of the world undoubtedly finds a strong connection
with cosmopolitanism. Due to the dramatic rise in mobility via more rapid modes of
transportation (airplanes, etc.), and “cyber-mobility” (Internet), migration (short-
term and long-term), as well as displacement (refugees, etc.), cosmopolitanism in
the everyday sphere has become quite commonplace.
Increasingly, people are becoming “cosmopolitans,” and this is where we see the
development of the Haruki phenomenon intimately linked to the idea of everyday
cosmopolitanism. Rather than encountering an exotic Japan through Murakami’s
writing, readers outside of Japan enjoy engaging with the stories themselves. They
describe feelings of affinity and identify themselves with the characters or their
social surroundings. At the same time, readers embrace the new “Japaneseness”
projected by Murakami that nurtures the sense of belonging beyond national or
cultural borders.
This was exemplified at the international symposium “A Wild Haruki Chase—
How the World Reads Murakami Literature,” which was convened in Tokyo in
2006.2 The translators participating from various countries claimed they had found a
new “Japaneseness” they could relate to, one that differed strikingly from traditional

2
The international symposium “A Wild Haruki Chase—How the World Reads Murakami Litera-
ture” was organized on March 25–26, 2006 at the University of Tokyo.
1.1 Is Murakami World Literature? 3

Japanese literature.3 Mainstream Japanese critics, on the other hand, argued that it
was Murakami’s “non-national” (mukokuseki) feature—westernized settings of his
novels as well as his unadorned “plainstyle”—that made his works accessible to an
overseas readership. This monograph is about many things. First, it is about this
perplexingly contradictory issue of “Japaneseness,” in the context of the growing
sense of a global cultural sphere—that is, one that transcends national and linguistic
borders. It is equally about how this seeming paradox relates to what I term
Murakami’s “cosmopolitan turn,” that is, his return from a solitary exile to pursue
instead social commitment toward his Japanese readership.

1.1 Is Murakami World Literature?

Since its conception in ancient Greece, the idea of cosmopolitanism has been
founded upon the principle of openness. Cosmopolitan consciousness does not
subscribe to the idea of building walls for the sake of establishing a sense of
belonging to a certain territory. Delanty and Inglis note, from a historical–geograph-
ical context, how the shift from Greek city-states to the Hellenistic Empire
expanding beyond Greek territory may have elicited the ideal of kosmopolites. “In
this vast trading and cultural world. . . the social conditions were established for a
new way of thinking that opened the hitherto closed world of the polis to a wider and
more globally connected world” (Delanty and Inglis 2010, p. 3). This suggests that
kosmopolites, from its beginning, refers to a mode that seeks connection beyond
borders.
Now, with contact between people and cultures increasing on a global scale,
“cosmopolitanism has . . . become seen as a way of life as much as a sense of political
or ethical obligation to the world as a whole” (Holton 2009, p. 2; my italics). While
the modern interpretation of cosmopolitanism is primarily focused on the political or
ethical dimension, due mostly to Kant’s proclamation of “cosmopolitan human
rights” and “cosmopolitan law,” the cultural dimension of cosmopolitanism may
have been overlooked. In this regard, Holton’s claim above, that cosmopolitanism is
“a way of life,” is pertinent. Since cultural cosmopolitanism is more focused upon
everyday matters, such as constantly changing lifestyles and the identities of indi-
viduals and communities, it is in line with the notion of everyday cosmopolitanism
that pays attention to a broader range of globally mobile people and their sense of
belonging. Today, many will find this concept of belonging with the world quite
familiar, since we are already connected by the Internet and by our use of mobile
devices and social media in our everyday lives.4 In this respect, literary works are no
exception to other cultural artifacts such as music, movies, and images, among

3
According to the official report of the event, 23 translators, writers, and researchers from 17 coun-
tries were present.
4
Social networking services (SNS) such as Facebook, Twitter, among others.
4 1 Introduction: A Cosmopolitan Roadmap to the Haruki Phenomenon

others, that are increasingly being shared in the global cultural sphere. And no
Japanese writer in modern memory has been more shared than Haruki Murakami.
The universal appeal of Murakami’s works raises the question of whether they
should be classified as world literature. The term Weltliteratur [world literature] was
originally conceived by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to describe the expanding
publishing marketplace of the early nineteenth century. In more recent times, David
Damrosch has defined world literature as “works that circulate beyond their culture
of origin” (2003, p. 4), that is, works that can be read and are read in translation by
foreign audiences. Furthermore, Damrosch designates this as a mode of circulation
and of reading (2003, p. 5). The proliferation of Murakami’s works epitomizes
world literature today, considering the number of languages and geographical
markets in which translations of his works are available.
Following Damrosch’s definition above, for instance, Mitsuyoshi Numano con-
tends that Murakami fits the model of world literature on account of the global scale
of his readership and the popularity of his work. This approach to world literature
offers a new perspective on the Haruki phenomenon, one that departs from the
traditional boundaries of literature grounded in national cultures and languages.
Numano’s argument is that Murakami’s literary work does not take a singular
form, but produces multiple diversified variables corresponding to the number of
languages and translators. The key here, obviously, is translation; Numano insists
that world literature is a ubiquitous form of art that circulates in various cultural
contexts through translation, and translation enables each work to begin a new life in
a new context.
Murakami’s translators were not only instrumental in disseminating his works in
various languages, but they were the ones who developed and established the Haruki
phenomenon. In my opinion, these translators were themselves cosmopolitans, who
became proponents of Murakami upon encountering his work. And there is much to
see in the relationship between the author and the translator that reflects everyday
cosmopolitanism. According to Damrosch, “literature stays within its national or
regional tradition when it usually loses in translation, whereas works become world
literature when they gain on balance in translation” (2003, p. 289), which suggests
that there is value added to the work through a successful translation. As Numano
observes, Murakami’s work is “cultivating new horizons for world literature by
invalidating the binary opposition to determine whether a work is Japanese or
Western and, related to this, whether it is entertainment or pure literature” (2006,
p. 239). The idea of opening a new horizon by transcending traditional boundaries,
particularly those boundaries that promote dichotomies of the sort noted above, is a
cosmopolitan outlook that is most likely shared by both the author and his
translators.
1.2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and the “Other World” 5

1.2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and the “Other World”

As we have seen, the Haruki phenomenon is inextricably tied to the development of

cosmopolitanism. At the same time, it demonstrates that a global cultural sphere,
which renders the boundaries of national cultures obsolete, has emerged. In this
sphere, the traditional polarization of West and East is no longer relevant and the
binary system of ideas from which it derived—central versus peripheral, universal
versus provincial, high culture versus sub-culture, etc.—seems meaningless. While
Murakami’s global popularity is often attributed to Japan’s astounding economic
impact during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as subsequent interest toward modern
Japanese culture, there is something out of the ordinary in his works that lures
readers in this extensive cultural sphere. What do those Harukists, who seem
omnipresent these days, seek in his works? Is there anything that could be called
“cosmopolitan” about his novels? And most importantly, how does everyday cos-
mopolitanism come into play in all these questions?
One distinctive feature of Murakami’s work is its cultural neutrality, the impar-
tiality that may serve as a medium in the global cultural sphere. For instance, his
novels often lack geographical affiliation, and this enables readers to sympathize
with the characters and their situations more readily. References to Western culture,
such as jazz and classical music, or foodstuffs like beer and sandwiches, situated in
the everyday life of the characters, promote the impression that the plot might be
unfolding anywhere—any modern city—not necessarily in Japan. In addition,
Murakami employs globalized icons, such as McDonalds, Colonel Sanders, and
Johnnie Walker, that are found in every developed location in the world, and thus
belong to all. While these may be acknowledged as “cosmopolitan” features that
make his works accessible to readers everywhere, the appeal of Murakami’s fiction
cannot be confined to such specifics. The Haruki phenomenon may have emerged
from the global cultural sphere, but our interest lies in identifying what, in
Murakami’s fictional works, attracts each and every one of those readers. Given
the scale of the phenomenon, it is fair to say that Murakami has readers all over the
world, and there must be some commonly shared quality, besides those universal
symbols and icons, that captures the heart of this global readership. This is an issue,
along with the relevance of everyday cosmopolitanism, that is explored in this
volume.
The grounding of the everyday cosmopolitanism that we see in Murakami’s
writing relates to what might be called the inner and outer self, or the inner and
outer worlds in which the Murakami protagonist plays his role. The Murakami hero
freely moves back and forth between his inner and outer self, modes of conscious-
ness and unconsciousness, real and unreal, and so represents a constant interaction
between the self and the other, even in the same individual. This is made possible by
what Strecher (2014) terms the “other world” or “metaphysical realm”. He asserts
that it is “the most central and significant facet of Murakami’s fictional landscape”
(2014, p. 16), noting that
6 1 Introduction: A Cosmopolitan Roadmap to the Haruki Phenomenon

(. . .) it leads us to what the author has termed the inner monogatari, or “narrative,” a key part
of the inner “core self” that grounds and informs the conscious self, while simultaneously
tapping into the collective Narrative, with a capital N, that results from the entire history—
even the prehistory—of human experience (Strecher 2014, p. 16).

The metaphysical realm, according to Strecher, is “tied inextricably to the notion

of the inner self and the inner ‘narrative’ that feeds and nurtures the development of
that self in the real world” (2014, p. 16). Indeed, Murakami’s heroes commonly set
out on a quest, enter the “other world,” and return as someone fully-grown, as seen in
the cases of Kafka on the Shore (2005), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Colorless
Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, and most recently in Killing
Commendatore. The 14-year-old protagonist in Kafka on the Shore travels to
Shikoku, where he finds refuge in a small library surrounded by a deep forest. In
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Toru Okada climbs down to the bottom of a well in an
endeavor to rescue his missing wife, Kumiko. As indicated in the title Colorless
Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Tsukuru’s journey to Finland turns out
to be yet another case of entering the forest, where he confronts his memories. And
the unnamed protagonist of Killing Commendatore attempts to resolve all the
mysteries and save everyone, including himself, by making his way through a
mountain cave. There can be little doubt but that all of these realms—the forest,
the well, and the cave—denote the “other world.”
Pursuing Strecher’s contention regarding Murakami’s “narrative” above, we face
the question: how does this metaphysical realm correlate with the “real” world? In
this respect, Killing Commendatore exemplifies the issue of the collective uncon-
scious, or what Strecher refers to as the collective Narrative “with a capital N” (2014,
p. 16). A more in-depth textual analysis will be carried out in Chap. 4 of this
monograph, but a brief introduction here may prove useful for the later discussion.
A key figure in Killing Commendatore is the eponymous, fantasy-like character
“Kishidanchō” (Commendatore), who emerges from underground—already a sign
that he comes from/belongs to the metaphysical realm. This enigmatic figure, who
declares himself “Idea,” guides the protagonist throughout the course of the novel.
We are certainly justified in linking the “Idea” to the “collective unconscious,” for
Murakami himself has explained that “the Commendatore (Idea) is possibly a
collected body of the alter-egos of the characters. Something like a mirror that
reflects all the different aspects of those characters.” (2019, p. 13). This suggests
that the Idea’s role is not limited to guiding the protagonist, but to navigating the
whole narrative, which the author maintains “is naturally themed on exploring . . .
(the realm of) the unconscious or subconscious” (2019, p. 12).
The protagonist of Killing Commendatore, like many Murakami heroes, is
someone who is “lost.” Although he seems rather self-contained at the outset, the
36-year-old painter is actually suffering from the trauma of his wife suddenly leaving
him. In truth, he is desperately in need of restoring himself in order to carry on with
his life. “Idea” assists him, following more or less exactly the same pattern Strecher
describes with regard to how the metaphysical realm is used, “establishing,
maintaining, or otherwise protecting individual identity . . . while at the same time
establishing contact with others” (Strecher 2014, p. 25). The protagonist strives to
1.3 Introducing the Chapters 7

identify his own “self,” or the internal narrative, by drawing portraits, and the reader
sees him evolve, from an isolated nobody into a “hero” in this metaphysical realm.
The transformation from detachment to commitment demonstrated by the pro-
tagonist is similarly found in a number of Murakami’s other works, including
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which addresses the issue
of identity and belonging. By re-establishing his identity, the protagonist Tsukuru is
able to pursue belonging with the other, which is comparable to the process followed
by the protagonist of Killing Commendatore. The metaphysical realm, or the “other
world,” facilitates their progress, for the struggle to establish one’s identity is
equivalent to dealing with one’s inner self. It is a journey to the inner self that
cannot be accomplished anywhere except through the process of internal dialogue.
In the case of Killing Commendatore, this process is largely reflected in the pro-
tagonist’s drawing of portraits, as the novel depicts how, through this process, he
becomes “engaged” with the other—a truly cosmopolitan quality.
It is also important to note that Murakami embodies what is described as the
cosmopolitan individual “who plays a role in diffusing or sowing the seeds of
cosmopolitanism” (Kendall et al. 2009, p. 101). Whether Murakami is aware of
this or not, his widely remarked transition from detachment to commitment in the
mid-1990s, and his highly controversial Jerusalem speech in 2009, are two key
occasions that clearly demonstrate such a tendency. The Jerusalem speech, given on
the occasion of Murakami’s being awarded the Jerusalem Prize, has come to be
known also as the “Walls and Eggs” speech, for in it, Murakami describes social and
political systems as “a high wall,” and individuals as “eggs,” hurling themselves at it
in futile—even suicidal —acts of resistance. In the Jerusalem speech, he famously
declares himself to be a “friend of the egg,” establishing his support for the
vulnerable human being confronting the “wall” that represents institutional power.
In fact, Murakami’s conscious decision to “become engaged,” can be identified as
early as 1992 in a public lecture he delivered at Berkeley, in which the author states
his desire to become engaged with the people of the world, as an individual Japanese
writer. Notably, this intention to connect to the world as an individual is consistent
with the notion of kosmopolites—the “original image of the world citizen”
(Yamakawa 2015) represented by Diogenes. Despite being an extraordinary cosmo-
politan—whose celebrity status is undeniable—Murakami aspires to remain an
individual with a cosmopolitan sense of belonging. In this monograph, we will
discover that Murakami represents a contemporary mode of cosmopolitan identity,
and the Haruki phenomenon reaffirms that everyday cosmopolitanism is at the core
of this global sensation.

1.3 Introducing the Chapters

This monograph will explore the idea of a burgeoning cosmopolitan identity through
a socio-cultural analysis of Murakami. The central interest will be on his global
popularity, widely known as the “Haruki phenomenon” and how it relates to the
8 1 Introduction: A Cosmopolitan Roadmap to the Haruki Phenomenon

flourishing idea of cosmopolitanism. Murakami’s identity as a writer has been

subject to question at home due to his perceived lack of “Japaneseness.” His novels
are typically situated in a kind of “no place” setting, and his protagonists display a
strong sense of individuality. While some Japanese critics disapprove of Murakami’s
work for its “stateless-ness,” its rootless sense of “non-belonging,” it is also true that
his works have been translated into over 50 languages, and he is acclaimed as the
most popular contemporary Japanese writer in the world.
How are we to account for such a contradiction? Is Murakami “un-Japanese,” as
mainstream literary critics contend at home, or does the author represent a new
“Japaneseness,” a new cultural model for which he is highly acclaimed overseas?
My aim is to demystify this puzzle, and to propose the idea of “everyday cosmo-
politanism” as a useful concept for addressing the novel mode of “belonging” that is
embodied by this writer and his works.
Cosmopolitanism has become increasingly relevant for the study of world soci-
eties affected by globalization. Kendall et al. (2009) classify scholarship on global-
ization by the economic, the political, the technological, and the cultural fields,
establishing how cosmopolitanism, as “the positive face of globalization” (2009,
p. 2), correlates with these areas. They observe that cosmopolitanism can be con-
sidered chiefly as the political and cultural manifestation of the globalization pro-
cess. According to their classification, discussions of cosmopolitan law and
cosmopolitan rights fall under the political dimension, for the issue of citizenship
in a globalized world is of particular interest. The cultural dimension is intimately
tied to technological and economic elements, for this is an area that concerns
mobility. Although mobility alone does not make people cosmopolitans, trans-
border migration is considered a key factor for conceiving cosmopolitanism. Simi-
larly, the borderless connections provided by technological advancements also play
a major role in promoting cultural cosmopolitanism.
The Haruki phenomenon coincides with the kind of globalization process
described above, as this socio-cultural phenomenon began to spread in the late
1980s and has continued to develop over the years. Without question Murakami’s
literary work stands firmly at the core, but he is referred to as a “phenomenon” owing
to the unprecedented social impact his works have had, beginning in Japan and
gradually spreading to other areas in the world. In Japan, Noruwei no mori (1987;
translated in 1989b as Norwegian Wood) became a record-breaking bestseller that
made Murakami a celebrity overnight. The excitement soon traveled to other East
Asian countries, where translations of Norwegian Wood (2000b) became bestsellers,
followed by coffee shops and bars named after Murakami’s novels, exerting a
popular influence over life and culture of the young generation.
Another wave of the Haruki phenomenon arose in the USA and Europe, with the
publication of Hitsuji o meguru bōken (1982; translated in 1989a as A Wild Sheep
Chase). As will be discussed in Chap. 5, the success of A Wild Sheep Chase
established Murakami’s position as a new voice from Japan and a potential successor
to the “Big Three” of modern Japanese literature: Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari
Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima. Indeed Murakami was a departure from native
1.3 Introducing the Chapters 9

essentialist approaches to Japanese literature, and changed the perception of the

outside world toward contemporary Japanese culture and society.
Bearing in mind that Murakami is a novelist, the most critical source of the
Haruki phenomenon must be located in his literary output. Murakami’s celebrity
often raises the question of whether his work is to be considered world literature,
sometimes in comparison with Harry Potter, simply for the scale of its popularity in
the global market. As discussed earlier, the Haruki phenomenon may appear to
embody Damrosch’s “world literature,” but this is not the course that we will follow.
The approach taken in this volume will be to investigate how everyday cosmopol-
itanism interrelates with the Haruki phenomenon, and to identify a cosmopolitan
moment that is shared by his readers. Since there are numerous studies that offer
textual analysis of Murakami’s literary texts, my aim will be to distinguish this
cosmopolitan moment through a comprehensive investigation of various sources,
including speeches, interviews, and essays, as well as some of his recent
fictional work.
Chapter 2 will show how the Haruki phenomenon correlates with the idea of
“everyday cosmopolitanism.” By analyzing the socio-cultural phenomenon in Japan
and abroad, Murakami’s unprecedented popularity as a global writer is closely
examined. His “cosmopolitan turn,” from detachment to commitment, during the
mid-1990s is the key to understanding the global reach of the Haruki phenomenon
thereafter. Murakami returned to Japan from his voluntary “exile” in the USA after
the events of the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo subway attacks by the Aum
Shinrikyo cult. His decision to be engaged with Japanese society and to assume
responsibilities as a novelist, in my view, demonstrates his nascent cosmopolitan
quality. This evolved into his cosmopolitan commitment, culminating in his pledge,
that he will always “stand on the side of the egg.” The epoch-making Jerusalem
Speech will be discussed later in detail, but this chapter will examine the repercus-
sions of this speech and the Barcelona speech, which was delivered after the Great
Eastern earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011.
Both occasions demonstrate Murakami’s aspiration of belonging as a “citizen of
the world,” and my argument is that his work offers a new way of belonging as a
cosmopolitan in the everyday sphere. In order to explore further the inquiry on
identity and belonging, Shikisai o motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, kare no junrei no toshi
(2013; translated 2014 as Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage)
will be closely analyzed. This novel is regarded as Murakami’s response to the
catastrophic disaster in 2011, and, therefore, critical to exploring the author’s
reaction and how it is rendered.
The question of Murakami’s “Japaneseness” is a recurrent matter of concern since
his début in 1979. By investigating the reasons for which Murakami was critically
dismissed by literary authorities in Japan, Chap. 3 will unravel how such criticism is
deeply rooted in the Nihonjinron discourse. Literally translated as “theory of the
Japanese,” this popular discourse promotes an ethnocentric ideology based on the
myth of Japaneseness. A thorough investigation of the Nihonjinron discourse will
help us to demystify why there is a stark contrast between the reception of
Murakami’s work at home, and its reception overseas.
10 1 Introduction: A Cosmopolitan Roadmap to the Haruki Phenomenon

Beginning from the postwar publication of American anthropologist Ruth

Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture
(1967) [1946], the Nihonjinron discourse permeates every level of Japanese
society until the present. Critical studies and analyses by scholars from various
fields will show that Nihonjinron promotes Japanese cultural identity by
establishing the myth of “Japanese uniqueness.” In order to understand further
how this notion of “Japaneseness” relates to Murakami, the literary genre of the
watakushi shōsetsu (I-novel), as well as the historical construction of the
Nihonjinron discourse, will be examined.
While the perception of “Japaneseness” as an inherent national culture was part of
the nation-building process for the Meiji government, the issue of “lost identity,” as a
result of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, is also a strong motivating force
behind the need to establish a unique Japanese cultural identity. In this respect, the
Nobel laureate speech delivered by Japanese novelist Kenzaburō Ōe in 1994,
entitled “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself,” clearly demonstrates the struggle
between Westernization and Japanization. Ōe’s reflection of his own experience as
a child when the war ended is a testimony of the contradiction felt and suffered.
Today, Murakami’s readership indicates that cultural boundaries are blurring and
“Japaneseness” is no longer a major deterrent to non-Japanese readers around the
world who wish to read and appreciate Japanese literature. Both as a novelist and as
an individual, Murakami departs from this collectively imposed cultural identity and
represents a shift toward a new cosmopolitan identity that seeks belonging as a
“citizen of the world.”
In Chap. 4, what I term Murakami’s “cosmopolitan turn,” which applies to his
widely acknowledged shift from detachment to commitment in the 1990s, will be
reviewed in some detail. It is generally understood that this shift owes much to the
aforementioned two major incidents that took place in Japan in 1995, although it
appears that Murakami was already contemplating ways to assume his responsibility
as a Japanese novelist even prior to these events. In The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki
Murakami (2014), Strecher reveals that Murakami “was beginning to feel a sense of
responsibility to his readers and to Japanese literature” (2014, p. 12), which he bases
on an interview he conducted with the author in October of 1994. This was prior to
the completion of Nejimakidori kuronikuru (1994–1996; translated as The Wind-Up
Bird Chronicle), which Murakami was writing in the USA. Strecher argues that the
gap between the first two volumes of this novel and the third indicates a kind of
ambivalence on the part of the author, who was “poised atop the dividing line
between self-absorption and social commitment, at that precise moment” (2014,
p. 13), and the two major incidents in 1995 “confirmed in Murakami his sense of
commitment to the Japanese people and his own sense of duty to play a role in the
improvement of that society” (2014, p. 15). Keeping this in mind, my analysis will
show that this was a transition from cosmopolitan exile to cosmopolitan commitment
that commenced in 1995, and manifested itself fully on the occasion of the Jerusalem
speech in 2009.
The publication of Andāguraundo (Murakami 1997a; translated in 2000a as
Underground), a non-fictional collection of interviews with victims of the sarin
1.3 Introducing the Chapters 11

gas attacks, confirms Murakami’s early commitment to Japanese society. By

interviewing both the victims and, in a subsequent book, the assailants of the
dreadful event, the author seeks to portray what he calls the “blind nightmare”
(Murakami 1997a, p. 721), referring to the state of chaos and despair felt by
members of Japanese society for being without a clue as to the cause of the terrible
incident. From this time onwards, Murakami seeks to develop a narrative that resists
the “System,” the overbearing social structure which deprives us of our autonomous
individuality. It is a subject about which the author continues to inquire even now.
More than a decade later, upon receiving the Jerusalem Prize in 2009, Murakami
delivered a speech entitled “Of Walls and Eggs,” in which he described this
“System” metaphorically as a powerful wall, against which the individual,
metaphorized as an “egg,” hurled himself in resistance. Murakami vowed that he
would “always stand on the side of the Egg” to resist that System. Speaking as a
novelist and as an individual, Murakami’s cosmopolitan outlook is manifested in this
speech, as he emphasized his individuality over any other type of belonging or
representation. The significance of the System will be explored through a review of
the various representations of state power and other forms of collective coercion in
his works. Finally, Murakami’s latest novel, Kishidanchō-goroshi (2017; translated
in 2018 as Killing Commendatore), will be analyzed to expose the continuation of
the novelist’s cosmopolitan commitment.
For further investigation of identity and belonging, in Chap. 5 we will return to
the subject of everyday cosmopolitanism and the Haruki phenomenon. The question
of “Japaneseness” will be revisited, with particular interest in how it opposes the
cosmopolitan notion embodied by the Haruki phenomenon.
Murakami’s global popularity was instigated by his gatekeepers, most of whom
are translators who studied Japanese language and literature. Without their individ-
ual mobility and initiative—to travel to Japan and study the language and culture, or
to approach their local publishers to disseminate Murakami’s works—it is rather
questionable whether the Haruki phenomenon would have developed on a global
scale.
The extensive number of languages into which Murakami’s works have been
translated confirms that this is a global project enabled by those individual translators
and gatekeepers. Doubtless, their cosmopolitan encounters with Murakami’s works
are what gave birth to this trans-border movement. Needless to say, Murakami’s
“non-national” (mukokuseki) style, applied to his literary works as well as his
lifestyle, proved conducive to nurturing those gatekeepers as well. The Haruki
phenomenon encapsulates the effect of everyday cosmopolitanism in shaping a
new way of identity and belonging in the world today.
In the pages that follow, we will encounter a cosmopolitan novelist, unleashed
upon the world at precisely the moment that national and cultural borders were
beginning to give way to the early stages of a modern globalization that would
flower more fully after the close of the twentieth century. What were the stakes of
“identity” for this writer, both as he debuted in the late 1970s, and after he became a
superstar? What has caused the “Haruki phenomenon,” not from the perspective of
literary merit, but in terms of social and cultural theory? What has Murakami’s
12 1 Introduction: A Cosmopolitan Roadmap to the Haruki Phenomenon

“cosmopolitan turn” meant to Japanese literature, or to world literature? What

follows will, I hope, be an extraordinary journey into the everyday cosmopolitan
mindset of Haruki Murakami that will shed light onto the process and effect of his
encounter with the cultural other. As we shall discover, that encounter, which
ultimately led to the author’s “cosmopolitan turn,” would resonate for four decades
with readers throughout the world, and change the very nature of both “Japanese”
and “literature” for all time.

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Chapter 2
Everyday Cosmopolitanism
and Haruki-Mania

This chapter will provide a close look into Haruki Murakami’s transformation as a
novelist and how his “cosmopolitan turn,” from detachment to commitment, may
have promoted the Haruki phenomenon as a global event. The aim here is to provide
an alternative approach to Murakami and his work, that contributes to resolve any
possible misunderstandings that seem to persist at home in Japan, particularly on the
issue of Japaneseness.
In what follows, we shall explore Murakami’s cosmopolitan commitment by
reviewing his non-fictional texts such as speeches, interviews, essays, and Shikisai
o motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, kare no junrei no toshi (2013; translated 2014 as
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage), a novel published after the
Great Eastern Japan earthquake and tsunami of March 11th (now known as “3.11” in
Japan). The key question here is identity and belonging, and by investigating the
cosmopolitan qualities of the writer, we will continue to explore this enquiry into the
possibility of “cosmopolitan identity” and belonging as a “citizen of the world.”
Murakami undeniably is the most popular contemporary Japanese author, but his
identity as a Japanese writer has been frequently challenged at home due to his “un-
Japaneseness.” This is something we can reflect on by exploring the Haruki phe-
nomenon and how it connects to the emergent ideal of cosmopolitanism that
advocates a new way of belonging.

2.1 The Haruki Phenomenon

The Haruki phenomenon has become an increasingly critical subject for the discus-
sion of Haruki Murakami as a global writer and how the social phenomenon relates
to a growing cosmopolitan cultural sphere. The global popularity of this writer is a
social phenomenon that is implicitly connected to the globalization process during
the last few decades. Studies have shown (see Japan Foundation 2008; Fujii 2007)
that there are variations of this phenomenon depending on the region, language,

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 13

T. Wakatsuki, The Haruki Phenomenon,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7549-5_2
14 2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and Haruki-Mania

societal changes, and time period. For example, in Japan, where the expression
“Haruki phenomenon” was first coined by newspapers in mid-1980s, it denoted the
overwhelming popularity of Haruki Murakami among the young generation of
readers that embraced the urban lifestyle of the protagonists of his novels. After
Noruwei no mori (1987; translated 1989, 2000a as Norwegian Wood) achieved a
record sale of over four million copies, the writer’s sensational success in Japan was
established as the Haruki phenomenon. Due to its sales in Japan, Norwegian Wood
was soon translated and published in countries such as Taiwan, Korea, and Hong
Kong, developing the initial phase of the Haruki phenomenon in East Asia from the
late 1980s.
The Haruki phenomenon in East Asia centers around Norwegian Wood. This
story of loss and isolation is commonly cited as the primary reason for attracting
young readers in the region to Murakami’s writing. In Korea, it was released in 1989
under the title Sōshitsu no Sedai [The lost generation], which resonated with the
“386 generation” (Kim 2008). This particular generation, born in the 1960s, and
actively involved in the democracy movement of the 1980s, symbolized socio-
economic changes in South Korean society at the time. Reaching their thirties, as
indicated in the number “three,” this generation had experienced a shared sense of
loss after the failure of the widespread student movements, and become the core
readership that supported Murakami’s rise to prominence in the 1990s. The
Murakami boom spread following the government lift of its ban against Japanese
culture that began in 1998, and eventually Norwegian Wood became a “must-read”
for young Korean students along with J.D. Salinger’s The catcher in the rye (Kim
2008). Today, the original fans, who are now in their middle age, remain loyal still,
while Murakami’s readership continues to expand to include younger generations
who are in high school and even junior high school. Kim (2013) notes that it is the
first time that Japanese literature was accepted in Korea without any conflict over its
nationality.
In the Chinese language sphere, the Haruki phenomenon spread from Taiwan to
Hong Kong, and then to Shanghai, and later Beijing. Similar to the case in Korea, it
corresponds to the democratic movements in the region during the late 1980s (Fujii
2007). In Taiwan, Murakami was first introduced by Ming Chu Lai, who translated
and published his early works in literary magazines in 1985. After Norwegian Wood
became a sensational hit in Japan, it was translated into Chinese and published in
1989, leading to a Murakami sensation. The Chinese language translation was
welcomed in Hong Kong and Norwegian Wood remained a bestseller there well
after its publication in 1991. It is worth noting that this occurred just 2 years after the
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and in this respect, Fujii’s (2007) observation
that the Haruki phenomenon is closely connected to the rapid socio-economic
changes in this region is significant. As will be discussed later in Chap. 5, his
“clockwise principle” that analyzes the shift of the phenomenon in correlation to
the socio-economic circumstances in the region, contributes to the discussion of the
globalized aspect of Murakami’s acceptance.
Murakami’s popularity continues to grow in East Asia into the twenty-first
century as well. A conspicuous example is the opening of the Murakami Haruki
2.1 The Haruki Phenomenon 15

Research Center at Tamkang University in Taiwan in 2014. It is the first research

center in the world that is dedicated solely to research studies on Murakami, and
aims to promote an interdisciplinary approach, including a wide range of academic
fields such as sociology, psychology, economy, and linguistics, in addition to
Japanese literature. The establishment of such a center reflects the increased number
of graduate students who choose Murakami for their research in the Chinese
linguistic sphere. While Murakami’s popularity continues to grow in China, how-
ever, there is also a marked transformation in the readership. Works such as Kami no
kodomotachi wa mina odoru (2000b; translated 2003 as after the quake) or
Nejimakidori kuronikuru (1994–1996; translated 1997b as The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle), which present Murakami’s social commitment, are gaining popularity,
and 1Q84 (2009–2010; translated 2011a as 1Q84) was “read as their own literature”
(Fujii qtd in Nakamura 2011). Anti (2013) confirms this view, stating that since
Murakami’s speech in Jerusalem, his politically liberal comments are supported by
his readership in China.
While Norwegian Wood instigated the Haruki phenomenon in East Asia from the
late 1980s, it was Hitsuji o meguru bōken (1982; translated 1989 as A Wild Sheep
Chase) that established Murakami’s nascent readership in the USA. This was the
first English translation of a Murakami novel, published by Kodansha International
in 1989, while Murakami’s short stories came to be introduced in The New Yorker
from 1990. The magazine’s renown contributed significantly to the author’s growing
literary acclaim, for he was one of the first Japanese writers to have his work
published therein. Since then, Murakami has gradually emerged as one of the most
popular novelists in the USA, and his new releases are regularly listed on The
New York Times bestseller list. Starting with Kafka on the Shore (2005) his works
developed a nationwide readership, and by 2011, 1Q84 had reached the second spot
on The New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction, followed by Colorless
Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which reached the top of the same list
in 2014.1
As we have seen, the Haruki phenomenon was indivisible from Japan’s economic
growth in the 1980s, but it was surely helped along by Murakami’s own unconven-
tional determination as well. There is what we may call a “cosmopolitan approach”
in this endeavor, for Murakami decided to find his way into the publishing industry
in the USA, where he chose not to rely on his Japanese publisher’s outlets in that
country, but found a local agent himself. His efforts in “becoming engaged as an
individual” present a cosmopolitan outlook, to say nothing of the fact that it was
unprecedented for an established contemporary Japanese author of Murakami’s
renown to engage a personal literary agent abroad in this way. As will be further
discussed in Chap. 5, he also developed his own network of translators with whom
he regularly works, who eventually became his “gatekeepers,” a term that will be

1
The original book in Japanese Umibe no Kafuka was published in 2002; 1Q84 was published in
three volumes in 2009–2010; and Shikisai o motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, kare no junrei no toshi was
published in 2013.
16 2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and Haruki-Mania

explained later in this volume. The relationship developed between the author and
his gatekeepers not only confirms Murakami’s cosmopolitan endeavor, but the
cosmopolitan qualities of the translators as well.
In his collection of essays, Shokugyō to shite no shōsetsuka (2015; The Profes-
sional Novelist), Murakami observes that his books became widely popular around
the world in the wake of certain major social changes. For example, the sales of his
books rose rapidly in Russia and eastern European countries after the collapse of the
communist system. There was a similar trend after the fall of the Berlin Wall in
Germany. Murakami suggests that after a major shift in social value systems that
affects people’s daily lives, it is only natural that they should seek a new “story,” a
new system of “metaphors” by which to structure their thinking. This may also apply
to the beginning of the Haruki phenomenon in the 1980s. Arguably, young people
around the world who had lost hope in their various protests against the established
social and political systems in which they had been brought up were in need of what
Murakami describes as an alternative “narrative” to follow. As the author observes,
the confusion caused by a disruption of an established social system may have led
people to lose faith in their own value systems, and under such circumstances, they
tried to accept “the uncertainty of reality” (2015, p. 286) by inter-adjusting the actual
social system with their own metaphor system. Murakami states that “the reality of
the stories my novels offered may have functioned well as a cogwheel for such
adjustments” (2015, p. 286), suggesting this as one of the reasons for his global
popularity.

2.2 Identity and Belonging, as a Cosmopolitan

Murakami’s cosmopolitanism can be traced historically within the context of his

career, beginning with his “cosmopolitan exile,” which is epitomized in his detach-
ment from Japanese society, and followed by what I term his “everyday” cosmo-
politanism. It is frequently noted that the protagonists of Murakami’s early novels
were depicted as “loners” who are isolated from society. But Murakami displayed a
similar detachment through his own lifestyle early in his career by living overseas to
escape his celebrity status in Japan.2 In The Professional Novelist (2015) Murakami
suggests that he wanted to avoid the pressure to conform that was imposed upon
members of Japanese society. His detachment not only led him to exile, but became a
key theme that he pursued as a writer. In a 1996 conversation with psychologist
Hayao Kawai, Murakami explains that he hoped to clarify his position by pursuing
personal detachment and eliminating what was then conventionally established as
“novelistic value” (Murakami 1996, p. 13). He refers to the tradition in Japanese
literature of measuring a novel’s literary value in terms of its artistic writing style,

2
As a result of the record-breaking sales of Noruwei no mori [Norwegian Wood] in 1987,
Murakami was sought after by media, fans, as well as the publishing industry.
2.2 Identity and Belonging, as a Cosmopolitan 17

which implies that his detachment was also a resistance toward the Japanese literary
establishment. Although his non-traditional approach was disparaged by literary
critics, those socially detached protagonists in Murakami’s first novels were
embraced by young readers in Japan. Likewise, it was his departure from traditional
values—a cosmopolitan vision—that appealed to readers in Asia, and contributed to
the spread of the Haruki phenomenon throughout the region. Similar to Japan, the
young in Asia were seeking to break away from conventional family ties, demanding
more independence and individual autonomy. Murakami’s protagonists were hailed
by those youth, who longed to replicate the lifestyle and enjoy the sense of freedom
that his protagonists represent.
“Everyday cosmopolitanism,” on the other hand, refers to a relationship between
one’s view of the world and one’s personal lifestyle, and this is an equally compel-
ling reason why Murakami and his works alike have effectively engaged a global
audience. His works are characteristically located in “no place” (Powers 2008) and
concern the “search for identity” (Strecher 2002) that attracts readers across cultures.
Murakami propounds an escape from conventional boundaries, allowing readers to
share a common story that can be approached regardless of national, religious, or
cultural differences. Unlike traditional Japanese writers who were appreciated
abroad for their exoticism and exclusive “Japaneseness,” Murakami’s everyday
cosmopolitanism presents a new Japaneseness that is favorably shared in the global
cultural sphere. As the aforementioned claims by Powers and Strecher suggest,
because his stories and the protagonists are often dissociated from specific locations
and belonging, Murakami’s works promote an autonomous self-identity that is
uninterested in ethnocentric collectivism or nation-state boundaries.
In this respect, the everyday cosmopolitanism that encompasses the Haruki phe-
nomenon is a departure from national identity, or what Stuart Hall referred to as “a
system of cultural representation” (1992). Hall argues that people are participating in
“the idea of the nation as represented in its national culture” (1992, p. 292), that is,
constructed by national histories, literature as well as the media, for the purpose of
unifying the nation. Hence, national identity can be a notion that advocates a homo-
geneous nation that encloses ethnocentric ideas. Murakami’s refusal to conform to
traditional values and conventional manners was, therefore, viewed by some as a
rejection of such a collective national identity. But, as Powers argues, “This ambiv-
alence towards nationality places him among the first truly global writers without fixed
abode, free to travel everywhere” (2008, p. 50), and this was certainly a critical
element that promoted the Haruki phenomenon. This leads to the issue of Murakami’s
“un-Japaneseness,” to be discussed further in Chap. 3.
So, how shall we identify “everyday cosmopolitanism” in Murakami’s written
works? His evident level of comfort in writing outside the narrow confines of
“Japaneseness” that marks traditional Japanese literature is surely a thread that
runs throughout the author’s work, and draws crowds of readers around the world.
Rubin notes this as well, arguing that, “Murakami captures universally psycholog-
ical phenomena that all people experience, and expresses this in a clear, simple
image that transcends nationality, race, and religion” (2016, p. 30). Such an insight
resonates with Strecher’s contention that Murakami’s stories, once translated into
18 2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and Haruki-Mania

other languages, “are then further translated by readers, in their minds, perhaps even
in their souls, ‘naturalized’ to the point that they speak directly to the reader,
wherever and whoever he or she happens to be” (2016, p. 133). Both Rubin and
Strecher recognize such characteristics in Murakami’s writing as a plausible reason
for readers to insist that the author is “writing about me,” regardless of the language
or country in which they are reading. This also corroborates Murakami’s claim that
the enduring task of the professional novelist is to establish a sense of belonging
between the “imaginary reader”—one without age, profession, or gender—and
himself (2015, pp. 254–255).
Murakami’s non-Japaneseness, or “nationality-less” style, applies not only to his
writing style and his literary works, but comprehensively to his lifestyle as an
individual. As the author openly admits, he opted to become an exile in order to
stay away from Japan. This was in 1986, when he was still early in his career as a
novelist. Rather than following the traditional custom of the serious literary writer in
Japan, abiding by the unspoken rules of the publishing industry demanded of such a
writer, Murakami chose to go his own way. He claims that it struck him as surprising
that the supposedly “liberal” occupation of the novelist was subject to such a
“conventional” system (2015, p. 96). Doubtless there were considerable repercus-
sions, since it would have appeared rebellious, or at best selfish, to resist social
convention in Japanese society. However, paradoxically enough, the novel he wrote
during his exile to Europe—Norwegian Wood—became a record-breaking bestseller
in Japan, leading to the Haruki phenomenon. As discussed earlier, the personal
detachment reflected in Murakami’s nonchalant characters resonated with the young
generation in parts of East Asia (especially South Korea and Taiwan), echoing their
feelings of loss and emptiness due to the socio-political situation in the late 1980s.3
Later, in the mid-1990s, Murakami’s detachment made a widely recognized transi-
tion to social commitment, which may be regarded as a “cosmopolitan turn”
(Wakatsuki 2016, p. 9) that exhibited the determination of the author to “become
engaged,” not with Japanese society, but with the wider world. Murakami’s transi-
tion from detachment to commitment shall be further discussed in Chap. 4.
The concept of “everyday cosmopolitanism” is encapsulated in two significant
terms—“Anyone” and “no place”—and is readily applicable to Murakami’s fictions.
The cosmopolitan idea of “Anyone,”4 advocated by Rapport (2012), encourages
independence from cultural traditions and geographical territories, and this notion is
clearly visible in the nameless and faceless characters found in Murakami’s fiction
from his early works such as Kaze no uta o kike (1979; translated 1987/2015 as Hear
the Wind Sing) and 1973-nen no pinbōru (1980; translated 1985/2015 as Pinball,
1973) to the latest novel (at the time of this writing), Kishidanchō-goroshi (2017;
translated 2018 as Killing Commendatore). “No place,” as expounded by Richard

3
Fujii (2007) describes this as the “post-democratic movement” principle of the Haruki phenom-
enon in this region.
4
A hypothetical cosmopolitan subject referred to as “Anyone” by Rapport, to suggest a human actor
that is universal and individual at the same time.
2.3 After the Speeches in Jerusalem and Barcelona 19

Powers, refers to the idea that the story can and does steer the reader to “No place but
everywhere” (2008, p. 53). This is pertinent to the Murakami text as well, which
transcends boundaries, including those separating the “physical” or, “what we think
of as reality” (Strecher 2014, p. 71), and the “metaphysical.” Despite the criticism
against cosmopolitanism, that it is overly idealistic or even elitist (Rapport 2012,
p. 48; cf. Kendall et al. 2009), Murakami’s “everyday cosmopolitanism” shows that
the notion is increasingly shared in the everyday spheres of people today. This is
because the writer aspires to become engaged as an individual—a cosmopolitan
exile—who seeks belonging beyond all borders of any type. Readers throughout the
world embrace his works through a process of deep empathy, leading them to believe
firmly that it is their story that is being told. It is precisely this mutual sense of
belonging, on the part of both author and readers, that sustains the “Haruki phenom-
enon” as a global and local sensation. Before we investigate this issue of belonging
in Murakami’s works of fiction, however, let us first review the author’s cosmopol-
itan move that was recognized around the world.

2.3 After the Speeches in Jerusalem and Barcelona

Murakami’s social commitment as a cosmopolitan individual is confirmed by his

widely publicized speeches delivered in Jerusalem and Barcelona. In what has come
to be known as the “Jerusalem Speech,” delivered upon receiving the Jerusalem
Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in 2009, Murakami speaks of his
mission as a novelist and openly criticizes Israeli bombing of targets in Gaza. Using
the analogy of eggs hurling themselves against a wall, Murakami suggests the
vulnerability of human beings against the “walls” that create divisions and effect
confrontations, and pledged always to stand on the side of the egg, right or wrong.
The “eggs” in this metaphor refer to individuals who stand up against monolithic
government systems, and represent people’s shared humanity and Murakami’s call
for a common understanding among people regardless of their nationality or reli-
gious beliefs.
The speech delivered in Barcelona in 2011 was on the occasion of the author
being awarded the International Catalunya Prize, just 3 months after the 3.11 disaster
in Japan. Murakami called for solidarity in the wake of this catastrophe, and
consoled the people, reminding them of the resilience within them through survival
of past natural disasters in the Japanese archipelago. What may have surprised many
was that the author made a direct reference to the nuclear power plant accident in
Fukushima, a direct result of the tsunami. He urged people to reflect on the tragedy
of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan and pleaded with his audience to
become “unrealistic dreamers” (Murakami 2011b) of a world without nuclear power.
This seemed unusual for Murakami, who was known for dissociating himself from
political issues. However, within the context of Murakami’s transition from detach-
ment to commitment in mid-1990s, the speeches in Jerusalem and Barcelona express
20 2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and Haruki-Mania

a new and developing political and social awareness on Murakami’s part, as well as
an even more surprising willingness to discuss such controversial matters in public.
Both the Jerusalem speech and the Barcelona speech were extensively covered by
the international media and spread widely over the Internet. Many appreciated
Murakami’s rare appearances to address the public, but for some peculiar reason,
he was criticized at home on both occasions. The Jerusalem speech was subject to
scrutiny by the Japanese media due to the timing of violent political confrontations
between Israelis and Palestinians. This may have been an overreaction; Murakami
was present to receive a literary prize, and in so doing, happened to express his
support for those suffering from military action. In the case of the speech in
Barcelona, Murakami was harshly criticized for delivering a speech about 3.11
outside of Japan, instead of appearing locally to support the people in the disaster
zone more directly. Literary critic Kazuo Kuroko (2015) even speculated that
Murakami’s speeches were meant to appeal to the international community
in order to raise his chances for the Nobel Prize for literature, rather than to share
in the suffering of the Japanese people (see Kuroko 2015, pp. 159, 194–196, 204). In
his book Murakami Haruki hihan [A Critique of Murakami Haruki], Kuroko
expresses strong dissatisfaction and skepticism toward Murakami. In particular, he
is bitterly critical of the Barcelona speech, calling it a betrayal to the history of anti-
nuclear movements in Japan, and he denounces Murakami for ignoring the long-
term efforts of such civil movements after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in 1945. Citing the phrase, “We Japanese should have continued to shout ‘no’ to the
atom,” which is often interpreted by the media as Murakami’s anti-nuclear message,
Kuroko accuses Murakami of undermining the legacy of the anti-nuclear movement,
and the atomic bomb literature (gembaku bungaku) that has developed as a literary
expression of those tragedies.
Such criticism, to reiterate, overlooks what I am calling the cosmopolitan char-
acter of Murakami’s commitment to social and political issues, which the author
pursues as a novelist, and a “citizen of the world.” Indeed, that is possibly the reason
why Murakami chooses to present his speeches outside of Japan, to communicate
around the world, not as a Japanese representative, but as an individual writer. To
touch on the issue of the atomic bomb in relation to the nuclear power plant accident
was itself a message that not many had voiced at the time; due to the countless
number of lives lost and missing from the tsunami, and the many who were
evacuated from Fukushima because of the nuclear accident, the Japanese people
were still reeling from the recent disaster. Nonetheless, the issue presented by
Murakami was an important matter that needed to be addressed. This would remind
some readers of Murakami’s approach toward the 1995 sarin gas attacks in the
Tokyo subways, when the author questioned the media-driven unified response
against the Aum religious cult, and published Andāgraundo (1997a; translated
2000 as Underground) and Yakusoku-sareta basho de: underground 2 (1998;
translated 2000 as The Place That Was Promised).
Kuroko asks why, in his Barcelona speech, Murakami did not mention his
involvement with some of the key literary works that are deeply connected to
the nuclear issue (2015, pp. 134–144). He notes in particular Tim O’Brien’s The
2.3 After the Speeches in Jerusalem and Barcelona 21

Nuclear Age (1985) and Marcel Theroux’s Far North (2009), both translated by
Murakami and published in Japan.5 One possible answer is that, for Murakami, The
Nuclear Age is a work that defies classification as A-bomb literature, an opinion
shared by Hiroaki Tasaki (2005), who sets the novel apart from existing A-bomb
literature in Japan, arguing that it is time to rethink the category. Tasaki draws on
Murakami’s afterword to his 1998 translation of another of O’Brien’s works, The
Things They Carried (1990), which deals with the Vietnam War: “the true story of
war is not about the war . . . O’Brien hates war, of course. But this is not a so called
anti-war novel. It does not appeal to the tragedy and stupidity of war. The war in this
book . . . is a metaphorical apparatus” (Murakami 1998 cited in Tasaki 2005, p. 165).
If one may speak of war literature that is not necessarily just about war, is it not also
possible to speak of a new type of A-bomb literature that is not necessarily just about
the bomb? And if Murakami expressed his respect for The Nuclear Age, both as
writer and translator, it is not inconceivable that he wished to avoid a simplified
labeling of this work as an “anti-nuclear text.”
Another work dealing with the nuclear issue translated by Murakami is Marcel
Theroux’s Far North (2009), which was published in Japan in 2012. Far North is a
near-future novel that depicts the world after civilization is destroyed due to global
warming. Writer Kazuma Inoue (2012) contends that this novel, which was written
before the Fukushima disaster, will be read in Japan with deep empathy since the
Japanese people have faced the reality that the world can collapse in an instant from
their experience on March 11, 2011. In the afterword, noting that this novel predated
the Tohoku catastrophe, Murakami states that,
. . . for Japanese people who read this book now . . . it will without doubt immediately
conjure up that tragic mega-quake and tsunami, and the devastating accident at the
Fukushima nuclear power plant. Needless to say, 11 March 2011 has brought about a change
in our perception of the world. (Murakami 2012, p. 376).

Murakami also alludes to a link between Chernobyl and Fukushima, pointing out
that Marcel Theroux had the idea for the book when he travelled to Ukraine in
December 2000 and interviewed a woman living in Galina, near Chernobyl. He
refers to an “element of premonition” found in good stories, and contends that by
projecting it into reality, new premonitions may surface. Reactions like these, for
Murakami, are “probably only ever found in literature” (2012, p. 377). This suggests
Murakami’s strong support for this particular work and that he finds a strong
connection between the narrative and the aftermath of the disaster in Fukushima,
where thousands of people were evacuated as a result of the nuclear accident and the
contamination that followed.
Two points bear noting as we reflect on the publication of The Nuclear Age and
Far North in Japanese: first, that neither work is likely to have made it to Japan
without Murakami’s active participation; the realities of the marketplace tell us this
much. Second, we must consider the sheer amount of time and effort it cost
Murakami to produce these works, not to mention the commentary he offers on

5
Far North was published in 2012 and The Nuclear Age was published in 2011.
22 2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and Haruki-Mania

each. To suggest, then, as Kuroko does, that Murakami’s decision not to mention
these novels in his Barcelona speech is a sign of his lack of interest or commitment to
the nuclear issue, must strike us as less than convincing.
We might choose to reflect, instead, upon Murakami’s long-standing contention
that it is better to speak in one’s own words than in those of another. Moreover, he
has never made a secret of his belief that any lesson derived from a work of fiction is
personal, and ought to be gained through direct experience, rather than through the
declarations of another. Is it any wonder, then, that he would elect not to use the
Barcelona speech as a forum for discussing the works of O’Brien or Theroux?

2.4 Murakami’s Cosmopolitan Commitment in Colorless

Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

While Kuroko’s critique on Murakami’s of alleged indifference toward the “A-bomb

literature” trajectory may resonate with some, the question that crosses the minds of
many would likely be: how has Murakami responded to this major disaster in his
own work? Two years after the catastrophe, Murakami released Colorless Tsukuru
Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, a work of fiction greatly anticipated by those
eager to know how the author would address the incident and its aftermath.
Due to keen interest from readers as well as critics and the media, Colorless
Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (hereafter referred to as Colorless
Tsukuru Tazaki) became a bestseller immediately after its release in April 2013, and
was consequently ranked at the top of the 2013 bestseller list, with sales of 985,000
copies.6 The story’s eponymous protagonist is Tsukuru Tazaki, who embarks on a
journey to find answers to the long enduring question about his sudden expulsion
from a closely-knit circle of five friends 16 years previously. Oddly enough, four of
the friends who formed this ideal group of “perfect companions” (Murakami 2014,
p. 5) during his high school years in Nagoya, had colors associated with their names:
Akamatsu (red pine), Oumi (blue sea), Shirane (white root), and Kurono (black
field), and therefore were addressed among themselves as “Aka” (red), “Ao” (blue),
“Shiro” (white), and “Kuro” (black). Only Tsukuru, lacking a Chinese character
containing a color in his name, was “colorless,” and this indicates that he was, in fact,
different from the others from the start. Tsukuru, now 36, is working for a railway
company in Tokyo. For reasons that remain a mystery to him, Tsukuru was abruptly
and without explanation cast out from this “ideal group” in his second year of
university, resulting in severe and lasting trauma. Thus his girlfriend Sara persuades
him to go and confront his former friends, for she realizes that memories of the
incident 16 years ago continue to cast a shadow over Tsukuru’s personal life.
Reluctantly, Tsukuru sets out on this mission, which becomes the “pilgrimage” in

6
Source: Nikkei Shimbun online. https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXNASDG0100Y_
S3A201C1CR0000/. Accessed 11 June 2019/06/11.
2.5 Le Mal du Pays: Past Memories and Beyond 23

the title. The storyline that eventually emerges is that Tsukuru was expelled after
Shiro accused him of having raped her. Not long afterward, Shiro is strangled to
death by an unknown assailant. Both of these incidents remain unsolved mysteries to
the end of the novel.

2.5 Le Mal du Pays: Past Memories and Beyond

The story of young love and isolation that is traced back to the protagonist’s school
days is reminiscent of Norwegian Wood, and this is perhaps one of the key issues to
be addressed. Notably, the titles of both novels are linked to music that instills
memories. Much as the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood” suffuses the 1987 novel,
“Le Mal du Pays/Years of Pilgrimage” sets the overall tone of the narrative through
its relatively monotonous sound. Furthermore, this monotony echoes with the barren
landscape of the Tohoku region following the tsunami, leading a number of critics to
recognize this novel as Murakami’s response to the 3.11 disaster. When Tsukuru first
learns the title of this piece from Haida,7 a student with whom he became close
friends in college, the young man explains the meaning of this French title as
“melancholy” or “a groundless sadness” (Murakami 2014, p. 52). This “groundless
sadness,” as denoted by the music, plays a significant role in illustrating Tsukuru’s
mind. Note, for example, his reaction in Chapter 13:
“Le Mal du Pays.” The quiet, melancholy music gradually gave shape to the undefined
sadness enveloping his heart, as if countless microscopic bits of pollen adhered to an
invisible being concealed in the air, ultimately revealing, slowly and silently, its shape.
This time, the being took on the shape of Sara – Sara in her mint-green short-sleeved dress.
(Murakami 2014, p. 197)

While the music is certainly a reminder of Shiro and Haida, as both are closely
connected to this piece, the paragraph above suggests that Sara is beginning to
occupy Tsukuru’s mind. Although Tsukuru refers to his heartache as “the memory of
intense pain” (Murakami 2014, p. 197), which implies that he still suffers from the
past memories of being deserted, there is also a subtle hint that this developing
sadness stems from the possibility of losing Sara, as we see at the end of the passage
above. This particular moment represents one of transition for the protagonist, for
Tsukuru is moving toward life again. Until now, he has restrained himself from
becoming emotionally involved with others for fear of getting hurt; however, life
with Sara represents an opportunity to leave his fear and his pain where they
belong—in the past.
“Le Mal du Pays” is played again, thousands of miles away from Tokyo, as
Tsukuru’s pilgrimage takes him to Finland to see Kuro, one of the female members
of the group. The musical piece brings the two together in remembering Shiro,
whom Tsukuru secretly adored at the time. “Le Mal du Pays” was a piece that Shiro

7
Haida’s name also contains color gray.
24 2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and Haruki-Mania

used to play on the piano, and after listening to Kuro’s account of the “whole truth”
about his expulsion (2014, p. 235), they grieve together for Shiro, as the music
vividly brings back her memory. The sense of “groundless sadness” resurfaces,
however, for there will never be a clear explanation, either of her death, or why she
made such an accusation against Tsukuru.
The preference exhibited by Kuro for the performance of “Le Mal du Pays” by
Alfred Brendel, when Tsukuru notes the difference from the familiar Lazar Berman
rendition, is not accidental. She explains, “Maybe it’s not so elegant, but I like it all
the same. I guess I’m used to this version, since it’s the one I always listen to.”
(2014, p. 317). The change in how the music is performed—from esthetically rich to
“not so elegant” (borrowing Eri’s expression)—seems to open a door to understand-
ing for Tsukuru that he never expected.
And in that moment, he was finally able to accept it all. In the deepest recesses of his soul,
Tsukuru Tazaki understood. One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone.
They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to
fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no
acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true
harmony. (Murakami 2014, p. 248)

While the high school group was a symbol of “harmony,” and Tsukuru suffered
badly from his expulsion from it, Kuro tells him that after cutting him off, the group
was never the same. Besides, he realizes that his own perception of himself as
“colorless” was not how the others had viewed him. This is demonstrated in their
dialogue that follows, when Kuro asks Tsukuru, to stop referring to her by color
nicknames.
But you don’t mind still calling me Tsukuru?
“You’re always Tsukuru,” Eri said, and laughed quietly. “So I don’t mind. The Tsukuru who
makes things. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.” (Murakami 2014, p. 231)

This exchange suggests that finding commonalities in names (specifically,

defined by colors) was more or less superficial as a connection, and because Tsukuru
was “colorless,” he was neutral and perhaps autonomous.
The conversation between Tsukuru and Eri (Kuro) shifts from Yuzu’s (Shiro’s)
death to Eri’s life in Finland, and readers will find in the context that Eri largely
represents “life” for Tsukuru. Therefore, Tsukuru’s revelation earlier demonstrates
his shift from shadow to light, as symbolized by the shift from Yuzu’s death in the
“other world” (Strecher 2014, pp. 227–228) to Eri’s life in a new world. It is also a
reflection of the protagonist’s personal transformation from detachment to commit-
ment. And, one hardly need add, the above-mentioned paragraph on Tsukuru’s
realization echoes the deep pain and sorrow over the massive loss of life on 3.11,
and the suffering endured by survivors of that event.
Toward the end of the novel, Tsukuru is listening to “Le Mal du Pays” when Sara
calls him. Although he has anticipated the call, Tsukuru does not answer the phone.
This particular scene depicts his uncertainty, for it was Tsukuru who reached out to
her in the first place, yet hung up before she answered the phone. So, although he is
almost certain that it is Sara calling back, Tsukuru continues to listen to the music.
2.6 In Search of the “Right Place” of Belonging 25

Why should this be? The plausible answer is that Tsukuru is listening to “Years of
Pilgrimage” for one last time in order to put an end to his past memory—to bury
Shiro and Haida once and for all—and to prepare himself to come before Sara once
more. His internal monologue confirms this. “Sara, he thought. I want to hear your
voice. I want to hear it more than anything. But right now I can’t talk” (Murakami
2014, p. 296, my italics). Tsukuru’s unusually strong determination is clear from this
statement, and we can see that he wishes to communicate with Sara. But for Tsukuru
to leave the past behind, the music has to come to an end, and so does his pilgrimage.
In addition, this is a scene in which Tsukuru becomes consciously aware of the
reason why he was “colorless”: it was because he had always turned away from
building a true relationship with another person. Tsukuru reflects, “Maybe I am just
an empty, futile person . . . But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of
me that these people could find . . . a place where they belonged” (Murakami 2014,
p. 198). The idea of belonging to a “place” is another important subject in this novel,
which will be explored later.
To accept Sara is a commitment for Tsukuru, something he has never done
before. As noted earlier, Tsukuru himself admits that he was “empty” because he
had never struggled to protect a relationship, nor challenged others for fear of being
hurt. This is why Tsukuru did not probe the reason why his closest friends had
rejected him all those years ago back in Nagoya. This final episode featuring “Le Mal
du Pays,” shows Tsukuru’s change, because he is about to complete his pilgrimage.
As music critic Atsufumi Suzuki suggests, “Le Mal du Pays” plays the role of
connecting the inner feelings of the characters, and Tsukuru “finds a place in reality
through music” (2018, p. 165). Compared to the shower of pop music that was lined
up in Norwegian Wood for the funeral of Naoko between the protagonist and Reiko,
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki remains persistently monotonous. Nonetheless, music
holds a strong position in connecting the characters. Notably, this particular scene
about Tsukuru’s attempt to reach out to Sara is reminiscent of the closing moment of
Norwegian Wood, when Boku calls Midori, saying “All I want in this world is you. I
want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the
beginning.” (2000a, p. 293)

2.6 In Search of the “Right Place” of Belonging

As we have seen above, the music “Le Mal du Pays” traces the protagonist’s
pilgrimage from detachment to commitment. Tsukuru’s revelation upon listening
to this piece in Finland uncovers his deep yearning to “connect” as he discovers a
fundamental human truth, that we cannot build relationships with one another
without first making a commitment ourselves. Tsukuru also realizes that this
endeavor requires him to recognize the past fully, for what he believed to be an
“ideal group” may not have existed in the first place. As “Le Mal du Pays,” the music
of nostalgia, alludes to, his journey to Nagoya and Hämeenlinna in Finland was a
pilgrimage to the past. Until he met Sara, Tsukuru was concealing his memory, but
26 2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and Haruki-Mania

through this pilgrimage, he confronts the past and moves on to commitment, seeking
the “right” place of belonging. In this respect, his occupation of designing railroad
stations, which exist to transport and connect multitudes of people, may not be a
coincidence, as we shall now see.
Tsukuru’s pilgrimage to commitment presents a search for identity and belong-
ing. Compared to the protagonist of Norwegian Wood, who remains adrift for the
most part, Tsukuru demonstrates a clear intention of belonging to the world of
reality. Although both protagonists are depicted as detached and secluded, there
seems to be a crucial difference as to how the protagonists grow out of their
detachment. In the 1987 novel, the protagonist Boku (“I,” familiar) leads a detached
life because he is bitterly disappointed by the student movement of the late 1960s.
While the narrative is centered around the “loss and recovery” of Boku, his recovery
seems rather limited, and we can hardly recognize the self-reliance and readiness that
will mark Tsukuru a quarter of a century later. This is exemplified in how the ending
scenes of these two novels overlap, for both protagonists call their loved ones, but
they act very differently. While Boku “called out for Midori from the dead center of
this place that was no place” (2000a, p. 293), Tsukuru concludes, after much
contemplation over the relationship with Sara, that “this wasn’t something he
could decide on his own. It was a question decided by two people, between one
heart and another.” (Murakami 2014, p. 298). In contrast to Boku, who still seems
lost, Tsukuru shows a strong determination to pursue belonging, accompanied by
careful consideration for the other.
If this is an outcome of the pilgrimage, what has changed in Tsukuru? Looking
back on his character, we can see that Tsukuru was relatively autonomous from the
beginning, for he chose to study in Tokyo in order to seek a career in railroad station
design, leaving behind his “perfect companions” in Nagoya. Presumably, he was
prepared to live as an exile rather than to settle on the more comfortable, predictable
group identity. As Eri tells Tsukuru, his friends back in Nagoya knew that he was the
only one who was self-contained enough to make it on his own, and this recognition
had led to his expulsion, although no one truly believed he was capable of assaulting
Shiro. As a result of surviving those years of isolation, and daring the pilgrimage to
revisit his repressed memories, Tsukuru attains his epiphany and emerges with an
individual identity distinct from the group. By growing out of his detachment,
Tsukuru has re-established his identity, which I find effectively cosmopolitan, for
he no longer seeks to belong to a specific group that is rooted provincially, but rather
aspires to belonging with others.
This renewed identity that urges Tsukuru toward commitment suggests a cosmo-
politan quality of encountering the other, for he pledges himself not just to Sara, but
to their relationship. According to Toshio Kawai (2013), commitment requires us to
risk ourselves, but at the same time, we must acknowledge the other. That is why the
issue here is “not about the result centering on himself, or whether Tsukuru was able
to make Sara his; rather, the key is that he encounters the other, outside of his true
self” (Kawai 2013, p. 245). While Kawai’s approach is based on his background as a
psychotherapist, his observation that the purpose of this work is to “connect with the
other and truly to acknowledge the existence of the other” (2013, p. 245) resonates
2.6 In Search of the “Right Place” of Belonging 27

with the notion of cosmopolitanism on encountering otherness, as Ulf Hannerz

(2006) describes.
Literary critic Norihiro Katō (2013) notes that commitment is one of the subject
matters in this novel. He identifies this first in the protagonist’s name, Tsukuru,
which means “to create.” But he also connects Tsukuru’s commitment with his
occupation of designing train stations, which he calls “a one-way commitment for
the future” (2013, p. 35), because no one can ensure that those who pass through
these stations will ever return; it is, like Tsukuru’s commitment to Sara, entirely a
matter of faith.
This may well be true; however, my interpretation is that railroad stations signify
a “place of belonging” for Tsukuru. Sara’s very first words to Tsukuru in this novel
are: “So you really liked railroad stations that much, ever since you were little?”
(Murakami 2014, p. 12). Tsukuru responds by telling Sara that he was attracted to
stations from a young age. Here, we can detect that the railroad station is not only
about his given name and present occupation, but represents a key issue concerning
his lifework. The railroad station, being a place where people gather, is a symbol of
space that is open and accessible to everyone. This leads to the assumption that
Tsukuru’s dedication to stations is a cosmopolitan commitment to create a “place of
belonging” where people encounter others. As the detailed description of Shinjuku
Station in the final chapter confirms, not only is Tsukuru deeply attached to stations,
but he gains a feeling of reassurance just by being there.
Tsukuru Tazaki loved to watch JR Shinjuku Station (. . .) Tsukuru visited railroad stations
like other people enjoy attending concerts, watching movies, dancing in clubs, watching
sports, and window shopping. When he was at a loose end, with nothing to do, he headed to a
station. When he felt anxious or needed to think, his feet carried him, once again of their own
accord, to a station. He’d sit quietly on a bench on the platform, sip coffee he bought at a
kiosk, and check the arrival and departure times against the pocket-sized timetable he always
carried in his briefcase. He could spend hours doing this. (Murakami 2014, p. 282)

Tsukuru does the same in Finland, at Helsinki Central Station, spending time
observing the passengers and watching the work of station employees and train
crews.
The protocol for operating a railway station was pretty much the same throughout the world,
the whole operation reliant on precise, skillful professionalism. This aroused a natural
response in him, a sure sense that he was in the right place. (Murakami 2014,
pp. 283–284, my italics)

Wherever he is—in Tokyo or in Helsinki—the only place that Tsukuru feels “at
home” is the railroad station.
Tsukuru’s deep yearning for the “right place” and the consolation he finds at
stations signifies his pursuit of belonging. Although he felt a “sense of belonging”
(Murakami 2014, p. 12) with the four friends as an “orderly, harmonious commu-
nity” (Murakami 2014, p. 16) in Nagoya, he was constantly afraid that he might fall
behind, and lose his place in this group. As Mitsuyoshi Numano suggests, this
“orderly, harmonious, intimate place” (Murakami 2014, p. 22) is a metaphor for “a
kind of utopia that was unsustainable in this world” (Numano 2013, p. 170);
28 2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and Haruki-Mania

accordingly, the loss of utopia leaves Tsukuru deeply traumatized. And because
Tsukuru suffers from nostalgia-driven despair, his pilgrimage to overcome this
trauma is intertwined with “Le Mal du Pays,” the title of which literally means
“homesick” (Numano 2013, pp. 169–170). Numano argues that, as a result of losing
his “homeland,” Tsukuru is in search of the “right place” (2013, p. 171). This invites
us to contemplate the significance of the “right place,” for indeed Tsukuru becomes
an exile because he was forced out of his utopia; leaving his nostalgia behind, he
realizes that the “right place” for him is where he belongs. For although utopia may
offer some carefree idea of belongingness, this only remains so as long as order and
harmony are maintained. This is probably why Tsukuru, whose autonomy had
already set him apart from the others, intuitively questioned his position within the
group. Tsukuru’s recollection of the events in Nagoya, after completing the pilgrim-
age, confirms this.
Maybe back then Shiro had been hoping to break up their group. This possibility suddenly
struck him. (. . .) Their group in high school had been so close, so very tight. They accepted
each other as they were, understood each other, and each of them found a deep contentment
and happiness in their relationship, their little group. But such bliss couldn’t last forever. At
some point paradise would be lost. (Murakami 2014, p. 292)

With a feeling of empathy, Tsukuru can imagine how Shiro must have sensed that
“paradise would be lost” (Murakami 2014, p. 292), and instead of waiting for that to
happen, she had “set Tsukuru up as the apostate” (Murakami 2014, p. 293).
Tsukuru’s transformation, from an exile into a man with a renewed sense of
identity and social commitment, reminds us of Murakami’s transition from “detach-
ment to commitment” following the Kobe earthquake and the sarin gas attacks in the
Tokyo subways in 1995. As I have argued elsewhere, Murakami became a “cosmo-
politan exile,” living overseas to escape the conformist Japanese society, but decided
to return to Japan in the mid-1990s and assume his responsibilities as a Japanese
novelist (Wakatsuki 2016, p. 9). Considering how the two tragic events in 1995 had
swayed the author, Yoshinori Shimizu’s contention that Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is
Murakami’s response to 3.11 seems plausible, particularly given that it was another
natural disaster caused by a massive earthquake. Shimizu points out that the 16 years
of absence between Tsukuru’s expulsion and the pilgrimage correlates with the time
period between 1995 and 2011. Furthermore, he asserts that the author’s choice of
Nagoya as the location of the novel is premeditated, referring to a travel essay
(Murakami et al. 2004) in which Murakami describes Nagoya as a “city of the
underworld”8 that symbolizes the internal dark-side of the Japanese people (2013,
pp. 8–9).
I think Nagoya is special because, although it is indisputably a major city, it still reserves the
kind of magic ritual that somehow directly connects to the “other world.” This “other world,”
consequently, is the classic other world¼darkness that we (not just the people of Nagoya but
we Japanese people at large) possess internally. (2013, p. 7 Murakami quoted by Shimizu)

8
The Japanese word mato literary translated as “magic city” is used, but considering the context, I
have translated this as a “city of the underworld.”
2.6 In Search of the “Right Place” of Belonging 29

Shimizu considers the above to be a reflection of Murakami’s thoughts on

Japaneseness, claiming that “Nagoya symbolizes a ‘condensed space of purely
propagated culture’ for the internal darkness held by the ‘orderly harmonious
intimate place’ where (those) Japanese live” (2013, p. 9). Therefore, although the
narrative is rendered as Tsukuru’s loss of his homeland, Shimizu claims that “this
narrative is our narrative, for this is the story of all of us, who have lost our
homeland, as an ‘orderly harmonious intimate place’” (Shimizu 2013, p. 10).
If Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is indeed the author’s response to 3.11, then the key
question for many is why Murakami opted for Nagoya, and not somewhere in
Tohoku? In a 2019 interview-article, Murakami explains that when he wrote All
children of the gods can dance after the Kobe earthquake, he made a rule that he
would not use the term “earthquake,” nor would he specify Kobe as the location
(Murakami 2019). It would appear that the same condition was applied to the writing
of this novel. But this begs the question: why did Murakami specify Nagoya so
distinctly? One plausible answer, offered by Shimizu above, is that the city connects
to the “other world.” This close attention to the “other world” echoes Numano’s
analysis that “Murakami’s protagonists are always struggling to stay in the world of
‘this side’” (2013, p. 169). Numano goes on to say that “investigating the abyss that
spreads beneath the surface of the seemingly composed daily life in the city . . . the
hidden trauma beneath, lies at the heart of Murakami’s literature” (2013, p. 167). He
notes for example, that Murakami’s use of metaphors is often presented in two
contrasting dimensions: a seemingly quiet daily life on the surface versus a deep,
hidden internal level; the present versus past trauma, restored by memories; social
self versus personal soul; or the real world versus the fantasy world (the other world)
(Numano 2013, p. 169).
If, as Numano claims, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is about the protagonist’s
struggle to stay on “this side,” then this would explain Tsukuru’s yearning for the
“right place” of belonging. For, unless he finds the “right place,” Tsukuru may
eventually fall permanently into the “other side.” This is clearly and powerfully
suggested by his recurring dreams that imply repressed sexual desire and violence,
that are “‘forbidden’ dreams from ‘over there’,” (Strecher 2014, p. 222). In his study
of Murakami’s metaphysical world, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami
(2014), Strecher argues that the “other world” is “exerting its influence on ‘this
side’” (2014, p. 229); however, “Murakami’s heroes press forward with the process
of redefining themselves independently of established convention” (2014, p. 229),
which applies to Tsukuru. His pilgrimage, on the surface, is a journey to restore past
memories and to allow Tsukuru to live in the present. At a deeper level of con-
sciousness however, it is also a quest for a “place of belonging,” where he can be
himself and discover where his heart truly belongs. While he may be struggling to
remain on “this side,” it appears that Tsukuru is holding on to the “other world” at
the same time. This is indicated by the ending of the novel, where the protagonist
falls asleep.
The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the
distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it was, finally, sucked into the depths
30 2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and Haruki-Mania

of the night, where it disappeared. All that remained was the sound of the wind slipping
through a stand of white birch trees. (Murakami 2014, p. 298)

To what unknown realm does that express train convey our hero? What does the
soughing song of the white birches mean to him? His consciousness fades away
along with the express train and the lingering image of the white birch trees takes its
place. Tsukuru is fond of the vision of trains; it calms his mind on “this side.” But the
white birch trees allude to the “other world.” Strecher asserts that the forest serves as
the boundary to the “other world” in many of Murakami’s novels, and notes
specifically that the Rat’s villa in Hokkaido is surrounded by white birches. In
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, white birches also populate the Hämeenlinna forest in
which Kuro’s cottage stands, again, marking it as part of the “other world.” Whether
or not Tsukuru will leave the “other world” behind remains unstated in the novel.
However, I would argue with conviction that the dual image of the express train and
white birches in the final paragraph of the novel tells us that Tsukuru is now capable
of committing to the reality of “this side” while embracing the otherness, even with
the darkness, that stays within himself. He has attained a sense of belonging in both
worlds.
At the beginning of this Chapter, we noted that identity and belonging are the key
interests of this text, for they concern the global popularity of Murakami known as
the Haruki phenomenon. My argument is that Murakami’s works offer a new way of
belonging in a world that is becoming increasingly cosmopolitan. The emergent
sentiment of everyday cosmopolitanism, as discussed earlier in Chap. 1, celebrates
Murakami’s narratives that are of “no place” (Powers 2008) and connect to “Any-
one” (Rapport 2012), for cosmopolitans are without allegiance to a specific com-
munity. Being a “citizen of the world,” the cosmopolitan seeks to belong as an
individual instead of becoming affiliated with groups. In this respect, Tsukuru
Tazaki’s re-established identity as an autonomous individual, and his readiness to
encounter the other, including the one lurking in the “other world,” is enviably
cosmopolitan. We, his readers, share this readiness to engage the other, both outside
and inside ourselves, for, once again, the stories told by Murakami represent a
peculiar form of bildungsroman (“coming-of-age” story) in which the hero pro-
gresses to higher and higher stages of belonging.
And these narratives are our own.

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30, 2019, from https://apjjf.org/2011/9/29/Murakami-Haruki/3571/article.html
Murakami, H. (2012). Yakusha Atogaki [Translator’s Afterword]. In Theroux, M. Kyokuhoku
(pp. 371–377). Tokyo: Chuokoron-shinsha.
Murakami, H. (2013). Shikisai o motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, kare no junrei no toshi. Tokyo:
Bungeishunju.
Murakami, H. (2014). Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage (trans. Gabriel,
P.). London: Vintage.
Murakami, H. (2015). Shokugyō to shite no shōsetsuka. Tokyo: Switch Publishing.
Murakami, H. (2017). Kishidanchō-goroshi. Tokyo: Shinchosha.
Murakami, H. (2019). Heisei no 30-satsu Murakami Haruki san Interview, Heisei o utushi, jidai to
ayumu. Available via Asahi Shimbun digital. Retrieved July 18, 2019, from https://book.asahi.
com/article/12182812
Murakami, H., Yoshimoto, Y., & Tsuzuki, K. (2004). Tokyo surume kurabu: Chikyu no hagure
kata. Tokyo: Bungeishunju.
32 2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and Haruki-Mania

Nakamura, M. (2011). Hajimete no Murakami Haruki, sekai no chaos ni mukiau tanoshimi.

Available via Asahi Shimbun digital. Retrieved November 2015, from http://www.asahi.com/
culture/news_culture/TKY201109270227.html
Numano, M. (2013). Shikisai, hiyu, nosutarujia. Bungakukai, 67(6), 166–171.
O’Brien, T. (1985). The nuclear age. New York: Knopf.
O’Brien, T. (1990). The things they carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Powers, R. (2008). The global distributed self-mirroring subterranean neurological soul-sharing
picture show. In The Japan Foundation (compiled): A wild Haruki chase: Reading Murakami
around the world (pp. 38–55). Berkley: Stone Bridge Press.
Rapport, N. (2012). Anyone: The cosmopolitan subject of anthropology. New York: Berghahn
Books.
Rubin, J. (2016). Murakami Haruki to watashi. Tokyo: Toyokeizai Shinposha.
Shimizu, Y. (2013). Mato Nagoya to, 16nen no hedatari no imi. In K. S. S. Henshubu (Ed.),
Murakami Haruki “Shikisai o motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, kare no junrei no toshi” o dou yomu
ka [How to read colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage] (pp. 6–13). Tokyo:
Kawade Shobo Shinsha.
Strecher, M. (2002). Dances with sheep: The quest for identity in the fiction of Murakami Haruki.
Michigan: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan.
Strecher, M. (2014). The forbidden worlds of Haruki Murakami. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Strecher, M. (2016). Epilogue: Haruki Murakami as global writer. In M. Strecher & P. Thomas
(Eds.), Haruki Murakami: Challenging authors (pp. 131–134). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Suzuki, A. (2018). Lisuto “Junrei no Toshi” yori “Le Mal du Pays”. In Y. Kurihara (Ed.), Murakami
Haruki no 100-kyoku [100 songs of Murakami] (pp. 162–165). Tokyo: Rittosha.
Tasaki, H. (2005). Bakudan wa jitsuzai suru: Nuclear Age o yomu. In: Gembaku Bungaku Kenkyu,
pp. 157–165.
Theroux, M. (2009). Far north. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux.
Wakatsuki, T. (2016). The Haruki phenomenon and everyday cosmopolitanism: Belonging as a
“citizen of the world”. In M. Strecher & P. Thomas (Eds.), Haruki Murakami: Challenging
authors (pp. 1–16). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Chapter 3
Is Murakami “un-Japanese”?: The Myth
of “Japaneseness”

The question over identity and belonging has always been a disconcerting issue for
Murakami as a Japanese author. From the start of his career, Murakami’s identity
and belonging as a writer were scrutinized in terms of the westernized lifestyle of his
protagonists, as well as his writing style, which appeared to be heavily influenced by
American novels. Murakami’s position in the order of Japanese literature was always
precarious. Comments from the selection committee members of the Gunzo Prize for
New Writers, a renowned gateway award for professional writers, affirm this. When
Murakami received this award with Kaze no uta o kike (translated as Hear the Wind
Sing) in 1979, the reviews were mixed.1 Kiichi Sasaki claimed that “It was like
pop-art” (1979), indicating his impression of new trends in art that were being
introduced from overseas. Similarly, Toshio Shimao described the work as being
haikara (“high-collar”), a term meaning that something is stylish and of western
origin. In addition, Shimao asserted that, in both storyline and characters, the story
might as well have taken place somewhere in America. While most of the committee
members appeared perplexed as to how to evaluate Murakami’s quality as a writer,
Saiichi Maruya was the exception. He highly praised Murakami’s ability for suc-
cessfully departing from the realistic novels that were traditional in Japanese liter-
ature. He maintained that, whereas Hear the Wind Sing was written under the strong
influence of contemporary American novels, Murakami had skillfully and liberally
diverged from conventional Japanese novels by utilizing such a platform. Notably,
Maruya sees not only a departure from traditional Japanese novels in Murakami’s
work, but also identifies what he calls “Japanese lyricism” and predicts that “this
quality of an American-style novel colored by Japanese lyricism may be the proto-
type of this writer’s creative style in future” (1979).
Maruya’s prediction proved to be correct, but it took several decades for this to
become clear to most critics in Japan. Today, Murakami is established as a highly

1
Kaze no uta o kike was translated in 1987 by Alfred Birnbaum. It was translated a second time by
Ted Goossen in 2015.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 33

T. Wakatsuki, The Haruki Phenomenon,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7549-5_3
34 3 Is Murakami “un-Japanese”?: The Myth of “Japaneseness”

reputable Japanese author and his works are translated into over 50 languages. Since
he writes in the Japanese language and his novels are situated in Japan, there would
be little doubt among the overseas readership about his identity as a Japanese writer.
And yet his readership continues to grow worldwide and Murakami has been
awarded a number of overseas literary prizes, including the Frank O’Connor Inter-
national Short Story Award (2006), the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the
Individual in Society (2009), the Catalunya International Prize (2011), and the Hans
Christian Andersen Literature Award (2016). Whereas his cultural identity was
questioned at home, there seems to be very little, if any speculating about
Murakami’s identity as a Japanese writer outside Japan. The disparity between
Murakami’s reception in Japan and his reception abroad suggests new developments
in conceptions of Japaneseness at home. It demonstrates that conventional ideas on
Japaneseness may perhaps be distorted, particularly when this notion is employed as
collective cultural identity. Stuart Hall (2003) contends that there are two ways of
reflecting on cultural identity. While identity often can be assumed as collective and
fixed since it refers to shared history affiliated by race or ethnicity, the alternative
understanding is that identity is unstable, for it is subject to change, sometimes in a
contradictory way. This sense, that cultural identity is neither fixed nor essential, is
useful for appreciating the case regarding Murakami. According to Hall, “Cultural
identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or
suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence
but a positioning.” (2003, p. 237). He emphasizes the word “positioning” to express
that cultural identity is determined by how it is approached. We may argue that the
discrepancy over Murakami’s “Japaneseness” shows that cultural identity is not a
permanent feature that shapes a person. In this respect, examining alternative
viewpoints from inside and outside Japan may provide a venue to counter conven-
tional Japanese ideas.

3.1 The Myth of “Japaneseness” and the Nihonjinron

Discourse

In order to understand why the issue of “Japaneseness” matters to Murakami, first,

we must investigate the Nihonjinron. This popular discourse has significant influ-
ence over perceptions of Japanese cultural identity and is widely established in
Japanese society. Nihonjinron, literally translated as “theories of the Japanese,” is
not an academic discourse, although the term is widely recognized through countless
publications written by scholars, journalists, novelists, diplomats, and even busi-
nessmen. According to a report published in 1978 (Nomura Research Institute), there
was a publishing boom on Nihonjinron in the 1970s, when most major bookstores
carried a Nihonjinron-corner dedicated to books on this field. It has permeated
Japanese society over several decades through a massive number of publications,
developing a popular genre for readers across generations.
3.1 The Myth of “Japaneseness” and the Nihonjinron Discourse 35

As a result of the popularity of Nihonjinron, critical studies and analyses were

undertaken by scholars from various fields. From these studies, it is easy to see the
most problematic issue with Nihonjinron: that it entails an essentialist conception of
Japanese cultural identity that is bound to everything from climate, culture, and
society to economy, thereby creating the myth of “Japanese uniqueness.” For
instance, Yoshio Sugimoto (1999) and Harumi Befu (1993) offer sociological and
anthropological analyses of such myths promoted by Nihonjinron. In the first place,
they protest that the combination of the words “Nihonjin” [Japanese people] and
“ron” [theory] gives the false impression that Nihonjinron is a “theory.” Their
investigation suggests that many of the Nihonjinron publications employed com-
monly familiar material in order to convince readers. In addition, historians such as
Yoshihiko Amino (2011) and Nagao Nishikawa (1995) question the cultural hege-
mony of the discourse. Both argue that Nihonjinron’s claim on the origins of the
Japanese nation is fictitious, particularly since it was designed to support the
sovereign nation-state system in the early twentieth century.
The role played by Nihonjinron discourse in determining Japanese cultural
identity is problematic, particularly because it imposes an ambiguous concept of
Japaneseness. And in the course of advocating “Japaneseness,” Nihonjinron assigns
this obscure notion as an inherent quality of all Japanese people. In order to
understand further the issue of Japaneseness, it is crucial to explore the historical
development of the Nihonjinron discourse. While Kojiki [Record of Ancient Mat-
ters] (712) and Nihon shoki [Chronicles of Japan] (720), both compiled in the early
eighth century, offer mythological narratives of the origins of Japan and the Japa-
nese, the text that is generally acknowledged as the locus classicus for Nihonjinron is
anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of
Japanese Culture, published in 1946. As the title suggests, Benedict investigated
Japanese lifestyles and studied their behavior, an assignment commissioned by the
US government during the Second World War in order to understand the enemy. The
book became widely known for its portrayal of Japanese national culture as a
“culture of shame,” in comparison to the “guilt cultures” of the West. Benedict
claims that Japanese people are less concerned with the idea of sin than they are with
how others view them. From this idea we might extrapolate the larger analogous
argument that Japan as a nation has always been concerned with how it is viewed by
other nations. This argument would seem to be supported by the immense popularity
of this publication in Japan as the first of its kind authored by a foreign scholar.
Considering the circumstances under which this report was written, Benedict’s effort
to remain unbiased is truly remarkable. As she states, “The question was how the
Japanese would behave, not how we would behave if we were in their place” (2005,
p. 5), a clear indication that Benedict was capable of observing the Japanese as the
other. But Benedict’s approach to Japan as the other was done not to alienate Japan,
but in the interest of neutrality and objectivity as a scholar.
This, perhaps, explains why her account was appreciated in Japan more than in
the USA. Since Benedict was a cultural anthropologist, she aimed to understand
Japanese society through culture, and her modeling of the cultural pattern of Japan
became widely accepted, as it inspired subsequent contemplation of the uniqueness
36 3 Is Murakami “un-Japanese”?: The Myth of “Japaneseness”

of Japanese society, and the cultural identity of the Japanese people. However, the
fact that Benedict wrote without visiting Japan led to criticism that this book was
“written for Americans by an American who did not know Japan” (Ishizawa 1997,
p. 12). Nonetheless, the Japanese translation became a phenomenal bestseller in
Japan and continues to be recognized as the classic text of postwar Nihonjinron
today.2
While The Chrysanthemum and the Sword holds a pivotal position in the
Nihonjinron discourse of the modern era, it is generally agreed that the tradition of
Nihonjinron literature began in the late nineteenth century with the Meiji Restora-
tion. In its early days, published works of Nihonjinron sought to position Japan
against the cultural superiority of Western civilization, thereby endorsing the unique-
ness of Japanese cultural assets. For example, Kanzō Uchimura’s Daihyōteki
Nihonjin (1908) and Inazō Nitobe’s Bushidō (1908) were written as a result of
their studies abroad and published in English first.3 While Daihyōteki Nihonjin
offered biographical portraits of historical Japanese figures, Bushidō provided an
account of the exceptional loyalty and self-discipline of the samurai spirit as part of
Nitobe’s efforts to demonstrate the moral principles of Japanese society in compar-
ison to Christianity. According to Takeo Funabiki (2010), both Uchimura and
Nitobe are intellectuals of the Meiji era who were fluent in English and aimed to
overturn the inferiority of Japan in the eyes of the West. Therefore, their works were
published in the USA first for English language readers, and then later published in
Japanese for a domestic audience, as they strived to overcome the “uncertainty of
identity” of modern Japan. Funabiki’s use of the expression “uncertainty of identity”
indicates that Japanese society was under enormous pressure in positioning itself
against Western civilization in an era of great historical change. This is one of the
reasons why Nihonjinron is keenly interested in how Japan and the Japanese are
viewed by the outside world.
Another well-known Nihonjinron work, Takeo Doi’s Amae no kōzō [The anat-
omy of dependence] (1971), was understandably inspired by The Chrysanthemum
and the Sword. Whereas Benedict used “shame” as a key word to describe Japanese
culture, Doi applied the word “dependence” (amae) to analyze the uniqueness of
Japanese society. It is said that he was rejecting the criticism that modern Japan
lacked “self” and individualism in comparison to Western society (Aoki 1999).
During the 1970s and 1980s, when Japan’s economic and technological advance-
ment peaked, the reactionary attitude typical of Nihonjinron texts was replaced with
assertions of cultural superiority and national accomplishment.
Ezra Vogel’s international bestseller Japan as Number One: Lessons for America
(1979) is representative of Nihonjinron discourse of this period. The fact that it was
written by a renowned foreign scholar ensured that it was well-received in Japan; the

2
The Japanese translation was published in 1948. Since then, more than 2.3 million copies have
been sold (Ishizawa 1997).
3
Both titles were originally published in English as Japan and the Japanese (1894) and Bushidō:
the soul of Japan (1900), respectively.
3.2 The watakushi shōsetsu and the Japanese Self 37

title not only satisfied the nationalistic demand for self-esteem prevailing in Japan at
that time, but provided reassuring evidence of the West’s recognition of Japan.
Although both Benedict and Vogel investigated Japan for an American readership,
the Japanese translations of both The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and Japan as
Number One were bestsellers in Japan, and sales substantially exceeded those of the
original texts published in the USA. Vogel sought to understand Japan’s economic
success through a wide-ranging examination of Japanese social systems such as
politics, education, and business. He identified groupism, or conformity, as a
virtuous characteristic of the Japanese social system, and attributed Japan’s overall
success in business and industry to it.
So, how is this relevant to Murakami? My hypothesis is that Murakami, as a
novelist, sidesteps the very “Japaneseness” promoted by Nihonjinron. As explained
above, Nihonjinron espouses a fixed notion of cultural identity for Japanese that is
often ethnocentric. By contrast, Murakami surpasses any monolithic cultural identity
that directs one’s identity to a “rooted” cultural tradition. The anxiety of becoming
“un-Japanese” is extended to matters over cultural identity that an artist’s cultural
heritage should be confined by the boundaries of his or her national culture. While a
number of Japanese novelists troubled themselves over the issue of cultural identity,
it appears that Murakami is unconcerned about his “Japaneseness,” or about being
labeled “un-Japanese,” and this is possibly why Murakami was not accepted by the
Japanese literary establishment. Exploring the issue of the Japanese novel or
watakushi shōsetsu through the development of modern Japanese literature will
help us to understand the circumstances surrounding Murakami as a Japanese author.

3.2 The watakushi shōsetsu and the Japanese Self

We must note that modern Japanese cultural identity mirrors Japan’s historical
struggle with the West. The quest for modern Japanese identity has been a constant
struggle between “the East and the West,” that is, a search for Japaneseness in its
ethnological origins balanced against the highly industrialized values of Western
civilization. From the time of the Meiji Restoration (1868) when a government-led
Westernization program was launched, Japan undertook intensive efforts to “catch-
up” with the West. And while it is true that nationalistic discourses were emphasized
during periods of war, it is also true that the keen aspiration to gain credibility and
authenticity through western approval has not diminished in Japan even today.
In the postwar era, Japanese cultural self-esteem re-emerged after the phenomenal
economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s, which is reflected in the Nihonjinron
publishing boom mentioned earlier. The content and rise of Nihonjinron mirror the
dynamics of Japanese society’s evolution since the nineteenth century, and the myth
of Japaneseness was instrumental in the Japanization initiative to defend Japanese
identity against Western modernity. In this regard, Japanese literature is no excep-
tion. Despite the fact that the shōsetsu [novel] was introduced as a literary genre
during the Meiji period, it was imperative that literature remain essentially
38 3 Is Murakami “un-Japanese”?: The Myth of “Japaneseness”

“Japanese.” Shōyō Tsubouchi’s renowned essay Shōsetsu Shinzui [The essence of

the novel] (1885) proposed a model of Japanese novels by introducing the realism of
Western literature to propel the transformation of Japanese literature, although
breaking away from traditional writings was a formidable task throughout the
subsequent years. According to Matthew Strecher (1996), the continuous debate
over “pure” literature during the Taisho and Showa eras shows that, the interest in
establishing Japanese literature developed hand in hand with the Western idea of
“high and low culture.”4 This is reflected in an ongoing dispute between junbungaku
as “pure” literature and taishūbungaku as “mass” literature. Strecher maintains that
the term junbungaku, “contains some distinct characteristics that are not attached to
American or European ‘serious’ fiction” (1996, p. 360), and its ideological back-
ground should not be overlooked. Referring to Kōjin Karatani’s historical analysis
on this issue, he points out that, during the 1920s and 1930s, in times of Japan’s
“imperialistic outreach – military, economic, and cultural (. . .) Japan itself became
consciously obsessed with defining precisely what it meant to be Japanese” (1996,
p. 373), and in literature this led to the rise of the watakushi shōsetsu (I-novel).
Rebecca Suter (2008) shares this observation in her study on Japan’s modernization.
In reference also to Karatani’s view on the development of Japanese modernity, she
alludes to what he calls “the birth of Japanese subjectivity” from the “discovery of
landscape” (2008, p. 26). Suter recognizes this as an implication of the state of
Japanese modernization as a consequence of Western influence, and notes, “. . .once
constituted, the concepts of subject and landscape were naturalized and taken for
granted, their recent origin was suppressed, and they were presented as natural and
eternal characteristics of Japanese culture, or even of human nature” (Karatani 2017,
quoted in Suter 2008, p. 26). While Karatani’s argument on the “discovery of
landscape” encompasses a broad territory of socio-cultural vision, Suter’s argument,
that literature played a central role in this naturalization process as well as the
conceptualization of the individual subject, is noteworthy. Since the “discovery of
landscape” largely refers to a matter of “self-discovery,” Suter’s contention, that the
watakushi shōsetsu, particularly its confessional mode, was instrumental in
establishing the idea of “literature as self-expression” (2008, p. 26), is persuasive.
Both Strecher and Suter expound on how modern Japanese literature and its funda-
mental concept were constructed as part of the Westernization process that began in
the late nineteenth century. It is important to note also that during this process,
literature was compelled to pursue Japaneseness, and that the watakushi shōsetsu
was established as a distinctively Japanese form of writing for that purpose.
In his comprehensive study on the history of Japanese literature Nihon
bungakushi josetsu [A history of Japanese literature] (2017), Shūichi Katō offers a
unique insight on the lives of novelists in the wake of a new age of literature during
the Meiji Restoration. Observing that there were mixed reactions toward the ideas of
“West,” “tradition,” and “society,” depending on the individual writer, Katō clas-
sifies the approach taken by young intellectuals at the time into five modes:

4
For details, see Strecher (1996).
3.3 The Language of the New Meiji Subject 39

(i) traditionalist, (ii) objectifying cultural tradition, (iii) drawing creative power from
cultural confrontation, (iv) following Christianity and Socialism, and (v) adopting
“naturalism” (2017, pp. 284–293). While each of the above-mentioned models is of
interest, the case of “naturalism” adopted by those who moved to Tokyo will be most
relevant for our discussion here. According to Katō, those young writers who later
became central figures of the Naturalist School were mostly sons of landlords or old
families from the countryside that moved to Tokyo seeking higher education.5
Compared to the students from Tokyo, these young men enjoyed much freedom
living in the city, but at the same time, they were far more tightly restrained by their
families back home. For instance, they were at liberty in terms of their romantic
activities while in Tokyo, but their marriages were treated as entirely separate
matters, to be determined by their families. As a result, they suffered from polarizing
conditions in terms of freedom as an individual; there was considerable freedom on
the one hand, but a total lack of it, on the other. Katō finds this to be the trigger of the
subject theme sought by the novelists of the Naturalist School and their watakushi
shōsetsu.
Under such circumstances, the newly introduced literary theory by Tsubouchi,
and the movement of genbunitchi (concordance of written and spoken language),
enabled these writers to become novelists as a means of expression. Tsubouchi’s
theory encouraged writers to portray the lives and states of mind of the people
“naturally,” without idealizing the subject, and the invention of kōgotai (writing in
colloquial style) allowed them to write prose no matter how “unskillful” they may be
(Katō 2017, p. 356). The “truth” or reality to be written was a record or depiction of
their daily lives, and this facilitated “the beginning of the era for anyone to write a
novel” (Katō 2017, p. 357).

3.3 The Language of the New Meiji Subject

Considering the above, it seems that the watakushi shōsetsu was, as the name
suggests, writing about one’s own life, which was made available for anyone and
everyone, and enabled by a liberated Japanese literature, both in terms of field and
writing style. So, how could such a mode of literature that endorses the individual be
employed for the purpose of promoting Japaneseness, particularly as a homogeneous
group consciousness? What was the role played by the Naturalist School and the
watakushi shōsetsu?
To explore these questions, it is important to understand that the first generation
of intellectuals after the Meiji Restoration grew up with the ideal of the Meiji nation-
state, and therefore, impulsively identified themselves with Meiji Japan. According
to Katō (2017), this owes much to Confucian studies during the Tokugawa era as

5
Katō is referring to writers such as Katai Tayama, Hakuchō Masamune, Tōson Shimazaki, and
Doppo Kunikida.
40 3 Is Murakami “un-Japanese”?: The Myth of “Japaneseness”

well as to the “nationalistic” trend of the Western culture in the nineteenth century to
which they were exposed (see Katō 2017, pp. 383–384). On the other hand, Katō
maintains that the Naturalist School novelists were an exception, since they had little
chance, if any, of becoming elite bureaucrats in the central government, mostly due
to their family background. In this respect, he observes that they were “powerless” in
the modernization process, either to promote Western modernization or to level
criticism against such social processes. Consequently, those novelists were left to
focus their interest on their personal lives (Katō 2017, p. 384). While Katō’s analysis
suggests that the Naturalist School was a somewhat spontaneous incident under the
circumstances, rather than a literary creation, he admits that the watakushi shōsetsu
writers retained some traditionalist approach that goes back to the origins of Japa-
nese literary history.6 In his view, their writings on “human truth” marked a
departure from a centralized concept or a guiding principle that defines the order
of the world, and instead presented critical observation and practical consideration
(2017, pp. 367–368). This tells us that, despite their will and ambition to conceive a
new literary work, they were in fact succeeding traditional Japanese literature.
Furthermore, regardless of the personal objectives of those aspiring novelists,
these works were designated to be the “original” Japanese literature, since they
emanated from a new cultural horizon set forth by the Meiji Restoration. And for this
reason, the watakushi shōsetsu, as a literary mode, was entitled to become a
representation of “Japaneseness.” As Eric Hobsbawm (1983) famously claims,
“tradition is invented,” and the Meiji Restoration is indeed a historical point in
time when tradition was re-created for the primary purpose of building a modern
nation-state, for which culture operated as an ideological tool (see Nishikawa 1995,
2001). Katō’s well-wrought examination of the Meiji novelists who embarked on
this mission to produce new Japanese literature shows us the struggle to re-invent
literary tradition by introducing new ideas from the West. In this respect, Katō
affirms the hybridity of Japanese culture, which is not irrelevant to the investigation
of Murakami, a topic we shall re-visit later in this chapter.
As we consider the making of modern Japanese literature, we must also pay
attention to the receiving end of this cultural production, that is, how it contributed to
cultivating a new audience. According to Nanette Twine (1978), until Meiji, there
was no unified style for writing that served for general purposes:
Literary Japanese in 1868 was far from being the efficient medium of communication needed
in a rapidly changing nation. The spoken and written forms of the language were so
dissimilar that separate grammars were required for each. The written language was itself
divided into several different styles, each for use in a clearly defined field. There was no
single all-purpose style simple enough to be understood by all literate Japanese. (1978,
p. 333)

Twine’s study shows that there were at least four main styles in use—kambun,
sōrōbun, wabun, and wakankonkōbun—in early Meiji. For example, kambun, with
its use of Chinese characters, was perceived as exclusively higher grade and was

6
Katō specifies this to Edo and Heian eras.
3.3 The Language of the New Meiji Subject 41

adopted for official business, serious literature, and upper-class education. Sōrōbun
was largely used for correspondence and in official public notices. It served for
commoner education as well. Whereas kambun and sōrōbun were strongly
influenced by Chinese, wabun, which originated in the Heian period (794–1185)
with the emergence of kana phonetic scripts, was “predominantly Japanese” (Twine
1978, p. 336), but remained secondary in the Meiji period due to the government’s
preference for kambun and Chinese studies.7 Wakankonkōbun, a mixture of Chinese
and Japanese, was close to contemporary speech, in terms of vocabulary, although it
still included numerous kambun expressions. This was the style generally used for
literary texts, including books, essays, and popular literature. Twine notes that,
It was popular because kambun was both too difficult for the lower classes and too formal for
describing everyday incidents; wabun, although simpler, was too flowery and rambling.
Many Chinese words had been assimilated into everyday Japanese, and literate townsmen
were familiar with the style of the Japanese classics. They therefore found the mixture of
Chinese and Japanese easier to understand than kambun or gikobun.8 (1978, p. 336)

Twine’s study details the complex situation surrounding language and writing
styles during the transition from Edo to Meiji. She contends that there were techno-
logical, intellectual, and educational reasons that required a change, particularly for
the purpose of introducing Western ideas. While the genbunitchi movement was first
triggered by such a “utilitarian value of the colloquial style” (Twine 1978, p. 339), it
was only natural that the literary stage would come next. With the success of Shimei
Futabatei’s Ukigumo [The drifting cloud] in, 1887, the colloquial style began to
spread from 1888 to 1889; however, it was halted by a reactionary nationalist
movement that pushed for a revival of Japanese studies.9 Therefore, the common
use of genbunitchi prose for the objective portrayal of people, places, and events, did
not occur until the rise of the Shaseibun [Literary sketch] School in 1900, established
chiefly by Shiki Masaoka. Twine attributes the success of this group to writers such
as Tōson Shimazaki and Sōseki Natsume, noting that “The latter’s Wagahai wa
Neko de Aru, 1905, drew public attention to shaseibun, and was highly praised for its
concise and fluent style” (1978, p. 353). Following the Shaseibun School, it was the
Naturalist School that finally promoted the use of the new style for literature; and
since they pursued the expression of human realities by delving into their emotions,
self-confession in the first-person narrative voice became a distinctive feature of this
school and of modern Japanese literature.

7
Kana refers to the Japanese phonetic syllabary.
8
A revival of the classical Japanese style instigated in the mid-Tokugawa period by a group of
conservative kokugakusha [Japanese classical scholars].
9
For details, see Twine (1978).
42 3 Is Murakami “un-Japanese”?: The Myth of “Japaneseness”

3.4 Novel Subjects for a New Nation-State

Contemplating the role of novels at the time, Strecher contends that the genbunitchi
movement provided for the production of materials to mold a new “Meiji citizen-
subject” in language, from which people could understand their role in the evolving
society (2017, p. 60). Although one could argue that the question of “citizenship”
remains problematic in Japan even now,10 Strecher’s argument that the junbungaku
of the early and mid-Meiji period provided a model for those readers to follow in
becoming “subjects,” is noteworthy. Strecher’s argument resonates with
Nishikawa’s contention that the primary purpose of the Meiji government, in its
course of modernizing Japan, was to develop and establish a nation-state system (see
Nishikawa 1995, 2001). According to Nishikawa, culture and civilization are terms
that were created in the eighteenth century to represent the new self-consciousness
and values of modern Europe; therefore, culture is an ideology that developed with
the modern nation-state (1995, p. 83). Considering its historical development and
role, he asserts that the term “culture” alludes to “national culture.” Founded on this
understanding, Nishikawa proclaims that examination of Nihonjinron or Nihon-
bunkaron [discourse on Japanese culture] turns out to be a discussion of the
nation-state, due to its intimate relationship with the educational system as well as
media journalism (1995, p. 164). According to Nishikawa, while Nihonjinron in
general focuses on ethnic characteristics or national characteristics of the Japanese
people, with particular interest in behavioral modes, Nihon-bunkaron is associated
with traditional values or spirit, centering around high culture, and in quest of
Japanese identity (1995, pp. 162–163). Therefore, Nihonjinron and Nihon-bunkaron
commonly share the purpose of distinguishing Japan or Japanese culture from other
nations and cultures, and promoting the ideology of “Japaneseness” as a represen-
tation of Japanese nation and culture.
Strecher echoes Nishikawa’s viewpoint in the field of literature, stating, “There is
(. . .) a strongly didactic aspect to Japanese literature from this period, and its
principal educational goal was to show Meiji readers by example how to be
individuals, imperial subjects, and even Japanese” (2017, p. 60). Furthermore, he
emphasizes that this was, arguably, a pivotal time to set forth what it was to “be
Japanese.” Therefore, he argues that “[t]he Meiji shōsetsu – was constructed as a
form of writing, by, for, and about Japanese people, and one of its most crucial
functions was to define for readers who they were as Japanese” (2017, p. 60).
Strecher’s contention that the shōsetsu was not merely literary entertainment, but
that it undertook the role of supporting the construction of a nation-state system by
educating the subjects of that system to follow the ideal Japanese model, is highly
persuasive. He goes on to assert that traditional modern Japanese literature, or “pure”
literature, is “intended to depict the Japanese experience, for Japanese readers with
the correct cultural, linguistic and historical experience” (2017, p. 68). This is why
he insists that the shōsetsu was written “by, for, and about Japanese people,” since it

10
For example, Wender’s (2005) discussion on the issue of Korean residents in Japan.
3.4 Novel Subjects for a New Nation-State 43

was critically important that a uniquely Japanese narrative be constructed in order to

materialize a Japanese subject. Similarly, the Nihonjinron discourse produces the
same effect through its advocacy of what Strecher facetiously calls “the inscrutable
aspects of what it means to be “Japanese”” (2017, p. 68). While Strecher’s use of the
term inscrutable pokes fun at the idea of the Western gaze, which once regarded the
Japanese as unreadable, my interpretation is that the term illustrates the way
Nihonjinron alludes to “Japaneseness” ambiguously, and this is how people were
molded into a nation, as constituents of a nation-state.
As discussed earlier, the enduring popularity of Nihonjinron has been attributed
to Japan’s quest for identity since the Meiji period. It was also supported by an
extraordinary volume of publications, variously described as a “mass consumption
commodity” (Befu 1993), or the “national sport of Japan’s reading public”
(Sugimoto 1999). In short, it became a national obsession. John Lie argues that
this led to what he calls “typological thinking,” for through these texts, “Japan
emerges as a valid unit of generalization, which is unchanging, homogeneous, and
distinct” (2001, p. 159). Typological categorization, he argues, is readily accepted
since it fits the wide-spread classificatory impulse that follows from people’s
questioning of the meaning of self and identity (Lie 2001, p. 168). And this is no
doubt what made Nihonjinron so popular, as we have noted earlier, in the develop-
ment of the discourse originating from The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. At the
same time, it is conceivable that modern nation-states exploited this inclination, and
promoted nationhood in order to establish unity from the diverse identities of its
citizens. Craig Calhoun claims that nationalism is distinctively modern and provides
“a way of constructing collective identities that arose alongside transformations in
state power” (2002, p. 29), but he also notes that nationalism converts to the
traditional in order to establish itself. He writes,
Specific nationalist identities and projects have continued to draw on ethnic identities of long
standing, on local kinship and community networks, and on claimed connections to ancestral
territories. This has been a crucial source of cultural content, emotional commitment, and
organizational strength for such identities and projects. (2002, p. 29)

This applies to Japan’s modernization process as well. Use of the idea of

“Japanese blood,” noted by Kōsaku Yoshino (1992), to represent Japaneseness can
be understood as the local kinship upon which Japanese nationalism drew. The idea
was enhanced by the family-nation ideology of the blood relationship between the
Japanese people and the Emperor. Roy Starrs contends that the Kojiki and the Nihon
shoki, the earliest known works of Japanese mythology, were used “for the con-
struction of an imperial mythology and to provide divine sanction for the emperor’s
rule” (2011, p. 81). He draws on Takamitsu Konishi’s argument that, since the Meiji
government advocated these publications as the cultural foundation of Japan, they
took part in developing a discourse “constructed by a modern nation-state (kokumin
kokka) whose ideological under-pinning was the emperor system (tennōsei)”
(Takamitsu cited in Starrs 2011, p. 81).
The prevalence of the Nihonjinron over the course of Japan’s becoming a modern
nation certainly matches Nishikawa’s argument on the effect of Nihon-bunkaron for
44 3 Is Murakami “un-Japanese”?: The Myth of “Japaneseness”

its role in the development of the nation-state. As Sugimoto’s argument that

Nihonjinron publications employ an N ¼ E ¼ C equation, that is, a three-way
equation between N (nationality), E (ethnicity), and C (culture) (1999) demonstrates,
the contentious issue is the relationship of Nihonjinron to nationalism, with which
many scholars agree.11 Befu summarizes the academic discussion over Nihonjinron
as follows: “If nationalism has to do (. . .) with national identity and the pride
deriving therefrom, then Nihonjinron has everything to do with nationalism”
(1993, p. 125).
As we have seen, the issue of “Japaneseness” disseminated through Nihonjinron
or Nihon-bunkaron lies in its complicity with cultural nationalism. Furthermore,
scholarly analyses demonstrate that Nihonjinron is an ideological discourse, or, as
Befu affirms, “prescribes what is normatively right and therefore how one should
conduct oneself” (1993, p. 126). Nihonjinron is problematic because, despite its
ambiguous setup, we are considered to be “un-Japanese” if we do not conform. Here,
the ideological myth of Japaneseness embedded in Nihonjinron becomes a matter of
cultural identity. Furthermore, given that Nihonjinron flourished in the quest for
Japanese identity, it is important to review critically how it was employed in terms of
assimilating cultural identity with national identity.
Through his analysis of the nation-state and national culture, including the role
played by Nihonjinron theory, Nishikawa (1995, 1996, 2001) offers compelling
views on the ideological effects of culture and its implications for national identity.
Following his contention that civilization and culture can operate as ideologies that
aid national integration, he argues from a historical viewpoint that both concepts
were introduced in an effort to develop Japan into a modern nation-state following
the Western model.12 In particular, Nishikawa underscores the functional role of
culture, claiming, “to the extent that the nation-state exists, a national culture will be
necessary as an ideology to integrate it” (1996, p. 245). His contention is that
“nation” is a fiction of what he calls the “nation-state era.” According to his studies,
nation is defined by cultural characteristics, such as race, physical similarity, reli-
gion, language, and cultural tradition, but he argues that when we observe ethnic
problems taking place on the global level, we realize that there is no nation that
satisfies these cultural characteristics (1996, p. 247). Nevertheless, Nishikawa’s
concern remains relevant that the idea of national culture encapsulated in
Nihonjinron discourse continues to thrive in Japan, despite the scrutiny over the
concept of nation. Although the concept of national culture is gradually losing
ground as a result of historical findings, particularly on the fictitious nature of
connecting “nation” and “ethnic group,” the idea of national culture seems to be
well sustained in Japan, as the continued popularity of Nihonjinron suggests.
Nishikawa draws on Norihiro Katō’s analysis of the multilayered structure of
Japanese culture to demonstrate how a homogeneous “Japanese” nation was

11
For example, Sakai (1997), Befu (1993) and Yoshino (1992, 2002).
For further discussion on this subject, refer to Nishikawa (2001) Chapter 8 “Kokumin-bunka to
12

Shi-bunka.”
3.4 Novel Subjects for a New Nation-State 45

constructed. According to Katō (1997), the item “Japanese” is defined as a notion of

Japaneseness supported by a multilayered structure accumulated over time. First, the
Japanese (people) were defined as residents of the Japanese archipelago and cate-
gorized as a racial group with distinctive characteristics. By inventing the Japanese
language, they were established as cultural subjects through language and ethnicity
and eventually became members of a nation-state (cited in Nishikawa 2001,
pp. 290–291). While acknowledging the various historical analyses of these issues,
Nishikawa also highlights how Katō offers a way of challenging entrenched pre-
conceptions about Japaneseness and Japanese culture. For, similar to the historical
process of the development of “Japanese” as described by Katō, the concept of
Japanese culture crystalized from national culture through the course of historical
events. Nishikawa explains that national culture was established as an ideology to
integrate the nation for the modern nation-state, and therefore, the invention of new
traditions and newly established histories occurred in other countries such as France,
Germany, and the USA, as well. In the case of Japan, however, these newly
established traditions and histories resulted in the creation of myths that centered
on the Emperor (2001, p. 294). This, according to Nishikawa, is how “Japanese
culture” was perhaps produced by way of national culture, and like “nation” or
“ethnic group,” exerted and continues to exert an overwhelming influence over the
people. Nishikawa’s concern over this influence is reiterated in his examination of
culture, in which he maintains that “the myth of origin must be abolished,” since
“pure culture” is an illusion created by the nation-state (2001, p. 302). Particularly
noteworthy is his argument that culture is fundamentally hybrid, for it continues to
transform through interaction. Building on this perception, we shall re-examine the
issue of “Japaneseness,” for this ambiguous concept is evidently a key culprit in
defining Japanese cultural identity.
As we have seen, scholars agree that the notion of Japaneseness is central to
Nihonjinron. Lie defines it as “an explicit articulation of the discourse of
Japaneseness” (2001, p. 150). Furthermore, Nihonjinron assumes that every Japa-
nese person possesses such Japaneseness, which is problematic since it is used
interchangeably with Japanese culture. Using culture interchangeably with ethnicity
together with nationality supports Sugimoto’s contention that Nihonjinron discourse
extensively utilizes the N ¼ E ¼ C [Nationality, Ethnicity, and Culture] equation. As
Sugimoto points out, Japaneseness is defined as “a set of value orientations that the
Japanese are supposed to share” (1999, p. 82), and advocates of Nihonjinron
unanimously posit Japaneseness as an essential quality that distinguishes them
from the West or the other.
Furthermore, Japaneseness often insists upon a homogeneous group identity. In
his exploration of the ethnicity of Japanese society, Lie (2001) contends that
Nihonjinron is founded on typological thinking, that is, the generalization of people,
culture, and identity. He observes that “Homogeneity and constancy characterize
typological categories, which imply essential identities” (2001, p. 159), and suggests
that this is what sustains the discourse on Japaneseness. Lie’s analysis shows that
such generalizations fall short both as theoretical concepts and as empirical
46 3 Is Murakami “un-Japanese”?: The Myth of “Japaneseness”

investigation; therefore, the idea of Japaneseness is “an empty and floating signifier”
(2001, p. 160), devoid of anything essential.
And yet, Nihonjinron discourse remains prevalent, and the idea of Japaneseness,
as homogeneous ethnic identity, is employed to distinguish a cultural boundary for
promoting national identity. The concern here is that this ideology is used to exclude
those who do not comply, as “un-Japanese.” As discussed elsewhere (Wakatsuki
2016), Murakami’s un-Japaneseness has been criticized as “odorless” (mushū) since
there is little to indicate cultural roots or locality in his works. The claim, that
Murakami’s popularity overseas is due to his un-Japaneseness, reflects the idea
that ethnic (or rooted cultural) identity must be assumed by a Japanese artist. But
Murakami’s global popularity demonstrates that the issue of Japaneseness can be
approached from a radically different perspective as well. Strecher observes that,
[The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle] may not have started any major trends, but it is part of a
major trend, one that forces Japanese and non-Japanese alike to confront the changing shape
of “national culture,” perhaps even to accept that, as cultural boundaries constantly shift, the
idea of an insular, homogenized, “native” culture becomes obsolete. (2006, p. 83)

This blurring of cultural boundaries is significant, especially in terms of

Murakami’s Japaneseness. While his perceived lack of Japaneseness accounts for
the critical attitude toward his work in Japan, the penetration by Japanese popular
culture, such as animation and manga, into overseas markets has renewed the
perception of Japaneseness. The idea of provincial “native” culture has become
outdated, and a new breed of Japaneseness, one that may perhaps be called “cos-
mopolite,” has emerged through an interplay with the global cultural sphere.
Murakami’s globalized readership indicates that Japaneseness is no longer a major
interest for non-Japanese readers around the world. The Japaneseness or
un-Japaneseness of Murakami is, in my view, an entirely irrelevant one, as his
work traverses the conventional dichotomy of East and West, and extends through-
out the world.

3.5 Lost Identity: Westernization and Japanization

The issues of Westernization and internalization, perennial Nihonjinron themes,

reflect Japan’s constant struggle with the West as the paradigmatic model of
advanced civilization. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, Nihonjinron discourse
demonstrates Japan’s urge to establish national identity on two fronts: to be recog-
nized by the West, and to maintain the self-esteem of a unique nation. Not only did
Nihonjinron texts contribute to nation-building, but studies confirm that Nihonjinron
has thrived when there is a need for enhanced national identity (see, for example,
Funabiki 2010; Minami 2006). An obvious case was the Meiji Restoration, during
which time Westernization and Japanization proceeded in parallel, and Japanization
as “nationalization” was conceived in the course of developing a new nation
(Nishikawa 2008). While the Meiji government was eager to envisage a new identity
3.5 Lost Identity: Westernization and Japanization 47

by introducing Western civilization and re-inventing Japanese tradition, Japan’s

experience of defeat in the Second World War was an instance of lost identity. In
his inquiry on why Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword gained so much
popularity in Japan, Yasuharu Ishizawa observes that “the Japanese people, who had
lost their identity due to the reversal of value systems after the war, must have found
validation in being defined as ‘a culture of shame’ by an American” (1997, p. 13). It
is no surprise that Nihonjinron flourished at this point in history, for the overturn of
social values that took place during the postwar period was instrumental in
re-shaping Japanese nationalism thereafter (Yoshino 2002, p. 203). Through his
analysis of the development of Nihonjinron discourse, Yoshino mentions that one of
the primary features of Nihonjinron was to reconstruct Japan’s national identity,
which was under threat by Westernization and industrialization. It was also an
attempt to apprehend Japanese cultural characteristics as a contributing factor for
the success of the Japanese economy and of social stability (Yoshino 2002, p. 203).
In her book The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan
and the United States, Suter refers to Murakami’s texts as “neither chrysanthemums
nor swords” (2008, p. 37), and argues that his works were viewed as completely
Westernized when he was first introduced in America. As she notes, “Reviews of
Murakami’s work, however, invariably insist on Westernization and
un-Japaneseness as defining features of his fiction. Many critics stress (. . .) the
presence of references to Western literature, music, and film” (2008, p. 42). She
also observes that after his short stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker,
Murakami was not seen by American readers as “Japanese.” This suggests that his
works were viewed as “un-Japanese” due to the cultural references to Western
artifacts, or the lack of what is expected of Japanese writers, which is to depict
Japanese culture.
Obviously this represents a significant break with tradition. As Minato Kawamura
(2006) points out, “in contrast to the exoticism and orientalism through which
Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima were apprehended by readers abroad”
(2006, p. 79), Murakami represents an emancipation from the strong dichotomy of
East and West that marked the period prior to his advent. Suter claims that
“Murakami’s work is representative of a new Japanese mode of relating to the
West: one free from the sense of anxiety, uneasiness, inferiority, or hostility that
characterized much postwar Japanese literary production” (2008, p. 9). Whether
such an attitude of uncertainty was characteristic of postwar Japanese literature is
debatable, but Murakami’s “detachment” as an individual, which is also reflected in
his work, was certainly new, and this was probably the reason why the Japanese
literary establishment found it difficult to accept him. Strecher offers a compelling
view on this matter in relation to junbungaku. He maintains that Murakami’s
emergence in the development of Japanese literature marks a critical challenge
against junbungaku as a literary genre of high culture that is uniquely Japanese.
He upholds Murakami’s independence from the literary mainstream, asserting that
“Murakami Haruki began his career with a meandering, occasionally touching story
of youthful confusion in a language that was light and simplistic, a very far cry from
the painstakingly-wrought, densely powerful prose of his literary predecessors”
48 3 Is Murakami “un-Japanese”?: The Myth of “Japaneseness”

(2017, p. 69). Strecher argues that Murakami’s simple and unpretentious style
“. . .was the very antithesis of what postwar junbungaku had come to be and (. . .)
posed a serious challenge to the primacy of the junbungaku model for literature”
(2017, p. 72).
Particularly noteworthy is Strecher’s argument that Murakami’s fiction, perhaps
unintentionally, “effectively deconstructed precisely those literary models that were
so carefully developed in the postwar” (2017, p. 72). The very choice of the term
mukokuseki, meaning “nationality-less,” which was used disparagingly to describe
the author by some critics in Japan, suggests their belief that “Japaneseness” is the
core essence that sustains junbungaku. As Strecher observes,
“pure literature,” despite its grounding in Western models imported during the Meiji period,
was always intended as a wholly Japanese mode of writing, intended for Japanese readers,
meant to construct Japanese models of subjectivity, to express, indeed, something essential
about being Japanese. (2017, p. 73, emphasis in original)

The perspective that junbungaku, like Nihonjinron, purports to the idea of

Japanese uniqueness is noteworthy, particularly for exploring Murakami’s identity
and belonging. For, as Strecher argues above, the emergence of junbungaku as a
literary model to preserve Japanese identity is quite conceivable given that there was
a crisis of identity in the Meiji period due to the flow of Western civilization. We
must also be aware that there was another “crisis” after Japan’s defeat in the Second
World War. If the mission of junbungaku was to preserve Japanese cultural identity,
then, understandably, the idea of being “pure” was vital for its sustainability, and
Nihonjinron served a similar purpose.
And yet, reverence for purity invites exclusionary attitudes that uphold the
homogeneity and groupism that would lead to collective identity. As discussed
earlier, junbungaku played a critical role in developing the Meiji “subject” by
constructing this collective identity; similarly, the Nihonjinron discourse promoted
Japaneseness to envision a homogeneous nation. Murakami’s departure from both
junbungaku and the kind of Japaneseness endorsed by Nihonjinron, therefore, offers
a new approach to the issue of identity and belonging. As Strecher contends,
Murakami has deconstructed firm definitions of “Japaneseness” as they emerged from the
debates on Nihonjinron, as well as grounding longstanding definitions of junbungaku; at the
same time, he has deconstructed conceptual perceptions of “the West,” even as these were
developed to oppose and yet, paradoxically, to define that very “Japaneseness” that grounds
Nihonjinron and junbungaku. (2017, p. 77)

Notably, it seems that there is much in common between the experiences of

Murakami’s generation and those of the Meiji era, in terms of their respective
encounters with the West. As Strecher suggests, “. . .Murakami’s generation, unlike
those that preceded it, was capable of confronting “America” in a manner reminis-
cent of how early Meiji reformers looked at “the West:” as the key to something new
and exotic” (2017, p. 70). In contrast with the generation that experienced the
dramatic events at the end of the war, and grew up as witnesses of the Occupation
(1945–52), Murakami’s generation—baby boomers born after the war—displayed a
subtly different attitude toward the West. We may see how it differs by investigating
3.5 Lost Identity: Westernization and Japanization 49

Kenzaburō Ōe, who belongs to the generation immediately preceding Murakami’s.

In his essay Watashi to iu Shōsetsuka no tsukuri-kata [How I was made into a
novelist] (2001), Ōe recalls that one of the two books that captivated him as a young
child was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and he was thrilled to have
the opportunity of reading the original English text at the American Culture Center
after the war ended (2001, pp. 32–33). This facility was one of the CIE Libraries13
established by the GHQ/SCAP14 during the Occupation, and Ōe was a high school
student by then. Although he was teased by his fellow students for reading children’s
books, the author claims that he was enthralled by the opportunity to read his favorite
story in the original language rather than in translation. Ōe’s fascination with foreign
literature, and his enthusiasm to read in English, reminds us of Murakami, who
began reading American novels in English as a high school student. However, unlike
Murakami, who was able to enjoy the reading experience and extend it to other
American cultural products, such as jazz music, Ōe faced an era in which Japanese
attitudes toward the continued presence of American military power in Japan were
growing significantly more negative. This was due to the outbreak of the Korean
War in 1950, and prolonged and exacerbated by the Cold War. Thus Ōe’s early
works, dealing with the issue of America or the American military, clearly express
the struggle of Japan’s powerlessness versus America’s hegemonic might (Kuroko
2003, p. 109).
This struggle is reflected in Ōe’s acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1994. In the speech, entitled “Japan, the Ambiguous, and
Myself,” Ōe professes that “after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation
since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two poles of
ambiguity” (Ōe 1994). But what does he mean by “ambiguity”? And more impor-
tantly, why did he parody the title of Yasunari Kawabata’s famous Nobel Lecture,
“Japan the Beautiful, and Myself”? Kawabata’s awarding of the Nobel Prize in
1968—the first awarded to a Japanese writer—complemented the successful staging
of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games as clear signs that Japan’s recovery from the
defeat in the Second World War was now complete.15 In their comments on
Kawabata, the Nobel Prize committee noted that, “in the postwar wave of violent
Americanization, his novel is a gentle reminder of the necessity of trying to save
something of the old Japan’s beauty.”16
According to the Nihonjinron trajectory (see Nishikawa 1995; Minami 2006), it
was the high point of the trend toward Japanization, and therefore, Kawabata’s
Nobel lecture emphasizing the unique values of Japan (against the West) is

13
Civil Information and Education Centers, often referred to as Libraries, were set up by the
GHQ/SCAP in 23 locations across Japan.
14
GHQ stands for General Headquarters. SCAP stands for Supreme Commander for the Allied
Powers.
15
Japan’s GNP (Gross National Product) was ranked the second in the world by 1969 and Japan
World Exposition took place in Osaka in 1970.
16
Award ceremony speech. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB2019. Wed. 27 Nov 2019. <https://
www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1968/ceremony-speech/>.
50 3 Is Murakami “un-Japanese”?: The Myth of “Japaneseness”

recognized as a Nihonjinron text. Whereas, Kawabata’s speech celebrated

Japaneseness, Ōe confronted the very issue demonstrated by Kawabata and noted
that his own personal development came as a result of seeking mentorship from the
West. By boldly replacing the word “beautiful” with “ambiguous,” Ōe exhibits his
protest, directed not against Kawabata, but against Japanese society. Ōe claims that
“This ambiguity which is so powerful and penetrating that it splits both the state and
its people is evident in various ways,” referring to Japan’s ambiguous position in
terms of being modernized under Western influence but geographically located in
Asia and insisting on preserving traditional culture. But in his eyes, Japan is “driven
into isolation from other Asian countries, not only politically but also socially and
culturally” (Ōe 1994). Furthermore, he maintains,
To define a desirable Japanese identity I would like to pick out the word ‘decent’ (. . .) This
deceptively simple epithet may starkly set off and contrast with the word ‘ambiguous’ used
for my identification in ‘Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself’. There is a wide and ironical
discrepancy between what the Japanese seem like when viewed from outside and what they
wish to look like. (Ōe 1994)

Here, Ōe expresses his wish to depart from ambiguity and chooses to be “decent,”
which he aligns with other meanings, such as “humane,” “sane,” and “comely” from
George Orwell’s characters (Ōe 1994). Considering that the early 1990s were a time
when Nihonjinron texts written by non-Japanese were popular bestsellers in Japan, it
is highly possible that Ōe was critical of the discourse, which is suggested in the
above excerpt from his speech. He denounces what is promoted in the Nihonjinron
narrative, and calls for a sound approach to reconsider Japanese identity.
On the other hand, Murakami, as a contemporary Japanese writer, remains
impartial regarding both the struggle with the West and the Japaneseness discourse.
As Strecher observes, Murakami’s work, including his unique writing style, was a
result of the author’s attraction to the American way of life, which he came to know
as a young teenager through reading contemporary American novels. Unlike the
earlier generation, which suffered from the war in various ways during its adoles-
cence, Murakami enjoyed being acquainted with American culture in his hometown
of Kobe, a major port city in the western region of Japan known for its multicultural
atmosphere. However, it was not just American culture that attracted him, but what
America represented—individual freedom—which he came to apprehend through
his interaction with literary works and music from a faraway continent. While
postwar Japanese writers sought freedom from the totalitarian militarism that
oppressed them, Murakami’s generation struggled against the institutional power,
symbolized by the student movements in the 1960s. As a college student, Murakami
was deeply disappointed by the outcome of these movements, and chose to be
“detached,” seeking autonomy as an individual (cf. Murakami Haruki, Kawai
Hayao ni ai ni iku 1996, pp. 9–12). This decision to leave the boundaries of his
community has ultimately changed his course, for he was abandoning what was
deemed the “proper” course for university graduates, and instead chose the path of
the “loner.”
References 51

This tendency to rebel against the “proper” path is equally reflected in the
language Murakami used as he began his writing career. With just a few short
paragraphs written in English and translated by the author back into his native
Japanese with Hear the Wind Sing, Murakami effectively obliterated the mystique
of a transcendent Japanese language that defied comprehension by any but the
Japanese themselves. In this regard, Rubin (2012) would seem to agree.
On Murakami’s relationship to Japan and the Japanese language, Rubin argues
that:
It is important to note how shocking Murakami’s cultural relativism is in the context of
Japanese literature. Readers unfamiliar with the quasi-religious rhapsodizing about the
spiritual superiority or unique magic of Japanese that has passed for serious intellectual
commentary in Japan (. . .) may not realize that Murakami’s cosmopolitanism is almost
revolutionary. (2012, p. 233)

As a scholar of Japanese literature, Rubin is keenly aware of its traditions. The

“spiritual superiority” to which he refers is the myth of the Japanese language, but
implies Japanese cultural traditions as well. It is because modern Japanese literature
has been encumbered with the mission of preserving Japaneseness that Murakami’s
cosmopolitanism is deemed “un-Japanese.” As Rubin points out, Murakami’s work
has been accused of undermining the literary and cultural value of Japaneseness.
Responding to a reader's question about whether Japanese literature is written for
Japanese readers, and therefore unlikely to be fully comprehensible to non-Japanese,
Murakami had this to say:
The world of literature is probably 85 percent feeling and desire, things that transcend
differences of race or language or gender, and these are basically things that admit of mutual
exchange (. . .) It’s my belief that Japanese literature has to open itself much more broadly
than it now does to the scrutiny of the world at large. (Murakami cited in Rubin 2012, p. 234)

Murakami’s commitment to openness rather than exclusiveness in Japanese

literature confirms his cosmopolitanism, and the cosmopolitan imaginary embodied
by Murakami may suggest a new Japanese cultural identity that is unbound.

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Chapter 4
A Friend of the “Egg”: Murakami Speaks
in Jerusalem

In February of 2009 Haruki Murakami was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the
Freedom of the Individual in Society. His acceptance speech, which became widely
known as the “Jerusalem speech” was significant both in terms of the occasion and
content that marked a special moment manifesting Murakami’s cosmopolitan indi-
viduality. Entitled “Of Walls and Eggs,” the speech was delivered by Murakami in
the city of Jerusalem amid a political conflict in the Middle East that led to violent
confrontation in the West Bank. While there was much controversy over
Murakami’s acceptance of the award, the writer decided to visit Jerusalem despite
being advised by many to stay away from such international political conflict. And in
fact, he was publicly criticized by anti-Israeli organizations, who protested that his
acceptance of the Jerusalem Prize would be understood as the author’s support for
Israel. Despite such criticism Murakami’s speech in Jerusalem expresses the author’s
political position, both as a writer and an individual, probably for the first time in his
career. In contrast to his earlier social detachment (Murakami 1996), the Jerusalem
speech now unveiled Murakami’s cosmopolitan qualities. Therefore, it was a critical
moment that disclosed the author’s shift from social detachment to cosmopolitan
commitment. Murakami’s message was simple enough, yet it was couched in
metaphorical language that aroused worldwide scrutiny, leaving many to wonder
in particular just what Murakami had meant by his analogy of “walls and eggs.”
Each of us, is more or less an egg. Each of us is a unique irreplaceable soul enclosed in a
fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or a
lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name ‘It is The System’. The
System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it
begins to kill us and cause us to kill others – coldly, efficiently, systematically . . . Between a
high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.
(Murakami 2009b)

The explanation of the metaphor offered by the author himself was that “Bombers
and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall,” and the
unarmed civilians “crushed and burned and shot by them” are the eggs. As suggested
by the author, this is one interpretation of the metaphor that seems directly connected

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 55

T. Wakatsuki, The Haruki Phenomenon,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7549-5_4
56 4 A Friend of the “Egg”: Murakami Speaks in Jerusalem

to the violence taking place in Gaza. However, the crucial point here is Murakami’s
announcement that he will “stand on the side of the eggs” as vulnerable human
beings, emphasizing that he will support the egg no matter “how wrong the egg.”
This demonstrates that Murakami’s concern lies beyond the political conflict in the
West Bank, and he espouses a broader viewpoint over humanity. Furthermore, the
writer’s strong aspiration to stand together with other individual “eggs” demon-
strates his cosmopolitan quality.

4.1 As a Novelist and an Individual

When Murakami’s visit to Jerusalem was announced, it was largely anticipated that
the writer would call for peace in view of the violent political confrontation that had
recently resulted in civilian casualties at the time. However, despite such anticipa-
tion, Murakami opened the speech in a playful manner, astonishing the audience by
declaring that, as a novelist, he is “a professional spinner of lies,” and that his
acclaim grows proportionally as he creates “bigger and better” lies (Murakami
2009b). In this slightly humorous approach, we can see Murakami’s strong will to
stand as an individual, first and foremost. He firmly denies particular affiliation by
saying that he came to Jerusalem as a writer, and his work as a professional novelist
aims to bring “a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it” (Murakami
2009b). Speaking as a novelist, as opposed to speaking as a cultural representative of
Japan, clearly marks Murakami as an individual, speaking for himself alone. He
maneuvers to defend the individualistic position of the novelist, and the importance
of trusting his own instincts.
Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people
are telling me – “don’t go there,” “don’t do that,” I tend to want to “go there” and “do that.”
It’s in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot
genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own
hands. (Murakami 2009b)

Notably, Murakami emphasizes that he had chosen to “see for himself” (2009a)
rather than to stay away, acting against warnings to avoid becoming involved in an
international political conflict. He admits that from the moment it was announced he
would be attending the award ceremony in Jerusalem, there was a storm of protest
from anti-Israeli groups that his presence would be seen as supportive of the regime
that had bombed the West Bank (2009a). The timing seemed ill-considered, since
reportedly, many civilians were injured in the attack. Under these circumstances,
Murakami’s argument that he was there as a novelist and an individual, becomes all
the more significant, for it clearly suggests a “cosmopolitan” approach that upholds
the autonomous self, and aspires to belonging as an individual, beyond national
borders or religious boundaries. Coupled with his explanation above, that writers
reject advice as to what they should or should not do, we see here a powerful sense of
resistance toward imposed collective power over the individual.
4.1 As a Novelist and an Individual 57

On the occasion of the Jerusalem Prize, Murakami was compelled to clarify his
position on the international political situation in Israel. Although he had given
public speeches before, this was the first time he had publicly stated his position on a
political event as visible as the Gaza conflict. Furthermore, Murakami gave a
detailed account of the events leading up to his acceptance speech in Jerusalem,
and explained references made in his speech through an interview article. Entitled,
“Boku wa naze Jerusalem e itta no ka” [Why I went to Jerusalem], the author states
that he found it unreasonable that he was pressured to make a public statement for a
personal decision upon receiving an award that was offered to him as an individual
(2009a, p. 156).
He reaffirms his standpoint by providing the timeline of events. According to
Murakami, he was first contacted by the secretariat on November 25, 2008. He also
notes that he hesitated, and even considered declining the award, on the grounds that
he believed Israel’s policy of enclosing Palestinians in the West bank and Gaza to be
wrong (2009a, p. 157). However, after discovering that past recipients such as Susan
Sontag and Arthur Miller had given speeches that were openly critical of the Israeli
government, he reconsidered and decided that it could be a meaningful opportunity
to speak to readers in Israel directly. He explains that “to decline the award is a
negative message, but to speak at the award ceremony is a positive message. My
style is always to choose the positive side as much as possible” (2009a, p. 157).
Whether Murakami’s visit to Jerusalem gave a positive message is debatable
since pro-Palestinian political activists were totally opposed to his participation in
the award ceremony, but the explanation above reveals the author’s thinking leading
up to his decision. Murakami claims that while drafting his acceptance speech, he
thought that a writer could make a statement, whereas diplomats and politicians
could not. He delivered the speech in the presence of President Shimon Peres,
approximately seven hundred attendees, and the international media from a number
of countries. It appears that his determination to “make a statement” was formidable
enough to overcome warnings against going to Jerusalem.
While the Jerusalem speech provides valuable material for understanding
Murakami’s personal principles and social standing, it underscores his cosmopolitan
commitment, that is, his willingness to be engaged as an individual. The cosmopol-
itan notion of encounters (Hannerz 2006) stems from understanding the other, as an
individual free from affiliation. As discussed previously, Murakami aspires to
maintain individual autonomy, and for him, this endeavor is “a matter of will”
(Strecher 2002, p. 94). It is the will to establish a self-determined identity that
does not submit to homogeneous collectivism. This does not mean, however, that
Murakami is an individualist who refutes solidarity, or to belong. Rather, he
demonstrates a disposition to engage with the other, a characteristic of the kind of
inclusive openness promoted by cosmopolitanism that Ulf Hannerz (2006) observes.
For Hannerz, “cosmopolitanism is a perspective, a state of mind, or a mode of
managing meaning, and cosmopolitans are those who have a willingness to engage
with the other.” (Hannerz quoted in Rantanen 2005, p. 120). Murakami’s speech in
Jerusalem echoes Hannerz’s idea of cosmopolitanism, for he alludes to people’s
shared humanity in a call for a common understanding between people regardless of
58 4 A Friend of the “Egg”: Murakami Speaks in Jerusalem

nationality or religious beliefs. Furthermore, Murakami’s determination is

underlined also by his perspective as a professional writer who rejects affiliation
with any particular institution. At the same time, he seeks to fulfil the responsibility
of a writer by delivering a speech which demonstrates his strong commitment to
become engaged.

4.2 From Cosmopolitan Exile to Cosmopolitan

Commitment

The Jerusalem speech is critically important because it highlights the point at which
Murakami turns from cosmopolitan exile to cosmopolitan commitment. For the first
twenty years or so of his career, Murakami was known for his social detachment,
which was applicable both to his protagonists and to himself. This began to change
after two catastrophic events that took place in 1995 in Japan: the Kobe earthquake
of January 17, and the sarin gas attacks of March 20 in the Tokyo subways by the
religious cult Aum Shinrikyo. Upon learning of the disaster that struck his home city
of Kobe, Murakami returned to Japan from the USA, to where he had fled to avoid
the domestic media frenzy resulting from the record-breaking sales of Noruwei no
mori (translated; 1989, 2000 as Norwegian wood) in 1987.
After returning to Japan, he published Andāguraundo (1997; translated 2000 as
Underground), a collection of interviews with the sarin gas attack victims. This was
followed by a sequel: Yakusoku sareta basho de: Underground 2 (1998; translated
2000 as The place that was promised: Underground 2), a collection of interviews
with members of Aum Shinrikyo themselves. Readers may have been surprised to
find that, not only had Murakami embarked upon writing non-fiction, but that he
decided to write about such a high-profile social crime. This was the turning point,
the start of Murakami’s shift from detachment to commitment, for it was Murakami
himself who convinced the publisher to undertake this project. He claims to have felt
strongly about not allowing such a significant incident to be forgotten so quickly,
because upon his return to Japan in June of 1995, he was rather shocked to find that
public interest in both the earthquake and the sarin subway attacks was quickly
fading (1999, p. 55). Besides this, the author admits to having a certain feeling of
uneasiness about Aum Shinrikyo that he could not ignore, because the cult seemed to
represent what everyone, including himself, must have “knowingly and consciously
excluded” (1997, p. 695) until then. Strecher holds the media accountable for this
phenomenon.
His first purpose (. . .) was to grasp more clearly the personal responses to the sarin incident
of victims and cult members alike, but this was not all; rather, he was also driven by what
might be kindly termed a perceived “lack of thoroughness” on the part of the mass media
(. . .) to oversimplify their reporting in favor of a mentality that opposes “us” (society, normal
decent people) to “them” (everyone who does not fit that description). (2014, p. 169)
4.2 From Cosmopolitan Exile to Cosmopolitan Commitment 59

According to Strecher, Murakami questions the simplified dichotomy of “us” and

“them,” which is apparently media driven, but I would argue that it is embraced by
the people as well, almost recklessly so. In the epilogue of Andāguraundo,
Murakami indicts the media, stating that, “[T]he perspective of the mass media in
disseminating information about this incident has taken the form of a simplistic
opposition, consisting of “our side,” meaning “victims ¼ purity ¼ justice” and “their
side,” meaning “criminals ¼ befoulment ¼ evil.” (1997, p. 692 quoted by Strecher
2014, p. 174). Here Murakami implicitly queries his readers as to whether the media-
steered opposition of “us” vs. “them” truly reflects the nature of the incident. As a
writer, Murakami resists the discriminatory approach taken by the mass media,
depicting the cult as “evil” and the rest of Japanese society as “pure.”
The question is, are we simply to accuse those cult members of being “evil,” and
cast them out, for Murakami wonders whether they, too, are not victims of what he
calls “the System,” his shorthand for institutional state power (cf. Strecher 2002,
p. 61). What Murakami did was to provide an alternative perspective on the
one-sided media reportage of the Aum cult. Instead of demonizing the cult group,
he paid attention to the narrative of the individuals. His effort to engage with
members of the cult as well as the victims of the incident, on an individual level,
rather than grouping and labeling them as the “other,” is markedly cosmopolitan. He
strives to tell their stories from an egalitarian viewpoint, while consciously avoiding
influence from sensational media reports. Rather than following the conventional
media in “discriminating ‘harmful and unhealthy’ perpetrators from ‘sound and
healthy’ victims” (Murakami 1998, p. 10), Murakami goes on to show that the
violence is not an isolated event but one deeply rooted in Japanese society.
In his book Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2003), Jay Rubin
contends that Murakami’s aim in undertaking Underground and its sequel was “to
convey how little separates the sick world of Aum from the everyday world of
ordinary Japanese” (2003, p. 239). He suggests that Murakami saw a structural
resemblance between the Aum cult and war-time Japan which he depicted in the
novel Nejimakidori kuronikuru (1994–96; translated 1997 as The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle) in an episode set in Manchuria. Rubin writes:
The individuality-crushing pressures of Japanese society can lead highly educated, ambi-
tious, idealistic young people to abandon the places that have been promised them in search
of worlds of unknown potential under misguided religious leaders. In a similar way, young
members of the elite abandoned the positions offered them in pre-war Japanese society to
join the government’s misguided ventures in Manchuria in the name of utopian slogans that
masked a bloody reality. (2003, pp. 239–240)

The statement above that the Aum cult members and war-time Japanese military
were young elites who “abandoned the places that have been promised them,”
obviously corresponds to the title of Murakami’s second book on the sarin gas
incident.1 Murakami explains he titled the book Underground because he felt that
both the earthquake and the sarin gas attacks shared a common “element of

1
Yakusoku sareta basho de: Underground 2 (1998).
60 4 A Friend of the “Egg”: Murakami Speaks in Jerusalem

overwhelming violence,” and that both were equally “nightmarish eruptions beneath
our feet – from underground – that threw all the latent contradictions and weak
points of our society into frighteningly high relief” (Murakami 2003, p. 206).
Murakami’s angst concerning the “us versus them” dichotomy probably stems in
part from his recognition that he shares something in common with the Aum cult,
i.e., “them.” What is that something? Is it evil? Is it an urge to violence? Is it a
sickness? In this regard, Murakami evidently finds points in common with another
celebrated member of what he calls “them.”
The system reorganizes itself so as to put pressure on those who do not fit in. Those who do
not fit into the system are “sick”; to make them fit in is to “cure”. Thus, the power process
aimed at attaining autonomy is broken and the individual is subsumed into the other-
dependent power process enforced by the system. To pursue autonomy is seen as “disease”.
(Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber manifesto,2 cited in Murakami 2003, p. 199)

The dilemma for Murakami is that he holds Kaczynski’s argument to be basically

correct, contending that “Many parts of the social system in which we belong and
function do indeed aim at repressing the attainment of individual autonomy” (2003,
p. 200).
How is this dilemma to be resolved? Murakami is not the Unabomber. He is not
the Aum Shinrikyo. He is not a terrorist.
Murakami is a cosmopolitan.
The answer lies in the nature of narrative as Murakami understands it. Strecher
(2014) describes the nature of monogatari [narrative] in Murakami as a form of core
identity or a kind of ideological belief system. He goes on to say there is a constant
tension in Murakami’s writing between the individual narrative and various collec-
tive narratives that are imposed upon the individual (political, religious, educational,
and so on). Murakami uses expressions like the “handed-down self” and the “allo-
cated narrative” to allude to this idea, contending that the Aum cult followers took
refuge from “the System” by giving up their identities (their narratives), and
assumed the “self” (narrative) that was “handed-down” by the cult leader, Shoko
Asahara. According to Murakami, this “pseudo self-determination” (2003, p. 201) is
actually an assimilation to the “distorted” self of Asahara; but in return, they are
spared from the anxiety of thinking through some of life’s most fundamental
questions, most important of which is calling “who am I?”
In response, Murakami warns that “If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of
that narrative you call your Self” (2003, p. 201), and thus we risk losing our
individual identity. Since he realizes that Asahara was a master storyteller who
successfully imposed his narrative on many who then blindly followed him,
Murakami shows his determination to challenge the task of offering an alternative
narrative. As a novelist he declares willing and able to undertake the task (2003,
p. 203). Murakami’s commitment and his subsequent message is evident in the
passage below:

2
Published in The New York Times in 1995.
4.3 What Is the System? 61

Haven’t you offered up some part of your Self to someone (or some thing), and taken on a
“narrative” in return? Haven’t we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater
System or Order? And if so, has not that System at some stage demanded of us some kind of
“insanity”? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams
really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else’s vision that could sooner or later
turn into nightmares? (Murakami 2003, p. 203)

Here, as Rubin’s earlier comment suggests, Murakami questions the collective

narrative of Japanese society, in which individuality is repressed and one eventually
surrenders to conformity. This is a contentious issue for Murakami as a novelist,
particularly since his monogatari is to be a narrative for the individual soul. The Self
of which he speaks is our identity, and if we submit this core identity to the System,
then we are likely to be overtaken by the collective narrative.
In order to overcome the framework of “us versus them,” it is essential to engage
with the other, and the approach taken by Murakami in Underground embodies this
cosmopolitan narrative. As opposed to the “us versus them” dichotomy, the cosmo-
politan narrative espouses “openness” toward otherness. Rather than being exclu-
sionary, the cosmopolitan seeks to encounter the other. And, for the cosmopolitan
identity, individual autonomy that does not insist on conformity is essential.

4.3 What Is the System?

In addition to the manifestation of Murakami’s cosmopolitan commitment, the

Jerusalem speech discusses another important aspect of Murakami’s mission as a
writer, namely, the System. As regular readers of Murakami are no doubt aware, the
System constitutes a vital notion in the author’s works as something that represents a
sinister power against which his protagonists struggle. Once again, we recall the
quote “Walls and Eggs” metaphor, in which the “System” is represented by an
impenetrable wall, which in turn represents the political and social power exerted
over the individual.
Murakami’s implicit resistance to homogenizing collectivism as a source for
division or discrimination is evident in this analogy. At the same time, the “walls”
signify the invisible System that divides us, and the “eggs” connote human beings’
extreme vulnerability.
Murakami maintains that the metaphor of eggs and walls functions on two levels.
One relates directly to the imminent clash in Gaza by which the metaphor of the wall
refers to the confrontation and division between Israel and Palestine. The State turns
its weapons upon civilians (the “eggs”), crushing them for the sake of its own
interests. In the speech, Murakami clarifies the metaphor as follows:
In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white
phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are
crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor. (Murakami
2009b)
62 4 A Friend of the “Egg”: Murakami Speaks in Jerusalem

The above connotation was widely shared by the media covering the event, but
Murakami also suggests a second, “deeper” meaning. This alternate version is
indeed a common theme that is integral to Murakami’s literary works. As noted
earlier, Murakami argues that everyone is an “egg,” because “each of us is a unique,
irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell” (2009b). On the same note, he declares
that each of us is “confronting a high, solid wall,” and the name of the wall is “the
System.” While we may think of the wall as a means of protection, Murakami warns
that the System can overtake us and lead us to kill or be killed ruthlessly. Consid-
ering the timing of this speech, the author’s statement is understood as a clear
reference to the warfare and violence caused by nationalistic confrontations. Yet,
in the article recollecting his visit to Jerusalem, Murakami denies that “the System”
directly refers to the nation-state system or issues of national borders entwined with
religious beliefs. He observes that, the confrontation between Zionism and Islamic
fundamentalism, which he refers to as “the intensity of these two ‘moments’”
(2009a, p. 166), is the most contentious issue. Furthermore, he explains that,
although such fundamentalism may not be directly responsible, their confrontation
and ensuing victimization of their own citizens exemplifies the structural scheme of
the System. By alluding to this structural scheme of the System, Murakami empha-
sizes our own complicity in sustaining that scheme, which he sees as potentially
dangerous. His concern is that, for many, it is easier to trust and submit to the System
than to oppose it. Therefore, he fears that people are unwittingly “transferring their
souls to the System” (2009a, p. 166) by submitting to orders from above and
abandoning the responsibility to think for themselves.
One of Murakami’s major issues with blindly trusting the System lies in its
implicit re-enactment of conditions prevalent in Japan prior to 1945. As discussed
earlier in this volume, Japanese people were subjected to their government’s mili-
taristic, imperialist and collectivist ideology (before and) during the war. As Nobel
prize laureate Kenzaburō Ōe recalls of his boyhood, people were not allowed to
question the legitimacy of the war, or to disobey the symbolic rule of the Emperor in
those days. Ōe describes being beaten by his elementary school headmaster every
day for questioning the practice of worshipping the Emperor’s photograph, which
was a daily routine for schoolchildren at the time (Kuroko 2003, pp. 35–36). It is not
difficult to see that the totalitarian undercurrents that controlled the Japanese people
during the war are comparable to the situation in Gaza at the time of the speech, since
at both points in time the System took precedence over the people. Thus,
Murakami’s wall and egg analogy confronts the framework that exists between the
System and the individual human being. This is suggested in his comparison of the
individual cult members of the Aum Shinrikyo with the situation of B and C class
war criminals in the aftermath of the Second World War (2009a, p. 168).3 Based on
his personal experience of interviewing former cult members, Murakami maintains
that although the cult followers are perpetrators, they are also “eggs,” and are victims

3
B and C class war criminals were considered less culpable than class A war criminals because they
were deemed to have been following the orders of their superiors.
4.4 Representations of the System in Murakami’s Works 63

of fundamentalism. In Murakami’s eyes, these accused criminals surrendered them-

selves to their Guru and lived inside walls that completely isolated them from the real
world. By the time the bags containing sarin were handed to them, they were unable
to escape the psychological wall that surrounded them, and even before realizing
what had happened, they were arrested, given a death sentence in court and placed in
solitary confinement, surrounded by yet more walls.

4.4 Representations of the System in Murakami’s Works

For Murakami readers, the term “System” is not an unfamiliar language; indeed the
word appeared in his fiction as early as 1985. In Sekai no owari to Hādo-boirudo
Wandārando (1985; translated 1991 as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the
World), the protagonist struggles with an unspecified institution, called the soshiki,
literally meaning “organization” in Japanese. While the term soshiki in Japanese is
generally applied to large organizations, and occasionally, to the criminal under-
world, the author applies the katakana shistemu [system] alongside these two
Chinese characters, so as to define their meaning. Clearly, Murakami intends to
name “the System” as the dominant power against which his protagonist struggles. It
is also notable that such power represented by the System denotes a group with
collective authority. Strecher (2014) asserts that this tension between individual and
group has been a key subject in Murakami’s works almost from the start:
Certainly from A Wild Sheep Chase the subversion or appropriation of the individual subject
and his/her internal narrative has been a prominent theme. Initially this appropriation was
attributed to the postwar Japanese State, which offered in return a comfortable life of
affluence and a state-sponsored ideology of economic participation. The State, represented
in highly concentrated, yet thoroughly abstract images and characters (the semi-mythical
sheep in A Wild Sheep Chase, the System in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the
World, Wataya Noboru in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and so on), appeared to hold
insurmountable power, a mixture of political, commercial, and media muscle, and yet,
somehow, Murakami’s loner protagonists, representing the voice of the nonconformist, the
determined individualist, battled with considerable success against these superpowers.
(2014, p. 65)

As Strecher points out, the postwar Japanese State is a subject matter that
Murakami pursues as a novelist. Murakami’s conversation with renowned psychol-
ogist Hayao Kawai confirms this (Murakami 1996). Murakami confides to Kawai
that he had come to realize his responsibility as a “Japanese writer” primarily
because he had lived abroad. He states that upon reviewing his own thoughts
about the Second World War, it occurred to him that Japanese society today has
not changed fundamentally, and “[It] is one of the reasons why I wanted to write
about Nomonhan in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. When you retrace the issue of
who you are, you just have to examine the whole of society and history” (1996,
pp. 59–60).
64 4 A Friend of the “Egg”: Murakami Speaks in Jerusalem

Murakami’s social commitment as a writer stands out in The Wind-Up Bird

Chronicle. This is also faithfully reflected in the attitude of the protagonist. The
author explains that his stories often assumed the style of a quest for the Holy Grail,
hence the protagonists were unable to achieve their goals at the end of the story. In
this novel, however, the protagonist Toru Okada is determined to win back his wife
Kumiko from the “dark world” (1996, p. 172). Rubin acknowledges this difference
and states, “[W]hereas most of Murakami’s earlier characters were content to leave
things unexplained and even relished their absurdity, Toru wants answers” (2003,
p. 209). This development in the Murakami protagonist develops even more in
subsequent fiction such as Umibe no Kafuka (2002; translated 2005 as Kafka on
the Shore), 1Q84 (2009–2010), Shikisai o motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, kare no junrei
no toshi (2013; translated 2014 as Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of
Pilgrimage) and Kishidanchō-goroshi (2017a; translated 2018 as Killing
Commendatore). For example, Kafka on the Shore is about the journey of a fifteen-
year-old boy, Kafka, who travels several hundred kilometers from Tokyo to Shikoku
in order to escape his father’s prophesy and to find answers about his lost family. In
1Q84, two protagonists, Aomame and Tengo, who appear in alternating chapters,
search for one another by hanging on to a string of memory from when they were ten
years old. And as we have already seen in Chap. 2 of this volume, Tsukuru Tazaki,
the protagonist of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, is
introduced as a young man obsessed with death after having been traumatized by
his sudden expulsion from his group of high school friends. Through revisiting those
members who deserted him, Tsukuru transforms himself both physically and men-
tally, to re-establish himself and begin a new relationship.
Murakami’s recent novel, Killing Commendatore, features a portrait painter in his
mid-thirties who rediscovers himself through a series of mysterious events and
strange encounters. The ending presents a stark contrast from his past works
where the protagonist restarts a life with his wife and child, which is unprecedented
in the Murakami world. Apparently, these protagonists are much stronger, more
persistent, and more determined, compared with the reclusive “Boku” in his early
works, who preferred to live in isolation. During the past two decades, Murakami’s
protagonists have gradually evolved to become committed to life and their surround-
ings, but they will always remain as “eggs” struggling against the invincible System,
for, as Strecher maintains, “[T]his is what Murakami meant when he spoke in
Jerusalem about eggs hitting a great and powerful wall. His protagonists have always
been the eggs, and somehow or other, even after shattering, they show that the egg
can and does continue its struggle.” (2014, p. 66)
Murakami’s thoughts on the System can be further explored in his interview with
writer Mieko Kawakami, Mimizuku wa tasogare ni tobitatsu [The owl flies away in
twilight] (2017). As a long-time Murakami reader, Kawakami employs the perspec-
tive of “evil” as a guideline for tracing the changes and developments in Murakami’s
works. She recognizes The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as the novel in which a clear
challenge toward the notion of “evil” by the author was identified. According to
Kawakami, the protagonist articulates direct hatred toward Noboru Wataya as a
representation of evil in this novel, and this expression of abhorrence by the
4.5 “The System Is Being Created by Us” 65

protagonist signifies commitment, not only by the protagonist Toru, but by

Murakami himself (2017, p. 83). Kawakami argues that this is distinct from the
way yamikuro (Inklings) was depicted as a representation of unassailable existence
in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
While Murakami admits that he consciously depicted evil when writing about
Noboru Wataya in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, he does not necessarily agree to the
evolving process of rendering this notion in his works. Alternatively, he refers to his
early short story “Kagami” [“The Mirror”] (*included in Kangarū-biyori (1983)).
“Kagami” is a bizarre episode about a night watchman at school, who sees some-
thing in the mirror which terrifies him because it is the exact image of evil. He breaks
the mirror and runs away, but when he returns the next day, he finds out that the
mirror had never existed at all. Murakami contends that it is like a “double or triple
illusion” since the protagonist sees an embodiment of evil in the dark, although it
was a reflection of himself in the mirror. Murakami’s denial of Kawakami’s com-
ment on the evolving stages of “evil” in his works, combined with the narrative of
“Kagami,” suggest that the author’s interest in this subject lies within the human self,
and, moreover, it is an enduring theme in his works most likely from the outset. What
is more, after more than three decades since “Kagami” was written, Killing
Commendatore offers a remarkably similar plot. The protagonist, who is a portrait
painter, has the ability to unveil the essence of the person he is drawing. He is
troubled by the fact that his portrait exposes the concealed violence of those he
paints, including one of himself. As Yutaka Kōno aptly notes, “This novel is like a
mirror. So, if we open our eyes widely and face the text, what we see beyond is not
the story Killing Commendatore, but our own reflection” (2017, p. 12). Kōno
recognizes this novel as Murakami’s own thoughts on writing, which is reflected
in the protagonist’s creative activity. He points out that the way the artist draws
resembles to how Murakami writes, for, first there is a detailed sketch to capture
reality, and then colors are added to express the essence. In the case of Murakami’s
novels, metaphors apply to those colors. “While the completed work may deviate
from reality, it lurks inside. If you have the eyes to sense it, then you would know
that it is even sharper than reality” (Kōno 2017, p. 13). Here, the “mirror” is
confirmed as the key to understanding Murakami’s literary work.

4.5 “The System Is Being Created by Us”

If Murakami sees “evil” within the self, then how does this relate to the System?
While the notion of “evil” is more likely to be found within the individual, it is
inseparable from the dark side, or what the author refers to as the shadow of
institutional systems within society. In The owl flies away in twilight, Murakami
draws on the various episodes in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in which Japanese
soldiers kill animals at the zoo, and soldiers who attempted to desert. He notes that
“while such acts are of course evil, it is the system called “the army” that is drawing
out the evil from the human being. The nation-state system creates a sub-system
66 4 A Friend of the “Egg”: Murakami Speaks in Jerusalem

called the army and extracts this evil on an individual level” (2017, p. 89, emphasis
in original). At the same time, Murakami reminds us that “we are the ones who
created such a system, so in the chain of those systems, we are unable to determine
who is the assailant and who is the victim” (2017, p. 89). Unmistakably, the message
from Murakami here is that the System is being created by us. The episodes
described above exemplify the author’s inquiry into how we are to recognize the
assailant and the victim. Here, we are reminded of the earlier discussion on Under-
ground in which some of the sarin victims were further victimized by media reports
that intruded on their privacy, or the lack of sympathy from co-workers, who
accused them of being lethargic when they were unable to work due to the afteref-
fects of the toxic gas.4
Murakami’s acceptance speech for the International Catalunya Prize (2011)
reaffirms his grave concern about the complicity between the System and “us.” He
uses the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima as a launching point for his own statement
against nuclear power, then relates this to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, reminding his listeners to recall that Japan is the only nation to have
suffered a nuclear attack. The author acknowledges that both the inhabitants of
Fukushima and those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were victims, but at the same
time, he alerts the audience to the fact that “we are all perpetrators,” stating:
Faced with the overwhelming power of the atom, we are all, all of us, victims, and at the
same time, we are all perpetrators. In that we are threatened by the power of the atom, we are
all victims. At the same time, in that we are the ones who uncovered the power of the atom,
and we have failed to stop the use of that power, we are all perpetrators as well. (Murakami
2011)

Here, the question raised in Underground continues to endure—can we dichot-

omize victims and assailants by discerning those who are not “one of us”? Have we
not averted from our responsibilities as participants? The System, in this respect, can
be seen as a symbol of collective irresponsibility, for people would merely consider
themselves as victims, largely overlooking their involvement or inaction.
Film director Tatsuya Mori, who produced a documentary film of the Aum
Shinrikyo, contends that Murakami’s novel 1Q84 depicts a certain change that
manifested in Japanese society after the 1995 incident. He finds this change to be
problematic, for, due to a media-driven sense of heightened risk, the dichotomy of
good and evil has been spread among the public. Mori argues that the image of the
Little People is a metaphor of the “collective call,” or the will of the people (2009,
p. 30), as he claims that both he and Murakami share the concern that something has
to be done about “this society where the Little People have emerged in swarms (. . .)
developing a giant chrysalis in the air” (2009, p. 31). Mori likens the collective call
with the giant chrysalis, which denotes the air chrysalis (kūki sanagi), and insists that
it is extremely dangerous for this intangible presence to permeate society unnoticed.

4
Although sarin is a toxic nerve gas that is lethal even at very low concentrations, little was known
in public about the aftereffects, including PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), at the time.
4.5 “The System Is Being Created by Us” 67

This idea that the air chrysalis is created by the Little People, who represent the
“collective call” of the public, resonates with the Jerusalem speech that “[T]he
System did not make us; we made The System” (Murakami 2009b). According to
Mori, the Little People develop the giant chrysalis from shared feelings of victim-
ization by society, and such anxiety ultimately leads to the exclusion of the other as
“evil.” Murakami, on the other hand, alludes to the discriminatory undercurrent in
the dichotomy of good and evil, which is exploited by the System. His support for
the egg aims to encourage self-awareness in the people, so that one can begin to see
the “air chrysalis” without being submerged in the kind of collective will (compat-
ible with corrective irresponsibility) criticized by Mori. Good and evil, according to
Murakami, are not absolute concepts but interchangeable notions that depend on the
situation. Therefore, he maintains that it is largely left to us to discern whether what
we confront is good or evil on each occasion, and by each one of us (2010a, p. 34).
While Murakami’s use of peculiar, surreal, or “divine” characters (Strecher 2014,
p. 195) is established as part of his style, the Little People prompt the question of
whether they are good or evil. Similar reduced-size figures are found in Murakami’s
short stories, such as “TV People” (1990) and “Odoru kobito [translated as The
dancing dwarf]” (1984) as well. In contemplating these figures, Yoshinori Shimizu
(2009) maintains that they are symbolic images that frequent Murakami’s works,
consistently signifying “the influence of the shadow that (violently) controls human
beings” (2009, p. 192). He contends that the Little People represent the collective
desire of people in society (or, what he calls the “shadow”), in contrast to George
Orwell’s “Big Brother” as a symbol of dictatorship:
The dwarfs and the Little People are variations of a familiar representation that appears in
almost every Murakami novel since A Wild Sheep Chase. The way they are depicted varies,
but the underlying connotation always remains the same: the violent power of the shadow
that controls human beings. It originates from the evil side of people, and to borrow the
words of “the Rat” in A Wild Sheep Chase, “the key point of vulnerability.” (Shimizu 2009,
p. 192)

The author’s thoughts on this matter can be traced to an interview published in

2010, in which Murakami discusses his novel 1Q84 extensively. While he admits
that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was indeed an inspiration, Murakami explains
that the difference with 1Q84 is that, instead of the near-future world depicted in
Nineteen Eighty-Four, his novel is situated in the past—the 1980s that he has
actually lived and observed; and at the same time, it explores a world beyond such
time and space. Murakami describes the world of 1Q84 as one where “Little People
crawl out from the underground. I cannot specify what the Little People are, but
perhaps we could vaguely understand them as messengers from a primitive world
from underground” (2010a, p. 44). He claims that, although he is the author, he does
not know who the Little People are, still less does he know their purpose. On the
other hand, the author insists that he is absolutely confident of their existence and the
kind of world they represent, which he believes is a pressing matter for the novelist
(2010a, p. 56).
Although Murakami is cautious about the role assumed by the Little People in his
novel, there can be little doubt that they concern the “System.” While describing
68 4 A Friend of the “Egg”: Murakami Speaks in Jerusalem

them as “messengers” from underground or another world, Murakami notes that the
Little People are, unnoticed in the dark, “re-writing the world that we are familiar
with” (2010a, p. 51). In view of Shimizu’s statement above, that the Little People
represent our collective desires, it is conceivable that they also reflect the vulnera-
bility of people, as a collective whole. Indeed, that is what Shimizu suggests when he
quotes the Rat on human vulnerability in A Wild Sheep Chase: “‘The key point here
is weakness,’ the Rat said. ‘Everything begins from there. Can you understand what
I’m getting at?’” (2010b, p. 282). Furthermore, the Rat tells the protagonist that
weakness is something that rots the individual from inside, and he is talking about an
overwhelming weakness, referring to “‘moral weakness, weakness of consciousness,
then there’s the weakness of existence itself’” (2010b, p. 282). He concludes that it
was due to such weakness that he was unable to escape from the sheep.
While the Little People and the sheep signify the vulnerability or the weakness of
the people, another “divine” character who appears in the recent novel Killing
Commendatore is the Idea. As the title indicates, the novel originates from Mozart’s
opera Don Giovanni, and the Idea is dressed as the Commendatore, from a Japanese-
style painting of the scene in which Don Giovanni murders Donna Anna’s father, Il
Commendatore. Described as a short male figure who is primarily visible and
audible only to the protagonist watashi [I], the Idea is reminiscent of the Little
People, although the way he randomly appears and disappears also reminds us of the
Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Without question, we can
see that the Idea holds a critical position in Killing Commendatore, for the first
volume of this novel comes with the secondary title, “The Idea Made Visible.”
One distinctive feature the Idea shares in common with the Little People is that he
emerges from underground. In this respect, Murakami’s explanation that the novel
Killing Commendatore was inspired by the Japanese classic “Nise no Enishi”
[A bond for two lifetimes], cannot be overlooked. “Nise no Enishi,” is a short
story included in Akinari Ueda’s collection Harusame Monogatari [The tale of
spring rain] (1808). It is a tale about a mummy who returns to life after being buried
underground for over one hundred years. Although he was a high priest who
undertook Buddhist training of deep meditation by fasting, the revived man shows
no trace of his former position, and is mocked by the villagers for the worldly
creature he has become. The way the mummy-turned-priest of “Nise no Enishi” is
discovered, by ringing a bell from underground, is virtually identical to the emer-
gence of the Idea in Killing Commendatore. What is more, prior to the appearance of
the Idea in the novel, watashi is told about “Nise no Enishi” and reads the story
himself. As a result, the tale is introduced in full, enabling readers who are
unacquainted with the story to learn about this peculiar narrative in detail. Clearly,
Murakami wishes to share the original tale that inspired him to write this novel, and
it is not surprising that the way the Idea is excavated from a hole in the ground
parallels the original story.
The question here is, what is the author’s aim, in terms of presenting the Idea
character? Unlike the mummy-turned-priest in “Nise no Enishi,” who takes pleasure
in secular life after being revived, Murakami’s Idea keeps to the protagonist’s side as
a guiding spirit. It is portrayed as a reasonably charming character that readers will
4.5 “The System Is Being Created by Us” 69

accept as a friendly figure, rather than a holy spirit. Besides the fact that they both
emerge from underground, there seems to be little that the mummy and the Idea
share in common. Instead, the Idea seems to resemble the Little People, following
the author’s earlier comment that they are messengers from underground. However,
although the Little People “develop air chrysalis” as a reflection of the collective call
of the people, thereby embodying the way the System is created, the Idea’s func-
tional role appears entirely different.
One thing that is eminently clear is that throughout the novel, the Idea serves as a
guardian for the protagonist. If both characters—the Little People and the Idea—are
messengers from another world, why is there such a disparity? In light of the
understanding that the Little People are reflections of the System for Murakami,
then what does the Idea represent? My interpretation is that the primordial space
from which the Idea emerges from is the “other world” or what Strecher (2014) calls
the “forbidden world,” or alternately, “the land of the dead” (2014, p. 82). While
such a realm is commonly thought to be a place of no return, the episode “Nise no
Enishi” suggests that this is not necessarily so, for the mummy makes a return to life.
Instead of segregating the “other world” from the present world, the Idea connects
the two worlds. Encouraged by the Idea, or more precisely, owing to his sacrifice, the
protagonist watashi is compelled to be engaged in a quest through this underground
realm to save Mariye Akikawa. Having successfully completed the mission, watashi
finds himself prepared to re-establish his life again with his wife and a newborn
daughter.
The act of transcending boundaries in order to reach the other is central to my
argument, for this is what fosters the cosmopolitan imagination of encountering
otherness. It is notable that the Idea is visible and audible only to watashi and
Mariye, both of whom are considerably open to the other. This reminds us also of
Fukaeri in 1Q84, who can see the Little People and is not afraid of them. Murakami’s
characters are divine, for they are invisible and unreachable for those who do not
recognize the “other”; but they remain faithful and enchanting to the few who do not
alienate the other.
Toshio Kawai (2010) observes that the human characters of Murakami’s novels
are often lonely and detached, and yet, they find themselves connected to the “other
world” almost effortlessly. Murakami readers will agree that this has been the case
with many of his novels, from early works such as A Wild Sheep Chase to his recent
novel Killing Commendatore, as explored above. The Murakami world is a realm
where one remains detached, and yet, is openly connected, since “nationality, age,
and gender become meaningless as boundaries” (Kawai 2010, p. 14). This may
explain why the solitary independence of his protagonists is embraced by readers
around the world. As Murakami notes in his essay Shokugyō to shite no shōsetsuka
[The professional novelist] (2015), his novels tend to become popular when there is a
major change in the social structure, such as in the cases of Russia and Eastern
Europe following the end of the communist regime, or Germany soon after the fall of
the Berlin Wall in 1989 (2015, p. 285). The value change, from social structures that
were grounded on the national framework to those that offer greater freedom to the
individual, resonates with the open and borderless notion of cosmopolitanism. As I
70 4 A Friend of the “Egg”: Murakami Speaks in Jerusalem

have discussed elsewhere (Wakatsuki 2016), Murakami’s works present a departure

from conventional boundaries, allowing readers to share a common story that can be
approached regardless of national, religious, or cultural differences. Without ques-
tion, the readers are free to choose their belonging.
***
Strecher (2014) contends that the analogy of the wall and egg in the Jerusalem
speech is essential for understanding Murakami’s raison d’être as a novelist. His
analysis, that the underlying principle of this analogy is placed over the continuous
struggle against the System, is particularly significant. Whereas there is little chance,
if any, that the egg will triumph, Strecher maintains that Murakami’s concern is set
beyond winning or losing. The egg, according to Strecher, signifies Murakami’s
protagonists, who, almost to a man, enter into a doomed struggle against the
invincible System. He observes that the struggle of the egg represents the resistance
of the individual, his determination to protection of his/her identity, or soul. On the
same note, if Murakami’s metaphor of the System is relative to the “collective call”
as Mori describes above, then it may suffice to say that the author aspires to defend
individual identity against an imposed collective group identity. The autonomous
individuality of the novelist, as emphasized in his Jerusalem speech, clearly dem-
onstrates Murakami’s determination to sustain the individual’s identity without
resorting to any particular collective body, such as nation or religious group. Instead
of establishing his position in a “closed” circle comprised of homogeneous alliances,
the author seeks belonging beyond borders. In Killing Commendatore, Murakami
taps into the cave from which the Idea emerges, bringing stories from the under-
ground. By invoking the “cave” and the unknown world that lies within, the author
invites his readers to a transcendent realm beyond the human constructs of binary
oppositions such as “us versus them.” Such narratives that direct the reader to see
“beyond borders,” are not only in line with Murakami’s mission as a novelist, but
they reaffirm this author’s cosmopolitan quality. And who knows, but that the Idea
might not be a friend of the “egg”?

4.6 Breaking Through the Wall

During the past decade, Murakami has delivered some memorable and uncompro-
mising speeches on the occasions of his international literary awards. As discussed
earlier, Murakami’s adamant and vital message on the issue of the System in these
speeches has remained largely consistent. This message was reaffirmed in 2014,
when the author delivered an acceptance speech for the Welt Literature Prize. Since
the ceremony was held in Berlin, it was not entirely surprising that the author
touched on the subject of the wall. Murakami reaffirmed that twenty-five years
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people around the world are still faced with walls
that create divisions and effect confrontations. He condemned such invisible walls
that separated people by race, religion, or intolerance and excluded the other, and
4.6 Breaking Through the Wall 71

explained his mission as a novelist, stating, “When we write novels we pass through
walls, metaphorically speaking. We pass through walls separating reality and unre-
ality, the conscious and the unconscious. We see what world lies on the other side of
a wall, come back to our own side and describe in detail, in writing, what we saw.”
(Murakami 2014). In the same speech, Murakami goes on to describe what happens
when the reading experience stirs our imagination.
When a person reads fiction and is moved and excited by it, he may break through that wall
together with the author. Of course, when he closes the book he’s basically in the same place
he was when he began reading (. . .) The reality around him hasn’t changed, and no actual
problems have been solved. Yet still the reader is left with the distinct feeling that he has
broken through a wall, gone somewhere and returned. (Murakami 2014)

Murakami’s argument that the reader no longer remains the same after “breaking
through a wall” demonstrates his abiding faith in the power of narratives. At the
same time, there is an underlying message that encourages readers to transcend the
wall, which is undoubtedly one of the main reasons why his readership continues to
expand on a global scale. As discussed earlier in this volume, Murakami’s novels
hold a strong appeal for readers who are striving to explore the world beyond those
walls that surround them. What it offers is perhaps a cosmopolitan imagination, to
find connections beyond borders that are shared by many people around the globe
today. As argued earlier, the inter-connectedness made available by technological
advancements and through the sheer scale of globalized mobility has certainly
supported the development of everyday cosmopolitanism, and the Haruki phenom-
enon is just as much a cosmopolitan phenomenon in terms of the unbounded sense of
connection that is experienced through reading his novels.
This idea of the wall as the System was repeated yet again in his acceptance
speech for the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award in 2016, and returns to an
early image from Murakami fiction: shadows. In “The Meaning of Shadows”
(2017b), Murakami offered his views upon reading Andersen’s story, “The
Shadow.” He remarked that he was astonished at first that Andersen, who is
known as a writer of fairy tales for children, had written such a dark story, which
deals with the struggle between a man and his own personified shadow for domina-
tion of his life.
But Murakami also presented his strong impression that this particular work may
have been Andersen’s attempt to express himself as “a free individual” (2017b,
p. 141). Murakami compared himself with Andersen and professed that “writing a
novel is a journey of discovery” (2017b, p. 142) for him, and that is why he felt
confident that Andersen wrote “The Shadow” as a work of self-discovery. Indeed,
Murakami’s reaction to this particular work may not be surprising, since he shares a
similar concept of the protagonist confronting his shadow in Hard-Boiled Wonder-
land and the End of the World. As discussed earlier, this novel was one of his early
works that manifested the author’s challenge toward the System. More importantly,
the novel is comprised of two worlds and the chapters are narrated by alternating
protagonists in the first person: watashi is the protagonist of the “hard-boiled
wonderland,” and boku is the leading character in “the end of the world.” Of note
72 4 A Friend of the “Egg”: Murakami Speaks in Jerusalem

is that boku has an alter ego which is his shadow. Shimizu suggests that this novel is
“a pilgrimage into the labyrinth of one’s internal identity” (2006, p. 120) that
represents the process of self-determination for the author, as a result of an
in-depth analysis of his own identity. This perspective corroborates Murakami’s
statement that when he is writing a novel, he encounters an unknown vision of
himself, which he acknowledges as his shadow. Most importantly, he pledges that it
is the mission of the novelist to face this alternative vision, and portray it as
accurately as possible, without giving in to the power of the shadow, or “losing
your identity as a person” (2017b, p. 143). Murakami’s mission as a novelist or how
he wishes to develop a narrative, is reaffirmed here. The shadow echoes the Rat’s
“vulnerability,” precisely what Murakami aims to overcome. For, the only way to
avert from submitting to the System is to maintain our own identity and to acknowl-
edge our shadows by confronting the “other.” The closing remarks of the Andersen
Award speech clearly recapitulate Murakami’s thoughts:
No matter how high a wall we build to keep intruders out, no matter how strictly we exclude
outsiders, no matter how much we rewrite history to suit us, we just end up damaging and
hurting ourselves. You have to patiently learn to live together with your shadow. And
carefully observe the darkness that resides within you. (Murakami 2017b)

In the perfect Murakami world of cosmopolitan imagination, there would be no

need for the eggs to smash themselves against the wall. For the wall has been
breached by the novelist and readers alike.

References

Hannerz, U. (2006). Two faces of cosmopolitanism: Culture and politics. In Serie: Dinamicas
interculturales. Barcelona: CIDOB.
Kawai, T. (2010). Kikan Book Review Murakami Haruki 1Q84 Book 1~3. Shōsetsu Tripper, 2010
(summer), 374–376.
Kōno, Y. (2017). Tokubetsu na maho ga kakatta kagami [A mirror of special magic]. Nami, 51(4),
12–17.
Kuroko, K. (2003). Sakka wa konoyonishite umare, ohkiku natta – Ōe Kenzaburō densetsu [The
writer was born and grew up this way: Legend of Kenzaburō Ōe]. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo
Shinsha.
Mori, T. (2009). Sotaika sareru zen aku [The good and evil relativism]. In Kawade Shobo Shinsha
Editorial Board (Ed.), Murakami Haruki “1Q84” o dou yomuka [How we read Haruki
Murakami’s 1Q84] (pp. 29–33). Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha.
Murakami, H. (1983). Kangarū-biyori. Tokyo: Heibonsha.
Murakami, H. (1984). Odoru kobito [The dancing dwarf]. In H. Murakami (Ed.), Hotaru, Naya o
yaku, sono-ta no tanpen [Firefly, barn burning, and other short stories]. Tokyo: Shinchosha.
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Murakami, H. (1990). TV Piipuru [TV people]. Tokyo: Bungeishunju.
Murakami, H. (1994–95). Nejimakidori kuronikuru (Three volumes). Tokyo: Shinchosha.
Murakami, H. (1996). Murakami Haruki, Kawai Hayao ni ai ni iku [Haruki Murakami goes to meet
Hayao Kawai]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Murakami, H. (1997). Andāguraundo. Tokyo: Kodansha.
Murakami, H. (1998). Yakusoku sareta basho de: Underground 2. Tokyo: Bungeishunju.
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Murakami, H. (1999). Long interview: Monogatari wa itsumo jihatsuteki de nakereba naranai

[Long interview: Stories must always be spontaneous]. Kokoku Hihyo, (October), 53–78.
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Murakami, H. (2009b). Of walls and eggs (Jerusalem Prize speech) (trans. Rubin, J.). Bungeishunju
(April), pp. 165–169.
Murakami, H. (2010a). Murakami Haruki long interview. Kangaeru Hito (Summer), pp. 13–101.
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1, 2019, from http://japanfocus.org/-Murakami-Haruki/3571
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important-motif-novels
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Award speech) (trans. Garbriel, P.). MONKEY, 11(Spring), 138–147.
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authors (pp. 1–16). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Chapter 5
An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan

The Haruki phenomenon is a cosmopolitan one especially in terms of how it

contributes to the development of a cosmopolitan cultural sphere. Murakami’s
popularity burgeoned from the early 1990s and continues to thrive into the twenty-
first century, which is unprecedented for a contemporary Japanese writer. The
widespread demographics of his readership, particularly of geographic location
and age group, would seem to confirm this. As we have seen in Chap. 2, the Haruki
phenomenon is intimately connected with the evolving cosmopolitanism that paral-
lels the globalization process during the turn of the twenty-first century, and what I
call the emergence of “everyday cosmopolitanism.” This applies not only to his
readership but also to his “gatekeepers”—translators and critics who work behind
the scenes in promoting and disseminating Murakami’s output, and thus played a
significant role in developing this social and cultural phenomenon. They were also
cosmopolitans who identified a new Japaneseness in Murakami’s work, and became
engaged in an extraordinary project that led to this global phenomenon.
This chapter will explore the very origins of the “Haruki wave,” the cultural
current that spread internationally, from Japan to North America, and throughout
East Asia in the same year. In the year 1989, two of Murakami’s novels were
published in translation: Noruwei no mori [Norwegian Wood] in Korea and Taiwan;
and Hitsuji o meguru bōken [A Wild Sheep Chase] in the USA. Owing to its record-
breaking sales in Japan the previous year, Norwegian Wood drew attention from
readers in East Asian countries who were already enthusiastic about Japanese
culture. In both Korea and Taiwan, Murakami’s novel was embraced by the young
generation in particular, establishing a cultural trend in which, for example, cafes
and stores were named after the title. On the other hand, Hitsuji o meguru bōken,
which was titled A Wild Sheep Chase in English, made a solid entry into the
Anglophone market. Its reception was not as flashy as the “Norwegian Wood
phenomenon” in East Asia, but its release gradually developed Murakami’s reputa-
tion as a contemporary Japanese writer in the English language sphere. In this

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 75

T. Wakatsuki, The Haruki Phenomenon,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7549-5_5
76 5 An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan

respect, A Wild Sheep Chase proved invaluable for gaining a foothold in the market.1
The two currents, one beginning in East Asia and the other in America, which
together eventually turned into the “Haruki wave,” varied in terms of the titles that
were published and how they eventually swept across these markets. Yet, there was
one remarkable feature they had in common: the effect of gatekeepers, whose
dedication and enthusiasm played a critical role in positioning Haruki Murakami
as a global writer today. Those persons we might identify as “gatekeepers” would
include editors, literary agents, critics, and publishers, but perhaps the most impor-
tant of all would be the translators. Let us then, examine what might be called the
“gatekeeper effect,” exploring the identity and belonging of these translators, for as
much as Murakami himself is a cosmopolitan, without these equally cosmopolitan
translators, the Haruki phenomenon might never have turned into a global one; at
least, it would not have been as diverse in terms of language, geographical region, or
spontaneity.
As we have seen in Chap. 2, the expression “Haruki phenomenon” originated in
Japan as the “Murakami Haruki genshō” in mid-1980s. Two decades later, it became
a widely recognized expression referring to a globalized cultural front. Despite his
global celebrity, the reception of Murakami as a Japanese author seems to differ
inside and outside Japan. The issue of cultural representation promoted by the
Nihonjinron discourse, which was reviewed in Chap. 3, offers some useful insights
on this perplexing matter. In what follows, the trajectory of the Haruki wave will be
explored in relation to the question of “Japaneseness” that persists over Murakami as
a Japanese author. The aim of this chapter is to show that the Haruki phenomenon,
which embodies the idea of “everyday cosmopolitanism,” offers an alternative
approach to the issue of identity and belonging in the world today: one that is
all-encompassing that brings Murakami and the gatekeepers together.

5.1 The Haruki Phenomenon and the Question

of Japaneseness

A peculiar characteristic of the Haruki phenomenon is the marked discrepancy

between its manifestation in Japan and other parts of the world. Notably, in Japan,
the “Murakami Haruki genshō,” or simply, the Haruki phenomenon, began with the
astounding commercial success of Noruwei no mori [Norwegian Wood], published
in 1987. The novel’s advertising by-line, “a 100% pure love story,” combined with
the red and green covers used for the two separate volumes, made the book a
commercial item perfect for Christmas. In his chronological account on Murakami,
Rubin remarks that “With the 1987 publication of Norwegian Wood Murakami was
transformed from a writer into a phenomenon” (2012, p. 160). It was at this point that
Murakami became more than a novelist; he was now a brand-name that was

1
For further details, see Karashima (2018).
5.1 The Haruki Phenomenon and the Question of Japaneseness 77

recognized by mass audiences, reaching far beyond his regular readership, which
suddenly expanded, now ranging from teenage girls to men in their forties. At the
same time, the “Norwegian Wood effect” was extended over other industries such as
advertising and music. According to Rubin (2012), although the original Beatles
song Norwegian Wood was not particularly popular in Japan, the album Rubber
Soul, which includes this title, recorded a sharp rise in sales following the novel’s
release.
Since its emergence in Japan in the late 1980s, the Haruki phenomenon has
developed into what may be called a “global incident,” one that is undeniably
associated with the globalization of culture over the last several decades. As a global
phenomenon, it is characteristically diverse: popular titles and reception vary
depending on the market. In East Asia, readers sympathized with the vague sense
of loss depicted in Murakami’s earlier novels, brought sharply to the forefront of
Norwegian Wood.
The novel’s success was also due in large part to rapid socio-economic changes
that took place from the 1990s through the early 2000s, and went hand in hand with
the rise of a consumerist era in East Asia. In this regard, the Haruki phenomenon was
also closely associated with Japan’s economic growth during the last two decades of
the twentieth century. This was particularly evident in the USA, where, due to the
emerging economic presence of Japan in the world, there was increasingly keen
interest in Japanese culture.
As described above, the Haruki phenomenon echoes the globalization process of
culture during a time when the Japanese economy grew rapidly overseas, and the
westernization of Japanese society became prevalent. More importantly, the phe-
nomenon manifests the issue of Japaneseness discussed in Chap. 3, which alludes to
the question of cultural representation. This is why the Haruki phenomenon is
compelling, not only as a literary event but from a socio-cultural point of view, in
dealing with the issue of identity and belonging. Following Murakami’s rise to
prominence and popularity outside of Japan, a significant gap has developed
between how his work is evaluated in Japan, and how it is viewed abroad. Within
Japan, Murakami’s “Japaneseness” and his status as a Japanese writer have become
increasingly controversial in proportion to his popularity overseas. In fact, questions
of cultural representation have plagued this author from the very start. Whereas he
was never awarded the coveted Akutagawa Prize, typically awarded to promising
young writers of “pure” literature in Japan, Murakami’s star continues to rise
overseas as he wins one major international literary prize after another; in addition
to the aforementioned Jerusalem and Catalunya prizes, he has also received the
Frank O’Connor Award, and the Franz Kafka Prize, Hans Christian Andersen
Literature Award, and others.2
And yet, Murakami’s literary value has been constantly questioned in Japan. The
reason for this, in my opinion, is inherently connected to the issue of Japaneseness.

2
Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award (2006), Franz Kafka Prize (2006), and Hans
Christian Andersen Literature Award (2016).
78 5 An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan

Although scholars such as Motoyuki Shibata and Mitsuyoshi Numano advocate

Murakami’s works by placing them into the sphere of world literature, their ability to
assign literary value is limited in the eyes of Japanese critics because they are seen as
outsiders to the field of Japanese literature.3
In contrast, mainstream critics and Japanese literature experts have expressed
concerns over whether such a “Westernized” writer can be representative of Japa-
nese literature (see, for instance, Uchida 2007; Ichikawa 2010). The issues of
cultural representation and of literary evaluation concerning Murakami are often
founded on the question of Japaneseness, and are thus inter-related. That is why the
cultural representation of Murakami has been the subject of relentless inquiry by
Japanese critics bent on interrogating his status as a “Japanese” writer.
As we have seen earlier, domestic literary authorities dismissed Murakami largely
on the grounds that he was a popular writer, and not an authentic writer of
junbungaku or “pure literature,” the quintessentially Japanese literary form. The
fact that he did not receive the Akutagawa Prize suggests that the Japanese literary
establishment was reluctant to recognize him. Both Kaze no uta o kike [Hear the
wind sing] and 1973-nen no pinbōru [Pinball, 1973] were shortlisted (in 1979 and
1980, respectively), but, Ichikawa (2010) observes that the majority of the selection
committee members were reluctant to endorse Murakami’s work because they felt it
was too heavily influenced by American culture. After missing these opportunities
early in his career, Murakami was treated as a writer of popular fiction rather than
serious literature by the literary establishment. The outstanding commercial success
of Norwegian Wood, his fifth novel, bolstered this view. Furthermore, since Nor-
wegian Wood was commercially promoted as a “100% love story” by the publisher,
the novel’s literary value was questioned by literary critics (Koyano 2005, p. 62).
In addition to literary concerns, Murakami’s personal lifestyle as a novelist came
under scrutiny, and was deemed counter to, or even disrespectful toward, traditional
Japanese conventions for writers. He refused, for instance, to make public appear-
ances, and even dissociated himself from the traditional literary circle. This
non-conformist attitude, especially for a public figure in Japan, was bound to earn
him the disapproval of the literary establishment. His decision to live in exile and
write abroad was, for him, a reaction to the pressures of being a public literary figure
in Japan; but for the Bundan (literary guild), it was one more indication that he was
not one of them.
As we have seen, the issue of authenticity that surrounds Murakami is largely due
to his estrangement from that quintessential literary expression of Japaneseness that
is “pure” literature. And just as the concept of “Japaneseness” rests firmly upon a
clear and irrefutable distinction between “Japanese” and “non-Japanese,” pure
literature rests firmly on the irrefutable distinction between “serious” writing and
“non-serious” writing. Murakami consciously resists this binary division. Strecher

3
Shibata and Numano work in American and Russian literature, respectively. Their strong defence
of Murakami fiction maybe found in Shibata, M., Numano, M et al. (eds) Sekai wa Murakami
Haruki o dou yomuka (2006).
5.1 The Haruki Phenomenon and the Question of Japaneseness 79

observes that Murakami’s fiction resists the serious artistic paradigms of the Japa-
nese novel and was effective in undermining “the most basic aspects of the distinc-
tion between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ writing” (2006, p. 11). In a public lecture
delivered at UC Berkeley in 1992, Murakami also touches on this issue:
In Japan, with its relatively homogeneous population, different literary customs have
evolved. The language used in literary works tends to be the kind that communicates to a
small group of like-minded people. Once a piece of writing is given the seal of approval with
the label jun-bungaku—“pure literature”—the assumption takes hold that it only needs to
communicate to a few critics and a small segment of the populace . . . Using new methods
and a new style, I am writing new Japanese stories—new monogatari. I have been criticized
for not using traditional styles and methods, but, after all, an author has the right to choose
any methods that feel right to him (Murakami cited in Rubin 2012, p. 202).

Instead of junbungaku or “pure literature,” Murakami insists that he is writing

monogatari, which literarily translates as “tale,” but I have rendered earlier as
“narrative” (see Chap. 4). Here, Murakami declares that he is more interested in
telling original stories then he is in receiving literary authentication.
The concept of monogatari, for Murakami, is both an authorial mission and a
commitment to society as a “citizen of the world.” While his novels are always set in
Japan, for the author aspires to portray Japanese society, the connections with the
“other” world depicted in his works are also shared outside of Japan, as his
readership turns increasingly global. At the same time, those readers become
acquainted with contemporary Japanese society through Murakami’s work. In the
above lecture, Murakami praises the efforts of fellow writers, including future Nobel
Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, for taking their writing “beyond the confines of a single
culture,” and predicts that “novels will become—increasingly interchangeable” in
what he calls the global village (Murakami cited in Rubin 2012, p. 204). As the
author claims, it is the enduring task of the professional novelist to establish a sense
of belonging between the “imaginary reader”—regardless of age, profession, or
gender—and himself (Murakami 2015, pp. 254–255). And this boundless belonging
is what sustains the cosmopolitan readership of his work.
Whereas the literary evaluation of Murakami in Japan involves an esthetic debate
between high and popular culture, this is not the case in the reception of Murakami
overseas. For example, in Russia, Murakami’s novels are found in bookstores
alongside other major world authors such as Milan Kundera, Gabriel García
Márquez, and Vladimir Nabokov, and he is “firmly settled in the educated reader’s
canon” (Numano 2006, p. 4). In the USA, Murakami is one of the most frequently
published authors in The New Yorker magazine, and the American literary scene
raises few questions concerning either his nationality, or the esthetic value of his
works. The prestigious international awards he has received confirm the recognition
of his literary value overseas.
In Japan, however, the literary evaluation of Murakami remains unsettled.
Despite the annual media frenzy about Murakami’s odds for winning the Nobel
Prize for Literature, mainstream literary critics remain cautious about honoring
Murakami as a respectable “Japanese” writer. As Tatsuru Uchida notes in his
essay, “Naze Murakami Haruki wa bungei hihyoka kara nikumareru no ka?” [Why
80 5 An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan

is Haruki Murakami hated by literary critics?] (2007pp. 167–172), instead of

appreciating the universal appeal of Murakami’s work, critics repudiate its lack of
locality. Uchida argues that such concerns about “rootless-ness,” or the absence of
the traditional style of Japanese modern literature, expose the insularity of critics
who insist on defining Japanese literature within “national” boundaries. Literary
critic Minato Kawamura’s comment that Murakami’s works are popular abroad
because “they do not belong to a distinct ‘place’—namely ‘Japan’” (2006, p. 79)
is perhaps illustrative of such reservations.
As the proliferation of Nihonjinron shows, the virtue of Japaneseness promoted
by this discourse is an undercurrent that has seized Japanese society for many years,
and literary evaluation is indebted to this ambiguous notion as well. The conven-
tional assumption is that Japanese literature should endorse Japanese “high” culture
and the national cultural identity it represents. Therefore, an authentic Japanese
literature is predestined to seek the “roots” of essential Japaneseness. The issue of
“locality” noted above aligns with this idea. We can now understand why
Murakami’s popularity overseas was dismissed by the literary establishment in
Japan. In their view, Murakami’s work is neither “high” culture nor rooted in
Japan, but instead revolts against such traditional values. While the question of
whether a text “belongs to us” as a cultural artifact may appear to be a legitimate one,
it is, in fact, rather problematic, for such inquiries, as stated earlier, rest on the binary
distinction of “us versus them.” The problem is that these binaries require the
drawing of a line that is recognizable only to those who “belong” to the rightful
community. Murakami’s work, instead, transcends the dividing line, and finds
connections to each and every reader.

5.2 A New Cosmopolite Japaneseness?

The Haruki phenomenon suggests that there is appreciation for the new “cosmopo-
lite” Japaneseness embodied in Murakami’s work. This cosmopolitan aspect of the
phenomenon persists as his work has been read by a global audience that has grown
culturally and linguistically more diverse with each passing decade (as of 2019, his
work has been translated into more than 50 languages). Opposing this, as our earlier
discussion has shown, Japaneseness is considered to be an essential aspect for
junbungaku, and this has led to the author’s being labeled mukokuseki
[nationality-less], and, therefore, “un-Japanese.”
The repudiation of the Haruki Murakami phenomenon, and of Murakami as a
Japanese author, suggests that cultural representation rather than literary quality, is
of primary concern to the Japanese literary establishment. In an attempt to demystify
the Haruki phenomenon, Inuhiko Yomota argues that Murakami is “culturally
odorless” (2006, p. 198). He explains that Murakami does not represent Japanese
culture, and that this “odorless-ness” has contributed to his global appeal, similar to
manga and anime, both of which are also culturally odorless, and popular abroad.
Yomota’s argument appears to replicate Koichi Iwabuchi’s analysis of the
5.2 A New Cosmopolite Japaneseness? 81

proliferation of Japanese audio-visual products in Asia during the 1980s and 1990s.
In Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism
(2002), Iwabuchi describes the transnational flow of Japanese culture, particularly
the penetration of the Asian market by Japanese media/audio-visual products. He
specifies the term “cultural odor” as “the way in which cultural features of a country
of origin and images or ideas of its national, in most cases stereotyped, way of life
are associated positively with a particular product” (2002,p. 27. Emphasis in origi-
nal). Iwabuchi argues that Japanese exports were “culturally odorless.”
But how does this compare to Murakami’s fiction? Yomota’s expression “cul-
turally odorless,” and the parallel he makes between Murakami’s work and popular
Japanese cultural productions like manga and anime, implies his views on
Murakami. By aligning Murakami’s literature with manga and anime, he implicitly
reduces the literary value of Murakami’s novels. Not only does his attempt to resolve
the Haruki phenomenon in the context of Japanese cultural exports seem partial, but
it displays an inescapable insularity. As much as Yomota’s attempt to comprehend
Murakami as a socio-cultural phenomenon is insightful, his viewpoint seems overtly
rooted in Japan. While examining the effects of globalizing culture, he remains
primarily concerned with the issue of locality; as he rather despairingly asks, “is
Japanese culture to be accepted only by erasing essential Japanese qualities?” (2006,
p. 220).
In contrast to Murakami, Yomota finds much to appreciate in the special attach-
ment to the local demonstrated by Kenji Nakagami. Comparing Nakagami with
Murakami, Yomota laments that the former is relatively unknown outside Japan, and
stresses that Nakagami’s reputation within the literary community in Japan is high,
whereas Murakami is “ignored by most literati” in Japan (2006, p. 219–220).
Nakagami is celebrated as the first writer born after the Second World War to receive
the Akutagawa Prize.4 His works focus on the local region of Kumano, where he was
born a Burakumin—a descendant of an outcast group during the feudal era. The
struggle between families and society is a major theme in his writing. Yomota’s
disappointment over Nakagami’s lack of international recognition is understandable,
however, his comparison between the literary value of Nakagami and Murakami,
based on the assumption that literature is “high” culture, and that literary value is
determined by the literati, is perhaps misleading.
In order to explain the Haruki phenomenon, a broader consideration of the global
formation of readership is required. In this respect, Strecher (2014) argues that
Murakami’s mukokuseki style was, in fact, what enabled his works to spread beyond
borders.
This mukokuseki style has proved an effective passport for Murakami’s entry into cultures
around the world, particularly those in East Asia. Critic Chang Mingmin states that
Murakami caused the first revival of interest in Japanese literature in Taiwan . . . and Kim
Yan-su notes that Murakami has (partially, at least) overcome half a century of Korean
animosity toward Japan following half a century of colonial rule, and now stands at the

4
Nakagami won the Akutagawa Prize in 1976, for Misaki [The cape].
82 5 An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan

forefront of a new body of East Asian writers—many of them influenced by Murakami

himself—who are posed to develop “a cultural autonomous zone in which the weight of
nationalism is eliminated . . . where [these writers] will be able to interact freely” (Strecher
2014, p. 11).5

The above reference to events in Taiwan and Korea suggests that the timing of
Murakami’s popularity in East Asia coincides with an era during which memories of
the Second World War gradually became less acute, and rapid socio-economic
changes took place alongside the emergence of a consumerist era. In addition, as
Kim points out, writers in East Asia were eager to overcome narrowly defined
nationalist concerns and to communicate beyond borders. The social circumstances
in East Asia exhibit cosmopolitan characteristics that encourage encounters with the
other. It is, therefore, not surprising that “while some Western critics have been irked
by the absence of anything ‘quaintly Japanese’ in Murakami fiction . . . his
mukokuseki style plays an important role in the attention he has received outside
of Japan” (Strecher, 2014, p. 12). The mukokuseki style was indeed a passport for
Murakami in a world that has become increasingly cosmopolitan, enabling his works
to travel extensively across national and cultural borders.
This mukokuseki may have been one of the reasons that many of Murakami’s
translators were initially drawn to his works simply as devoted readers. They are
agreed in declaring that the transcendence of national and cultural boundaries, for
which they felt empathy in their everyday lives, was one of the strongest factors
attracting them to his work. Perhaps, the sensation that “this story is about me”
inspired people who started out as enthusiastic readers to become professional
translators, some of them even before Murakami had become a superstar. There is
an effect of everyday cosmopolitanism—of encountering and understanding the
other—in the personal accounts of those translators who eventually became gate-
keepers. Let us investigate how this may have begun in the first place.
In 2006, an international symposium entitled “A Wild Haruki Chase: How the
World is Reading and Translating Murakami” was organized in Tokyo. This was the
first time that translators from all over the world gathered to discuss the reception of
Murakami’s work in various markets. Most of the translators present had had some
experience of living in Japan, either studying or working. Many revealed that,
initially, their reasons for translating Murakami were personal; ranging from lan-
guage practice, recommendation of a Japanese friend, or just pure interest.
The one thing they agreed on was that the process of translating Murakami’s work
involved both literary and cultural translation. As Terhi Rantanen (2005) has noted,
learning another language is a step toward everyday cosmopolitanism, but commu-
nicating in a language that is not our mother tongue—“leaving one’s safety zone”
(2005, p. 127)—is crucial for acquiring cosmopolitan qualities. This applies to many
of the translators, who encountered Murakami’s work while learning the Japanese
language and/or living in Japan. Furthermore, there is a quality of everyday

5
Strecher quotes from Kim Yan-Su.
5.3 The Two Currents of the Haruki Wave 83

cosmopolitanism discernible in the translators’ willingness to participate in the trans-

national cultural sphere through the challenges posed by the act of translation.
Another interesting aspect of this symposium is that apparently, mukokuseki was
not an issue of concern, nor did the participants consider to be Murakami nationality-
less. A number of the translators, including those who were scholars of Japanese
literature, pointed out that readers in their countries do observe a certain Japanese
quality in Murakami’s works. For instance, German translator Ursula Gräfe argued
that Murakami is “very Japanese,” not only because of the structure consisting of
ambiguous endings and the episodic appearance of characters, but because the
behavioral patterns of the protagonists allude to those represented in traditional
Japanese novels such as Naoya Shiga’s Anya koro [A Dark Night’s Passing] and
various works by Sōseki Natsume (Gräfe in Shibata et al. 2006, p. 294). Ivan
Logatchev argued that in Russia, Murakami has become the de facto standard of
contemporary Japanese writers. He noted that “there was no contemporary Japanese
writer read in Russia before Murakami” (Logatchev in Shibata et al. 2006, p. 206),
and due to the exponential growth of the Murakami readership among a younger
generation of readers in their twenties and thirties, the image of Japan that the older
generation cherished—samurai, geisha, Fujiyama—was bound to change. Trans-
lators and scholars from Korea, Poland, France, and other countries affirmed that
while there is a sense of non-belonging or borderless-ness associated with
Murakami’s works, the writer is acknowledged in their homelands as a Japanese
author, and their readers do see certain Japanese qualities in his novels.
When discussing Murakami’s works, the translators express close affinity with
one another, and their rapport is founded on the shared feeling of everyday cosmo-
politanism. As the translators point out, Murakami’s books are read in their countries
not because they are Japanese literature but because they can be enjoyed by many
different kinds of readers. Prior to the advent of Murakami, interest in Japanese
literature overseas was fairly restricted to those specifically attracted to Japanese
literary studies. Although the works of Nobel laureates Yasunari Kawabata and
Kenzaburō Ōe, along with Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Yukio Mishima, were trans-
lated and published in a number of languages, the readership remained fairly limited.
By contrast, Murakami’s works were appreciated in many countries by readers who
were not necessarily interested in Japanese literature per se. Murakami’s writing
penetrated a broader market by capturing a much wider readership beyond enthusi-
asts of traditional Japanese literature.

5.3 The Two Currents of the Haruki Wave

The two currents of the Haruki phenomenon—in Asia and the USA—manifest
cosmopolitan qualities of individual translators and editors whose personal enthusi-
asm toward Murakami’s work evolved into initiatives that led to the global phe-
nomenon. These individuals, as “gatekeepers,” played a key role in opening the door
and introducing Murakami to readers and markets outside Japan. By exploring how
84 5 An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan

these gatekeepers encountered Murakami’s works, became “fans,” and perhaps

without knowing, engaged in what I call “the currents” of the Haruki wave, we
shall identify how the Haruki phenomenon parallels the emergence of everyday
cosmopolitanism.
We can see the trajectories of these respective currents and how they flourished
independently of one another in two representative texts: Norwegian Wood, and A
Wild Sheep Chase. While the socio-economic conditions of the market at a specific
period of time may have turned a Japanese author into a global sensation, there also
exists a strong resonance with the literary expression in Murakami’s work that
developed into a cultural phenomenon. The acceptance of these two works in
disparate geographic markets illustrates the socio-economic circumstances of those
markets, including the specific time frame concerned, which also suggests that
Murakami’s expanding global popularity is not irrelevant to the dramatic growth
of the Japanese economy during the 1980s and 1990s, and the ensuing growth of
interest in Japanese culture at that time. Having said that, there is a subtle distinction
to be made between the development of the Haruki phenomenon in these two
regions. Whereas in East Asia the overwhelming commercial success of Norwegian
Wood contributed significantly to the Haruki phenomenon, in the Anglophone
market, A Wild Sheep Chase (which predates Norwegian Wood), developed the
foundation of Murakami’s recognition as a literary figure. This is not to say that
Japan’s economic situation played no role in the Haruki phenomenon in the English
speaking world, but we would be justified in arguing that Murakami’s entry into the
West was grounded more in his production as a writer than it was in a sense of shared
social-economic conditions as it was in East Asia. It is also true that Japan, at the end
of the 1980s, was an enigma to people in the USA, who needed a new cultural model
of Japan that would supersede outdated notions of Japanese culture. Alfred
Birnbaum, who translated A Wild Sheep Chase in 1989, notes that Murakami’s
emergence filled a lingering void at the time, particularly Japan as a “faceless
country” (quoted in Karashima 2018, p. 207).
Let us first look into the Haruki wave in East Asia that commenced with
Norwegian Wood. Murakami was first introduced to the Chinese language market
in 1985 and since that time has been one of the most popular writers in that market,
despite vast differences in the political economies of the several countries therein
(Fujii 2007).6 In Taiwan, the translation of Norwegian Wood in 1989, followed by its
release in China that same year, and in Hong Kong in 1991, led to the start of a
Murakami “boom,” and that novel has remained a long-term bestseller in the region.
However, socio-political conditions led to the Haruki phenomenon developing at
different moments along a 10-year span in this region. As the development of the
phenomenon in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China suggests, Murakami’s works
influenced the lifestyles of younger generations in this region, and its impact on
culture manifested in a variety of activities, particularly music, food, and hobbies,

6
The Chinese language market refers to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia
where Mandarin is the major publishing language (Fujii 2007).
5.3 The Two Currents of the Haruki Wave 85

corroborating the claim that the Haruki phenomenon was a social phenomenon
conjoined with youth culture (Shibata et al. 2006).
Fujii formulates four basic principles governing the order in which the Haruki
phenomenon developed in the Chinese-speaking world. His “clockwise principle”
(2007, p. 77) argues that the spread began in Taiwan, and then moved clockwise to
Hong Kong, next to Shanghai and finally to Beijing. This progression was tied
indelibly to the economic growth of each of these regions. The second principle,
having to do with the “economic leveling-off” (2007, p. 77), underpins the order in
which Murakami’s popularity flourished in each region, at the point when rapid
economic growth had leveled off. Together, the “clockwise” principle and “eco-
nomic leveling-off” principle demonstrate the connection between the flow of
Murakami’s popularity and the economic conditions of the various sectors in the
Chinese language market.
While the above two principles are associated with economic conditions, a third
concerns the democratic movements that occurred in East Asia, which also includes
South Korea, where Murakami’s work was first translated in 1989. And all of these
principles are reflected in the release and reception of Norwegian Wood.
The key here is the feeling of loss accompanied by emptiness that is depicted in
Norwegian Wood. In Japan, the novel was regarded as Murakami’s nostalgic
account of his own experience of the student movements of the late 1960s and
early 1970s. This resonates with Murakami’s popularity in South Korea, where the
young generation was afflicted with a sense of lethargy and hollowness due to the
socio-political situation in their country in the 1980s. Thus, they identified with
Murakami’s depiction of “the sense of failure and loss that Japanese youths expe-
rienced . . . and the psychological conflict that they subsequently must have experi-
enced in the transition to consumer capitalism” (Kim 2008, p. 66). Similarly, in
Taiwan there was a democratization movement that resulted in bloodless reform in
the late 1980s, in contrast to the mainland Chinese government’s brutal suppression
of student protestors at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Fujii describes this as the “post-
democratic movement” principle (2007, p. 77) noting that this third principle
signifies a shared emotion among the younger generation of the region.
Fujii’s fourth formula, interestingly called the “Wood-high Sheep-low” [Shinko
Yotei] principle (2007, p. 77), describes the significant difference in reception and
popularity between Norwegian Wood and A Wild Sheep Chase in East Asia, a
situation that was diametrically reversed in the West. “Wood-high Sheep-low” is
Fujii’s tongue-and-cheek Chinese four-word idiom suggesting that Norwegian
Wood, was highly valued by East Asian audiences, while A Wild Sheep Chase
received relatively low interest. Unlike Norwegian Wood which was translated and
published in East Asia soon after its 1987 release in Japan, A Wild Sheep Chase,
which predates Norwegian Wood by 5 years, was not available in translation until
the mid-1990s.7

7
A Wild Sheep Chase was published in Taiwan in 1995, and in China and Korea in 1997.
86 5 An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan

“Wood-high Sheep-low” notwithstanding, A Wild Sheep Chase was the first of

Murakami’s works translated into English and published in the USA, in 1989, the
same year the Chinese and Korean translations of Norwegian Wood were published.
Alfred Birnbaum, who did the first translations of Murakami’s works into English,
was crucial to the introduction of this novel to the USA and the Anglophone market.
Along with Elmer Luke, an American editor who recognized the appeal of A Wild
Sheep Chase, Birnbaum assumed the role of the gatekeeper to introduce Murakami’s
works to an international readership. This was 1988, when “Everything Japanese
was of interest in America . . . especially the story of a cool young guy who didn’t
buy in to the economic mystique; and from America the interest spread to Europe”
(Rubin 2012, p. 190). In contrast to the “Wood-high Sheep-low” principle in East
Asia, the popularity of Murakami in North America and Europe is better described as
“Sheep-high Wood-low” [Yoko Shintei] (Fujii 2007, p. 78), for, while Norwegian
Wood was not widely available in the USA until the year 2000, A Wild Sheep Chase
was published in paperback as early as 1992 in New York and London. Translations
in France, Germany, and Russia followed a similar pattern for these two titles (1990,
1991, and 1998, respectively). Publication of Norwegian Wood followed a few years
later in each country (1994, 2001, and 2003, respectively).
There can be a number of reasons why it was “Sheep-high Wood-low” in the USA
and Europe, but one thing we know is that the development of the Haruki phenom-
enon in the West began from an affectionate reader of Murakami living in Japan.
This was Alfred Birnbaum, widely known as the first to translate Murakami’s work
into English, introducing the author in the Anglophone world and beyond.
Murakami confirms Birnbaum’s role as the initial gatekeeper, noting in an essay
that “Alfred was a very talented and enthusiastic translator. Had he not approached
me with the idea, I would never have dreamed, at the time, of translating my works
into English” (2015, p. 288). According to Karashima (2018), Birnbaum first
translated “Nyuyoku tanko no higeki” [The New York Mining Disaster] from
Murakami’s collection of short stories, Chūgoku yuki no surō bōto [A Slow Boat
to China] (1983), which he had read on the recommendation from a friend, and felt
to be unique, completely different from other Japanese literature. He took his sample
translation to Kodansha International and urged them to consider publication, with
the proposition of translating the novel Hitsuji o meguru bōken, Murakami’s third
work, which was originally published in 1982 by Kodansha. Karashima (2018) notes
that Birnbaum was particularly interested in this title, for he identified a “new voice”
of Japanese literature that was unlike any previous Japanese writer, and felt this
novel to be neither too realistic nor overly fantastic, but “found the perfect balance
between the everyday and the fantastic” (Birnbaum quoted in Karashima 2018,
p. 28).
While the editor showed interest in the idea of translating Murakami’s work,
Birunbaum was told that Hitsuji o meguru bōken was too long from a business point
of view. Ming Chu Lai, Murakami’s pioneer translator in the Chinese language
sphere, had the same experience. Like Birnbaum, Lai began translating Murakami’s
works on her own initiative, seeking to publish them in Taiwan, where she was told
that short stories were more desirable for the purpose of introducing a new writer. It
5.4 An Array of Gatekeepers 87

all started in 1985, a banner year in which Ming Chu Lai’s translations of three
Murakami short stories were published in a Taiwan magazine, while Birnbaum’s
translation of 1973-nen no pinbōru came out in English.8 It must be noted that
distribution of Pinball, 1973 was rather limited, since it was included as part of the
Kodansha English Library for English language learners in Japan; despite
Birnbaum’s wish to introduce Murakami’s work to readers outside Japan, several
more years would pass before his translation of Hitsuji o meguru bōken, entitled A
Wild Sheep Chase (1989a), would be published in the USA, building a foothold for
Murakami in this new market.

5.4 An Array of Gatekeepers

If Birnbaum was Murakami’s “pioneer” translator and, along with editor Elmer
Luke, “started the Murakami engine” (Luke, quoted in Karashima 2018, p. 278) in
the USA and beyond, it was Jay Rubin who shifted the engine into high gear.
Murakami’s rise to literary celebrity cannot be accounted for without noting Rubin’s
contribution as perhaps the most faithful of the “gatekeepers.” In his book Murakami
Haruki to watashi [Murakami and me] (2016), Rubin recalls his profound shock
when, at the request of an American publisher, he read Sekai no owari to
hādoboirudo wandārando (1985; translated 1991 as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and
the End of the World). Until then, Rubin admits that he had had no interest in
contemporary Japanese literature up to that time, and he simply found it unbelievable
that a Japanese writer could possess such a bold and unrestricted imagination. He
states that he was “totally fascinated by Murakami’s works” (Rubin 2016, p. 15), for
he felt as though that they were written for him. He found himself deeply attracted by
Murakami’s humor and the way the author addressed the subjects of time and
memory. But what struck him above all was that Murakami’s writing made him
feel as though he was looking at the world directly “from the protagonist’s brain”
(Rubin 2016, p. 16).
Almost instantly Rubin became a “fan” of Murakami, and wrote to him asking for
permission to translate his short stories. He was contacted by Murakami’s agent and
submitted trial translations of two short stories: “Pan’ya saishugeki” [The Second
Bakery Attack] and “Zō no shōmetsu” [The Elephant Vanishes]. Rubin (2016)
recalls how surprised he was to receive a call from Murakami himself, several
weeks after he sent the translations. At the time, Murakami was living in the USA
as an artist-in-residence at Princeton University. The reason he called was to ask if
Rubin would agree to publish his translation of “The Second Bakery Attack” in

8
The short stories published in Taiwan were “Kagami no yuyake” [Sunset in the mirror], “1980-nen
ni okeru supamaketto-teki seikatsu” [Supermarket-like life in 1980], and “Machi no maboroshi”
[Illusion of the town].
88 5 An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan

Playboy magazine.9 Rubin clearly remembers the day, quipping, “Sōseki never gave
me a call” (2016, p. 17), and at this moment Rubin realized the realities of working
with a “living” writer, for this call from Murakami would change his life.
In 1993, Rubin took up a post as professor of Japanese literature at Harvard
University and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Once there, he changed the
curriculum for his introductory course on modern and contemporary Japanese
literature by narrowing down the number of writers from twelve to three (Rubin
2016, p. 25). In place of a comprehensive course covering major writers of the time,
he decided to focus on only three: Sōseki Natsume, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, and Haruki
Murakami. This was because he discovered that most of the students who took this
course were interested in reading Murakami. As a result of Rubin’s decision above,
Karashima notes, “Haruki Murakami was positioned, along with Sōseki and
Tanizaki, as one of the three big writers who should be read,” for to be included
in a Japanese literature course at Harvard, a top university in the USA, legitimized
Murakami as an important Japanese author (Karashima 2018, p. 306).
Rubin’s translation of Nejimakidori kuronikuru (1994–1995) [The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle] (1997), which Murakami started while he was at Princeton, is of particular
interest to our investigation of Rubin’s contribution as gatekeeper. Volume One of
this lengthy three-volume novel in the original Japanese was serialized in the
magazine Shincho from October 1992 to August 1993. Although it was an ongoing
project, and yet to be published in book form in Japan, Murakami asked Rubin if he
would be interested in translating the work. Rubin took this opportunity, but at the
same time, he was aware that this would be an “adventure” for him as a scholar, since
the original novel was still in progress, and the convention was to examine the overall
reception of a complete work prior to undertaking its translation (Rubin 2012, p. 396).
The brilliance of Rubin’s translation of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was surely
instrumental not only in that work’s selection as the winner of the Noma Prize in
1997,10 but Murakami also credits Rubin with the solidification of his position as a
major writer in the USA from that time (Murakami 2015, p. 289). Owing to the
publicity efforts conducted by the publisher, Knopf, and Murakami’s newly selected
agent Amanda Urban, reviews of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle appeared in major
newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times. In his article “East
Meets West,” Jamie James introduces Murakami as the best-selling novelist in Japan
at that time, stating that “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle . . . is a big ambitious book
clearly intended to establish Murakami as a major figure in world literature” (1997).
He also praises Rubin’s translation as “polished,” and commends the editing that
“stripped away much of the fussy pop ornamentation” (James 1997) that was seen in
Murakami’s earlier novels. He also compares the work’s style favorably with “The
Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” an earlier version of the first chapter,
originally published in The New Yorker.

9
“The Elephant Vanishes” appeared in The New Yorker in 1991, and “The Second Bakery Attack,”
came out in Playboy in 1992.
10
The Noma Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.
5.4 An Array of Gatekeepers 89

Indeed, Rubin’s role in terms of “editing” the English version of The Wind-Up
Bird Chronicle was perhaps crucial; it was a major task that he faced, particularly
after being involved in the translation of this extensive novel for more than 3 years.
As noted earlier, Rubin began translating this novel during its serialization. After
Part One, “Dorobō kasasagi” [The Thieving Magpie], was published in Shincho,
Murakami wrote Part Two, “Yogen suru tori” [Bird as Prophet], and these two came
out as separate volumes in Japan in 1994. Murakami (2010) notes that he wrote the
first two parts of this novel in Princeton and was comfortable with them, but after
they were published in Japan, he felt there was more to write and began working on a
third volume in Cambridge. This volume, “Torisashi otoko” [The Birdcatcher], was
published in Japan in 1995. What made this extremely difficult for the English
translation was that the total volume had increased considerably, and exceeded the
length agreed upon by Murakami and Knopf. To make matters worse, Knopf
intended to publish the entire novel as a single volume, which in its complete form
would have been enormous (see Rubin 2012, p. 389–390). Under these circum-
stances, Rubin was “concerned at what an editor may do to the text” (2012, p. 389),
and took the initiative to trim down the work, submitting two versions: a complete
translation, and an edited version. Knopf opted for the abbreviated version
(Karashima 2018, p. 315). Faced with Knopf’s decision to publish The Wind-Up
Bird Chronicle as a single volume—a decision about which Rubin had his doubts—
he set about the challenging task of translating and adapting simultaneously. Con-
sidering that Murakami was still a newcomer in the USA at the time, we can imagine
the difficult position into which Rubin was placed. Without his passion and personal
dedication, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Murakami’s career might have
followed a very different path in America.
Another vital element that contributed to the success of The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle in the US market was the publication of excerpts of the work in The
New Yorker prior to its release. Murakami had already been introduced to American
readers through The New Yorker in 1990 with his short stories “TV People,”
(September) and “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” (November).
According to Murakami (2010), he was contacted by the editor, Linda Asher, and
agreed to this idea, for it would benefit both the publication of the novel and the
magazine to publish in advance and attract the interest of readers. As a result, “The
Zoo Attack” appeared in the July 31, 1995 issue, followed by “Another Way to Die”
in the January 20, 1997 issue. Murakami (2010) acknowledges that by offering such
“previews,” readers, as well as those connected with the book trade, became aware
of the up-coming book, paving the way for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to be
unleashed upon the American public. This is confirmed by Philip Weiss, who wrote
in The Observer (1997) that “The Japanese author had lately been profiled in The
New Yorker. New York magazine put its full weight behind the book.” He also
noted that “Knopf hoped that it would at last break the 48-year-old author out of a
cult American following ‘into the vast audience that he already enjoys on his home
turf.’” (Weiss 1997). Since The New Yorker is respected for the quality of the short
stories it publishes, in addition to its legacy of introducing such celebrated American
authors as Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, and Raymond Carver,
90 5 An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan

Murakami’s regular contribution to this prestigious magazine undoubtedly helped to

establish his position in the US publishing market. If, then, The Wild Sheep Chase
opened the door to America and started the “Haruki wave,” The Wind-up Bird
Chronicle could be called the turning point for the Haruki phenomenon.
Among those gatekeepers who are translators, there is one thing that they all share
in common: they all started translating Murakami’s work out of personal interest—
because they liked it—as opposed to being commissioned by a publisher. As we
have seen, this was true of both Birnbaum and Rubin, as well as of Ming Chu Lai,
who played such a conspicuous role in developing the flow of the “current” in East
Asia. Quite a few translators who participated in the aforementioned symposium in
2006 claimed similarly that they began translating Murakami’s work of their own
accord rather than being asked to do so. Like Lai, who was drawn to Murakami’s
writing for “the solitary and sincere sentiments that seemed to spring from the
bottom of his heart” (Lai 2015, p. 143), these translators appear to be connected
with a feeling of empathy that suggests a cosmopolitan cultural sphere is developing.

5.5 To Be Engaged in a Silent Conversation

Writing on the subject of gatekeepers in world literature, William Marling (2016)

declares that in the first place, “Writers do not get published without help” (2016,
p. 1). According to Marling, in order for writers to be accepted in those cultural
markets outside the original text, gatekeepers and gatekeeping are indispensable
factors, making it crucial for writers “to be discovered, translated, promoted, and
reviewed” (2016, p. 1). Since Marling recognizes the Anglo-American publishing
industry to be the “engine” of world publishing, and at the center of world literature,
he maintains that gatekeeping of this market is critical for any work to become world
literature (2016, p. 3). For this reason, translation is considered to be a key to
success, and he views translators as the most important gatekeepers.
Now, how does this apply to Murakami and his gatekeepers? Marling maintains
that local accomplishment does not necessarily promise success as a writer of world
literature, and this is pertinent to what we have seen earlier, tracing the course of
Murakami’s penetration into the US publishing market. For, although he gained
widespread popularity in East Asia with Norwegian Wood, and the Haruki phenom-
enon had already begun to spread in that region, this was not necessarily the case in
the USA. Although A Wild Sheep Chase was translated and published in the USA in
the same year that Norwegian Wood was done in East Asia, it did not draw the same
level of attention. The author himself admits that there were limits to how much
could be achieved by Kodansha International in America at that time.
While Marling dedicates a whole chapter to Murakami, entitled “The Prizes,
Process and Production of World Literature,” his analysis does not tell the full story.
First, he describes Murakami as an author who has “trained” (2016, p. 133) for the
growing market of world literature, because the author made his debut by winning a
prize. But this is slightly misleading, for it is a well-established practice in the
5.5 To Be Engaged in a Silent Conversation 91

Japanese literary community for writers to begin their careers by winning a prize.
Murakami, then, was simply one more aspiring writer who submitted his work or a
literary prize. The Gunzo Prize for New Writers, which Murakami won in 1979 with
Hear the wind sing, did start his career, however several more years were required
for Murakami to become a professional writer, at which point he was able to close
his jazz bar and make a living from his writing (Murakami 2015, p. 249). Marling
further states that after his success in the home market, Murakami moved to America
and spent time at several Ivy League universities, and calls this a part of Murakami’s
“training” process in working toward world literature. However, according to Rubin
(2012), the principal reason for Murakami’s move to Princeton in 1991 was to avoid
the media and society-wide attention in Japan after the mega-success of his Norwe-
gian Wood.
In order to examine the gatekeeping process in the making of Murakami as an
author of world literature, Marling applies the concept of the “dominant fraction”
(2016, p. 13), which he borrows from Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the “dominant
fraction of the dominant class” (Bourdieu, Rules, pp. 104–105 cited by Marling
2016). In Bourdieu’s analysis of the bourgeoisie class and their cultural capital, the
“dominant fraction” is the bourgeoisie proper of the dominant class who are in
control of the economic capital of society, whereas the “dominated fraction,” who
are the intellectuals, controls the cultural capital (Milner and Browitt 2002,
pp. 88–89). Marling argues that Murakami is consciously aware of the “dominant
fraction” as “Big Publishing” (2016, p. 11), for in 1Q84, one of the main characters,
Tengo, whom he designates as Murakami’s “proxy,” becomes closely associated
with the experienced editor Komatsu for re-working a text into a bestseller. He
observes that Murakami’s depiction of Komatsu as a gatekeeper, knowingly aware
of the power of the “dominant fraction,” confirms the author’s own method and that
“The older ways of gatekeeping had been suborned, and all that mattered was getting
product out of the printing plant” (2016, p. 139). But this overstates the matter, to say
the least, and also strikes one as irrelevant. In this regard, Murakami has admitted to
feeling like “the goose responsible for production” in what he facetiously refers to as
“Murakami Haruki industries” (2017, pp. 307–308). Such a comment suggests the
author’s acute awareness of the economic system that drives the publishing industry,
a reality that is certainly reflected in 1Q84, however, it does not follow that this is an
ironic depiction of Murakami himself as a writer. Quite the contrary, in 1Q84, the
emphasis is placed on the scope for creativity rather than on material success.
Another point on which Marling notes the relevance of the idea of the dominant
fraction is how reviewers have affected the success of Murakami’s work, particularly
in America, which is a major gateway to world literature. He names two major
reviewers of the time: Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, and John Updike
for The New Yorker. While calling Kakutani “the most feared reviewer in English”
(2016, p. 157), Marling denounces her disinterest in world literature and translated
literature. Nonetheless, he insists that Murakami was a favorite, drawing on her
reviews of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and After the Quake (2002). However, as he
admits, Kakutani’s commentary on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which appeared in
The New York Times Book Review (October 31, 1997), sums up this novel as “part
92 5 An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan

detective story, part Bildungsroman, part fairy tale, part science-fiction-meets-Lewis

Carroll,” concluding that “Wind-Up Bird has some powerful scenes of antic comedy
and some shattering scenes of historical power, but such moments do not add up to a
satisfying, fully fashioned novel” (Kakutani cited in Marling 2016, p. 159), which
seems less than flattering. Furthermore, although Marling implies that it is rare for
Kakutani to review translated works, she may have selected After the Quake (2002)
because it was a collection of short stories Murakami wrote after the Kobe Earth-
quake of January 17, 1995. Her portrayal of that collection as “a hallucinatory world
where the real and surreal merge and overlap” (Kakutani cited in Marling 2016,
p. 159) is neither a detraction nor an endorsement for Murakami’s literary reputation.
The point here is that Kakutani, whether flattering or not, plays the role of gatekeeper
in the development of Murakami’s place in world literature.
Another reviewer whom Marling designates as a gatekeeper is John Updike, a
renowned American novelist and literary critic. Updike was a contributor to The
New Yorker for half a century, and his review of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
(2005) appeared in the January 24–31 issue of 2005. Unlike Kakutani, who seemed
ambivalent about in endorsing Murakami’s work, Updike compliments the novel,
calling it “a real page-turner, as well as an insistently metaphysical mind-bender”
(2005). He likens Murakami’s “dreamlike” narratives to the works of Kobo Abe, and
compares the dream sequences in Kafka on the Shore with those found in the
Japanese classic The Tale of Genji, in which Lady Rokujo travels “down the tunnel
of her subconscious” (Updike 2005).
Although Marling considers the above review to be somewhat baffling, I find that
Updike’s remarks are neither disparaging nor harmful for Murakami’s reputation.
On the contrary, we can only imagine how reassuring it must have been for the
author and his gatekeepers to have gained the attention of Updike and The
New Yorker in the first place. Elmer Luke, who worked on the publication of A
Wild Sheep Chase from Kodansha International, would probably agree; Luke recalls
that elaborate preparation for promoting that book, including various publicity
efforts, paid off when The New York Times review was published on the day of its
release (2010, p. 200). According to Luke, it was particularly important that the work
be reviewed by The New York Times, since other magazines and newspapers would
surely follow.
As the editor who introduced Murakami to the English language market, Luke’s
accomplishment as gatekeeper is of particular interest. In addition to the above-
mentioned publicity work, he notes that particular attention was paid to the posi-
tioning of Murakami within the new market. In an effort to renew existing views of
Japanese literature, Murakami was characterized as a new voice from Japan: an
author who creates characters who are not only relevant in the present, but with
whom the reader might even make friends. This contrasts with the “old” Japanese
literature, whose beauty lay in its subtlety (Luke 2010, p. 199). As a result, A Wild
Sheep Chase was successfully positioned as a “post-Big Three” work.11

11
“Big Three” refers to Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima.
5.5 To Be Engaged in a Silent Conversation 93

Luke also maintains that, had the “Big Three” not been translated into English,
their establishment in the West would have been difficult, and the excellence of the
translations was a critical factor (2010, p. 194). He names Edward Seidensticker as
the “best translator in the history of Japanese literature” (2010, p. 203), and asserts
that without his outstanding translations, Yasunari Kawabata might never have
become Japan’s first Nobel Laureate for literature (2010, p. 203). He attributes the
excellence of Seidensticker’s translation to the “literary intuition” he shared with
Kawabata (2010, p. 203), and in the same way, compliments Birnbaum’s translation
of A Wild Sheep Chase for “firmly grasping Murakami’s intention” (2010, p. 198).
This is in stark contrast to Marling’s contention that “His (Murakami’s) translators
serve as his quality control team, smoothing out the rough edges before publication”
(2016, p. 144). For whereas Luke places his emphasis on the deep understanding of
the original text as well as on the autonomy of the translated work, Marling, while
upholding the important role played by translators as gatekeepers, suggests that
translation is merely a part of the process in the publication of world literature. This,
however, certainly is not the case with Murakami’s gatekeepers.
If, as Paul Auster claims, “translators are the shadow heroes of literature” (2007),
then Murakami’s team of translators can surely be regarded as champions who
contributed to the establishment of Murakami’s works in various languages and
cultural spheres. They were the ones who made it possible for “different cultures to
talk to one another . . . enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the
world, live in one world” (Auster 2007). This is perhaps comparable to the “Haruki
world,” in which readers around the world find sheer joy in sharing their experiences
of exploring Murakami’s work.12
While readers “collaborate” in developing the “Haruki world,” no less collabo-
rative are the efforts between Murakami and his translators, which has undoubtedly
been conducive to encouraging the gatekeeper effect. As I have discussed elsewhere
(Wakatsuki 2018), there is an important connection to be made between a given
author’s style and approach to writing, and how an adequate translator/gatekeeper
may emerge. In his book of essays on the professional novelist, Murakami (2015,
p. 289) notes that at various points, Birnbaum, Rubin, Philip Gabriel, and Ted
Goossen all approached him with requests to translate his work into English, and
one must conclude that there was something in Murakami’s writing that was both
attractive and conducive to translation (Wakatsuki 2018).
This resonates with the discussion between authors and translators on their
exclusive relationship in an article entitled “‘It’s a silent conversation’: authors
and translators on their unique relationship” (Armistead 2019). Polish novelist
Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft, who jointly received the Man
Booker International Prize in 2018, maintain that it is simply “a matter of trust”
(Armistead 2019).13 This trust may have been somewhat tested in the relationship
between Korean author Hang Kang and her translator, Deborah Smith, who jointly

12
Murakami fan sites.
13
Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2018, which was announced in 2019.
94 5 An (Extra) Ordinary Cosmopolitan

won the same award in 2016. Looking back on the process of translating Hang’s
award-winning novel The Vegetarian, they note with some bitterness the widespread
criticism of the translation, which Smith admits contained numerous errors. Yet even
Hang and Smith form an effective writing team, agreeing that without this transla-
tion—which Hang refers to as a “cultural transposition”—The Vegetarian would
never have emerged as a part of world literature. While all those interviewed
unanimously attest to the undeniable fact that author and translator work as a team
for publishing in another language, Polish author Leíla Slimani’s comment about her
translator, Sam Taylor, offers a vivid portrait of a relationship that rests on
unshakeable faith. Referring to an inquiry about a male translator (Taylor) rendering
works centered on female protagonists, Slimani argues,
“. . . Sam understood in a very subtle way my characters and also my style, what atmosphere
I wanted to instil, what music I wanted to create with my words. It is magic when you feel
that someone understands and respects your work so much. When I read my book in English
I always think: that’s the exact word I would have chosen” (Slimani quoted in Armitstead
2019).

It is this mutual trust and the ability to sympathize on a creative level that brings
author and translator together, and in this regard, Murakami and his team of trans-
lators are no exception. Being a translator himself, Murakami fully understands the
laborious work involved in translation.14 He regards his translators as “buddies” who
will always be on his side, affirms that translators are the most important partners;
and therefore, the key is to find a translator who gets along with you (2015, p. 290).
In the above-mentioned article from The Guardian, Flora Drew, translator of the
Chinese author Ma Jian, describes the process as being a “silent conversation,”
which is critical for producing a text without being consumed by accuracy or
replicating words. What Murakami means by “someone who gets along with you”
is, conceivably, someone with whom you can have this silent dialogue, and share the
joy of capturing the moment, demystifying the relationship between “word and
thing, letter and spirit, self and world” (Kelts 2013). And this, in all likelihood, is
the magical process by which translators are transformed into gatekeepers, whose
ultimate role, as we have seen, is not to guard or block the gate of cultures, but to
ensure the smooth and uninhibited passage of culture across borders, throughout the
cosmopolitan cultural sphere.

References

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/06/its-a-silent-conversation-authors-and-transla
tors-on-their-unique-relationship

14
Murakami is renowned for his translation of American writers into Japanese, including Raymond
Carver, John Irving, J.D. Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Raymond Chandler.
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Auster, P. (2007). Foreword. In E. Allen (Ed.), To be translated or not to be. PEN/IRL report on the
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Chapter 6
Conclusion: In Search of Belonging

This monograph, The Haruki Phenomenon: Haruki Murakami as Cosmopolitan

Writer, is my inquiry on identity and belonging. In the course of exploring the global
popularity of Haruki Murakami, I have sought to establish what I term “everyday
cosmopolitanism,” which refers to a sense of belonging to the world, transcending
boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, religion, and perhaps even our physical location.
Murakami is a Japanese author who writes in Japanese, yet his works are enjoyed
around the world, in various languages and among diverse cultures. As we have seen
earlier, there are a number of plausible reasons why Murakami has become such an
international celebrity, but what sustains his global popularity, in my view, is the
emergent cosmopolitanism that permeates the everyday sphere of his readership.
The cosmopolitan idea of “belonging to the world” may not seem so unrealistic in
this modern era of globalization and increasing inter-connectedness made available
by technological advancements. Today, however, exclusionary nationalism is on the
rise, and the world is becoming deeply divided by border controls and confrontations
of religion, ethnicity, and territory that provoke endless disputes. The emphasis on
national identity that until recently seemed to be diminishing in an increasingly
borderless world, is now reasserting itself to repulse the exponential flow of migra-
tion. The cosmopolitan ideal, proposed by Immanuel Kant for perpetual peace,
reinvigorated in the late twentieth century, now seems to be on the verge of being
nullified.
But this is precisely why the effort to distinguish everyday cosmopolitanism or
“cosmopolitanism within everyday spheres” (Kendall et al. 2009, p. 101) is signif-
icant now. As noted in the Introduction, the Greek philosopher Diogenes declared
the kosmopolites, the “citizen of the world,” for the idea of being a cosmopolitan
concerns individual autonomy and freedom of belonging anywhere. Diogenes pro-
nounced himself to be a kosmopolites in response to the question of where he was
from, a question that was ultimately an enquiry over his identity. Under the ancient
Greek city-state system, affiliation to the polis (city-state) was a marked identifica-
tion of the person; and Diogenes, who was an exile, sought for belonging beyond the
border. His imagination of such freedom—to break away from conventional

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 97

T. Wakatsuki, The Haruki Phenomenon,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7549-5_6
98 6 Conclusion: In Search of Belonging

identification that is founded on institutional affiliation—is what makes the idea of

cosmopolitanism relevant for us in the present day. And it is my opinion that the
Haruki phenomenon reflects this notion of cosmopolitanism, particularly for
approaching the issue of identity and belonging in the current times.
Today, the question of identity and belonging is an essential issue that defines our
autonomy as individuals; for this is not limited to our citizenship, but about deter-
mining our inner selves, to ascertain where our hearts belong. As we have seen in
this volume, one key reason for Murakami’s global popularity is the sense of
individuality that is shared among his readership. The timing and geographical
mapping of the “Haruki-wave” demonstrates that Murakami’s works found devel-
oping readership at the juncture of major social changes. From here we conclude that
the Haruki phenomenon is intimately connected to the spread of cosmopolitanism,
for the issue of identity and belonging is central to this notion. Furthermore,
Murakami himself represents a form of cosmopolitan exile owing to his own
detachment, or what we earlier referred to as his “non-Japaneseness.” Murakami
may well be an outcast from a nativist view of “Japaneseness” established by the
Nihonjinron discourse, but his aspiration, as a cosmopolitan exile, to seek belonging
beyond national or ethnic borders, is the very essence that stirred the global Haruki
phenomenon.

6.1 Investigating the “Everyday” and “Otherness”

in Murakami and Shaun Tan

Cosmopolitans in the modern era have been deemed by some to be those with the
resources to travel anywhere and to live wherever they choose. They are regarded as
a social class of “frequent travelers” (Calhoun 2002), indicating their privileged
status. This outlook, however, may no longer apply, considering the shifting state of
globalization during the last two decades or so. Today, due to growing migration
around the world, along with advancements in communications technology, travel to
other countries and encounters with other cultures have become part of everyday life
among “ordinary” people. Mass migration due to political, economic, and environ-
mental reasons has become increasingly commonplace in the twenty-first century.
Under such circumstances, many contemporary artists have addressed the issue of
identity and belonging as an intimate personal matter that affects their everyday
lives, and subsequently, their creative inspiration.
One such artist is Shaun Tan, whose wordless graphic novel The Arrival (2006)
became an international bestseller, translated into 23 languages. Tan professes to be
amused by the label “graphic novel,” and calls himself an “accidental graphic
novelist” (2011), explaining how this classification surprised him with its unex-
pected success. The Arrival is a story of immigration that gained universal acclaim,
depicting a commonly shared experience of a man arriving in a new world. The
128-page book contains no text apart from the indecipherable language of the new
6.1 Investigating the “Everyday” and “Otherness” in Murakami and Shaun 99

world, and the storyboard of six chapters is depicted solely through realistic illus-
trations. Tan’s illustrations owe much to his extensive research on immigration to
postwar Australia, as well as mass migration to the USA around the year 1900, their
sepia-tone lending them the flavor of old family photo albums. On the other hand,
the world the immigrants enter is bizarre, futuristic, filled with fantasy-like creatures,
including giant statues and floating ships. This unusual combination of the real and
surreal developed a forum of empathy from people around the world with similar
experiences. Furthermore, the “visual narrative” without words was praised for
giving the sensation of watching a silent film, as readers become “as amused as
the travelers who have no language to explain what they see” (Hunter 2011, p. 14).
On this point, Tan appreciates what he calls the “power of the silent narrative” (Tan
2019), for he believes that when we, as readers, are deprived of any written
description or guidance on how to interpret the images, “we must ourselves search
for meaning and seek familiarity in a world where such things are either scarce or
concealed” (Tan 2019). This preference, to trust the imagination of the reader, is
perhaps comparable to Murakami, particularly in terms of the “other world” we
explored in Chap. 2 of this volume, but before examining this intriguing possibility,
let us first delve a little more into Tan’s work and his personal background, to
understand how they relate to the “everyday” notion of cosmopolitanism.
As noted above, the success of The Arrival is a testimony for the spread of
everyday cosmopolitanism, widely felt among many who find connections beyond
borders and boundaries. Tan’s attention to everyday details throughout the book
underscores the real-life experiences of immigrants, and effectively communicates
the common problems faced by people who were being displaced. This is not
unrelated to Tan’s own background, as he himself notes, for his father immigrated
to Australia from Malaysia, and Tan grew up in Perth at a time when “being half-
Chinese was unusual and cause enough to feel like an outsider” (Tan 2011, p. 7). For
Tan, the notion of belonging is a recurring question, as he asks,
What does it mean to belong to a place, to understand a particular world, yet also feel that
many aspects of it are beyond your grasp and can’t fully be explained? I think this is a
question everyone asks throughout his or her life, regardless of age, background, or
education. It’s a basic question of existence. (Tan 2011, p. 7)

While the above statement may resonate with many, as The Arrival did, this
question of existence also incorporates the question of identity. Besides the nameless
characters and inescapable feeling of alienation that is reminiscent of Murakami,
there is a strong sense of yearning for belonging that draws empathy from the reader.
What is fascinating about The Arrival is that it is based on the individual stories of
immigrants. Tan contests generalization of portraying immigrants collectively as a
group, and instead pays attention to visualizing each and every one of them through-
out the book. This reflects the artist’s strong will to challenge “the language of
politics, economy, and media” (Tan 2010, p. 10) that so often oversimplifies the lives
and experiences of immigrants. Built upon extensive research on the actual experi-
ences of people beyond time and space, Tan successfully renders commonly shared
100 6 Conclusion: In Search of Belonging

elements such as family, memory, and nostalgia into a non-verbal composition that
communicates with everyone.
If The Arrival was founded on the “everyday” notion of Tan’s cosmopolitan
vision, his The Lost Thing (2000) captures the sense of “non-belonging” or “other-
ness.” The Lost Thing is Tan’s second picture book, which became a bestseller and
an Oscar-winning animation film, after being turned into a short film directed by the
author. As the title suggests, the story is about an unknown, strange, robot-like
creature discovered by the narrator/protagonist on the beach. A young boy, based on
the author himself, becomes friends with a nameless creature he encounters on a
local beach. Seeing that this strange creature is “lost,” the boy tries to find its home,
or somewhere it belongs. They work their way through a seemingly authoritarian,
bleak industrialized society, where, oddly enough, no one seems to notice this
gigantic, unidentified creature accompanying the protagonist.
This brings to mind Murakami’s statement in Underground, in which he
describes his first encounters with Aum Shinrikyo, the religious cult responsible
for the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways. The author confesses that he
turned away from the scene explaining the circumstances:
[In] February 1990, when Aum stood for election in the Lower House of the Japanese Diet
(. . .) the campaign was a singularly odd piece of theatre. Day after day strange music played
from big lorries with sound-systems, while white-robed young men and women in oversized
Asahara masks and elephant heads lined the pavement outside my local train station, waving
and dancing some incomprehensible jig.
When I saw this election campaign, my first reaction was to look away. It was one of the last
things I wanted to see (. . .) I felt an unnameable dread, a disgust beyond my understanding.
(Murakami 2003a, p. 198)

Murakami mentions that other people around him showed a similar response;
pretending not to see. Almost everyone would just walk away, without giving a
second thought, and it looked as though they would simply forget about
it. Murakami seemed to regret not having given it more thought at the time, for
this particular experience persisted as a disturbing memory.
According to Tan, the subject creature of The Lost Thing is “more than a simple
character, object or idea . . . something that ‘just doesn’t belong’” (2011, p. 7). The
uneasiness that Murakami felt upon sighting the Aum Shinrikyo cult members, and
subsequently made him “look away,” overlaps with The Lost Thing, for no one
except the protagonist recognizes its existence, nor do they seem to care. This
reaction, or rather, this non-reaction, by society casts the solitude of the strange
looking creature into greater relief. Tan’s account, that this unknown creature
represents a “kind of metaphor for various social, political, and personal problems”
(2011, p. 7), resonates with Murakami’s thoughts on the Aum case. In the afterword
to Underground, Murakami contends that “encounters that call up strong physical
disgust or revulsion are often in fact projections of our own faults and weaknesses”
(2003a, p. 199), suggesting the possibility that the Aum cult members were perhaps
a “distorted image of ourselves” (2003a, p. 198). He asks his readers: can we be
certain that we, as citizens on “this side,” and the Aum cult on “the other side,” are so
6.2 The “Other World” or “Another World” in Between? 101

distinctly apart? It is not difficult to see that both Murakami and Tan find it
problematic to “look away” in order to avoid the uneasiness of facing the other.
Like the “Lost Thing,” many could pretend that it does not exist, but as Tan’s story
tells us, the abandoned creature does not simply disappear or dissolve away. The
boy’s attention and sympathy is the only help to solving the problem. Yet, in reality,
so many things are ignored or overlooked, just as we see in the “Lost Thing.”
As we have seen in Chap. 4, the Aum incident contributed to Murakami’s turning
point as an author. By publishing a collection of interviews with both the victims and
culprits of the attack, Murakami established his own stance toward Japanese society,
a stance at which he hints in 1Q84 (2009a), particularly in his portrayal of the
Sakigake cult and its efforts to offer an alternative worldview to people who have
dropped out of the mainstream Japanese social structure, known to Murakami as “the
System.” As Strecher (2014) argues, Murakami describes this worldview as
monogatari, or “narrative,” and it is through this narrative that individuals are
offered—by the system, by religious cults, and so on—a way of making sense of
the world and the individual’s place in it. Murakami, following his turn to commit-
ment, pledged that he would offer a narrative that would surpass the narrative by
which Asahara had driven his followers to commit such a crime. This is also the
point at which Murakami began more stridently to depict and resist “the System” in
his own fictional works.
Tan, on the other hand, proclaims that he will pursue the “lost thing,” which he
considers to be his starting point as a creator. While both authors seek to create
“narratives” that communicate with readers, regardless of age, nationality, or lan-
guage, both Murakami and Tan seem also to share a vision of engagement, without
excluding the other, and to maintain a sense of openness. This, in my view, is the
truly cosmopolitan quality, substantiated by Tan’s comment that he is often “saved”
by readers who pay attention to those unknown creatures that appear in his works,
for “[t]hese are the things that ultimately give meaning to a story and remind us how
important it is to positively embrace the ambiguities of everyday life with an open
mind.” (Tan 2011, p. 7). This affirms Tan’s aspiration to facilitate communication
between his readers and those “lost things” that the artist can see, just like the young
boy who encounters the unidentifiable creature on the beach.

6.2 The “Other World” or “Another World” in Between?

One distinctive feature Murakami and Tan share in common is the highly effective
use of metaphor. While Murakami’s metaphors are expressed in literary terms, Tan’s
metaphors are visualized artworks of supernatural creatures that are rather eerie, yet
somehow, they evoke nostalgia. For example, in The Lost Thing (2000), the main
character, abandoned on a beach, is a “large lumbering red teapot of a thing with
stalked eye, grey lobster claws and odd tentacle feet” (Hunter 2011, p. 14). The boy
claims that “it had a really weird look about it—a sad, lost sort of look,” when he first
encounters the Thing. Since it is an illustrated picture book, no textual descriptions
102 6 Conclusion: In Search of Belonging

are given, but the expression above suggests that the boy empathized with this
strange creature upon first sight and accepted it. There is nothing in the text to
indicate fear or reservation on his part. Comparably, Murakami’s metaphors take
unusual forms as they appear out of the blue, in physical, tangible forms, and
communicate with the protagonist. Here again, there is scarcely any resistance or
disbelief on the protagonist’s part when encountering the personified metaphor. For
instance, in the case of the short story “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” (2003b), the
episode begins with the sudden appearance of the Super-Frog.
Katagiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment. It was powerfully built, standing
over six feet tall on its hind legs. A skinny little man no more than five-foot-three, Katagiri
was overwhelmed by the frog’s imposing bulk.
“Call me ‘Frog,’” said the frog in a clear, strong voice.
Katagiri stood rooted in the doorway, unable to speak.
Don’t be afraid. I’m not here to hurt you. Just come and close the door. Please. (Murakami
2003b, p. 82)

Although Katagiri is utterly confused about the bizarre situation, he eventually

calms down and listens to what the Frog has to say, and decides to work with him to
save Tokyo from an imminent earthquake disaster. Despite such extraordinary
circumstances, readers are drawn into the story, as they wonder how this most
unusual pair will stop the earthquake from happening.
In spite of the difference in the modes of expression—one in words, the other
without words—the way these supernatural characters emerge and befriend the
protagonists is a style Murakami and Tan share. In particular, the protagonist’s
reaction toward the other is where we recognize a certain “cosmopolitan quality”
that values hospitality, and aspires to maintain an attitude of openness toward
strangers. Furthermore, the circumstances are significant in which both episodes
take place as part of the protagonists’ everyday lives, for they evoke cosmopolitan-
ism in the “everyday” sphere. In The Lost Thing, the boy discovers the Thing on the
beach near his home, while in “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” Frog awaits Katagiri in
his apartment. Instead of treating them as “intruders,” both the boy and Katagiri
decide to help these strange characters, which develops into friendly relationships.
Although this may sound like a recipe for fantasy adventures, both stories progress in
a fairly realistic manner: the boy and the Thing wander through some bureaucratic
system and the indifference of an authoritarian industrialized society, whereas the
“battle” of which Frog speaks, takes place in the underground of the local bank in
Shinjuku, where Katagiri works. Once we wander into this liminal space between the
real and the surreal, we as readers are persuaded to stretch our imaginations upon
encountering the other.
In his essay on The Arrival, Tan (2010) states that the mysterious creatures that
appear in his works are unbound by specific interpretation. According to the artist,
they are metaphors applied to a wide variety of anxieties that plague the modern
subject, from political suppression, poverty, and war, to religious oppression and
environmental destruction. On the other hand, Murakami’s metaphors have been
6.2 The “Other World” or “Another World” in Between? 103

viewed as a reflection of the protagonist’s alter ego, which would imply that Frog is
an expression of Katagiri’s inner self—perhaps his unconscious fear of a major
natural disaster (see, for instance, Strecher 2002, 2014 etc.). Arguably, both
Murakami and Tan resist fixed interpretation of their metaphors, and both are
successful in stimulating the imagination of their readers through their use of varied
metaphors.
The key to this success is the “everyday” sense of belonging that resonates with
readers, regardless of their social conditions, language, or cultural backgrounds. For
instance, Murakami cleverly visualizes his metaphors by adopting highly interpret-
able symbols: Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker in Kafka on the Shore (2005); a
dwarf-like figure dressed as the Commendatore from the painting based on the opera
“Don Giovanni,” in Killing Commendatore (2018); the Sheep in A Wild Sheep
Chase (1989), to say nothing of a giant frog. Strecher notes that the author’s choice
of metaphor is deliberately made, for “it expresses his powerful and recurring image
of going beneath the surface, burrowing into the mysterious depths of the inner
consciousness” (2014, p. 7), suggesting an intimate connection between metaphor
and the “other world.”
In contrast, Tan’s strange creatures are unique—purely artistic creations of the
imagination—that originate in “another world,” or, what he refers to as “a place that
is in-between the two worlds of reality and dream” (2011, p. 3). His visual narrative
accommodates these peculiar creatures in a space wherein they co-exist with the
“real world” of human beings. This is evident in The Arrival when the protagonist
reaches a new land and suffers from a sense of isolation, for eventually he is saved by
those surreal creatures that appear from every side, whether on the streets or in his
attic room, and become his companions. It is not difficult to imagine that these
creatures are projections of the protagonist’s mindscape, and although they are
unreal, their existence is irresistible to the protagonist, who desperately seeks a
sense of belonging in an unknown world. Murakami readers will find this familiar,
for his metaphors, in most cases, exist to guide the protagonist, who is traumatized or
suffers in solitude, through his journey of healing or redemption.
Whereas Murakami’s “other world” is primarily a parallel world that exists
alongside a “real” world, the alternative world offered by Tan is “another world”
that strives in-between imagination and reality. Nevertheless, for both writers, these
worlds of undefined boundaries, not only the characters but readers can enjoy
equally the liberty of “belonging” anywhere. There is perhaps a sensation of
becoming a cosmopolitan, unbound by territories of geography, culture, religion,
or language, and we can imagine that this shared feeling of independence is what
makes both Murakami’s and Tan’s works popular on the global stage. All readers
need is to use the power of imagination as their passports, to enter this inter-
connected world of the real and the surreal. Whether it be Tan’s “art form,” or
Murakami’s “narrative,” it is up to readers to determine how they choose to become
engaged, for it is, for them, essentially about entering “a space in which the thoughts
of another person can flourish” (Tan 2019).
The notion of “everyday” found in Tan’s work nurtures his project with the
cosmopolitan imagination—free from pre-conceived ideas of who we are, or where
104 6 Conclusion: In Search of Belonging

we belong—that inspires readers to participate by re-constructing the narrative in

their own everyday sphere. As exhibited by The Arrival, this “everyday” perspective
is what sustains his fantasy-like elements to co-exist with human lives in the world of
reality. Tan regards this balance between everyday objects and their imaginary
alternatives to be vital to his work, as he contends:
In my own nameless country, peculiar creatures emerge from pots and bowls, floating lights
drift inquisitively along streets, doors and cupboards conceal their contents (. . .) These are
all equivalents to some moments I’ve experienced as a traveler . . . . (Tan 2019)

This reveals that Tan’s fantasies are derived from his own personal experience. In
his world “in-between,” neither real nor fantasy, Tan employs these “everyday”
subjects to urge his readers to “look beyond the ‘ordinariness’ of their own circum-
stances” (Tan 2019), for, as an artist, he wishes to convey the importance of gaining
an alternative perspective toward the world in which we all live.
Sachiko Kishimoto, who is the Japanese translator of many of Tan’s works,
observes that “he is someone who always stays close to those who exist ‘on the
periphery of society’” (2019, p. 6). She is referring to Tan’s illustrations where small
objects portrayed in detail are found on the corner of the pages, although they can
easily be overlooked. While this can be recognized as Tan’s playfulness, on the one
hand, it also suggests that he is an artist who pays extra attention to those little things
that dwell quietly on the peripheries of our world.
This brings us back to Murakami’s Jerusalem speech, in which he declares that he
will always “stand on the side of the egg” (2009b). As we have already seen,
Murakami delivered this speech as a novelist and as an individual, expressing his
strong wish to stay out of institutional affiliations and to avoid been recognized as
representing specific interests. When he states that “Between a high, solid wall and
an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg,” (2009b) he
confirms his position and his determination to be autonomous. This was Murakami’s
“cosmopolitan moment,” the moment at which he made his commitment to the
world, emerged from years of voluntary exile that nurtured this new sense of
belonging. His support for the vulnerable “egg,” which stands as a metaphor for
the civilians under attack in Gaza, demonstrates his compassion as a “citizen of the
world.” Furthermore, as Strecher notes, “the egg is but the latest of many metaphors
for the individual soul or core identity” (2014, p. 6); so the premise of this metaphor
is the issue of identity itself, for we are the eggs. Tan’s endless attention to everyday
details of ordinary people, and Murakami’s persistent will to maintain his individ-
uality, suggest that pursuing the issue of identity and belonging is a matter of
importance shared by both. Their narratives unfold with the enchantment of the
“other world” or “another world” in-between, seeking always and persistently to find
resolution in establishing relationships, where identity is rediscovered as belonging
to the self.
References 105

References

Calhoun, C. (2002). Nationalism. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Hunter, L. (2011). The artist as narrator: Shaun Tan’s wondrous worlds. Bookbird: A Journal of
International Children’s Literature, 49(4), 10–16.
Kendall, G., Woodward, I., & Skrbis, Z. (2009). The sociology of cosmopolitanism: Globalization,
identity, culture and globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kishimoto, S. (2019). Shaun Tan no manazashi. In Shaun Tan no sekai: dokodemo nai dokokahe
(pp. 6–7). Tokyo: Kyuryudo.
Murakami, H. (1989). A wild sheep chase (trans. Birnbaum, A.). Tokyo: Kodansha International.
Murakami, H. (2003a). Underground (trans. Birnbaum, A. & Gabriel, P.). London: Vintage.
Murakami, H. (2003b). After the quake (trans. Rubin, J.). London: Vintage.
Murakami, H. (2005). Kafka on the shore (trans. Gabriel, P.). New York: Vintage.
Murakami, H. (2009a). 1Q84. Tokyo: Shinchosha.
Murakami, H. (2009b). Of walls and eggs (Jerusalem Prize speech) (trans. Rubin, J.). Bungeishunju
April, pp. 165–169.
Murakami, H. (2018). Killing Commendatore (trans. Goossen, T. & Gabriel, P.). New York: Knopf.
Strecher. (2002). Dances with sheep: The quest for identity in the fiction of Murakami Haruki.
Michigan: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan.
Strecher. (2014). The forbidden worlds of Haruki Murakami. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Tan, S. (2000). The lost thing. Sydney: Hachette Australia.
Tan, S. (2006). The arrival. London: Hodder Children’s Books.
Tan, S. (2010). Sketches from a nameless land: The art of the arrival. Sydney: Lothian.
Tan, S. (2011). Kotoba wo koete: e ga kataru monogatari no chikara. Kotoba wo koete: Australia no
ehon no miryoku Shuan Tan jisaku wo kataru (Lecture at the Osaka Prefectural Central Library),
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shauntan.net/
Index
A Commitment, 3, 7, 9–11, 13, 15, 18–20, 22–28,
Abe, K., 92
A-bomb literature, 21, 22
Akutagawa Prize, viii, 77, 78, 81
Akutagawa, R., 83
Another world, 68, 69, 101–104
The Arrival, 98–100, 102–104
Artists, 37, 46, 65, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104
Asahara, S., 60, 100, 101
Atomic bomb literature (gembaku bungaku), 20
Aum Shinrikyo cult, 9, 100
Auster, P., 93
B Cultural phenomenon, 8, 9, 75, 81, 84
Barcelona speech, 9, 20, 22
Belonging, ix, xi, 1–3, 7–11, 13, 16–19, 25–30,
33, 48, 56, 70, 76, 77, 79, 97–104
Benedict, R., 10, 35–37, 47
Berlin Wall, viii, 16, 69, 70
Bildungsroman (“coming-of-age” story), 30, 92
Bourdieu, P., 91
C Diogenes of Sinope, 1
Capote, T., 89
Carver, R., 89, 94
Chernobyl, 21
Citizen of the world, xi, 1, 9, 10, 13, 20, 30, 79,
97, 104
Civilization, 21, 36, 37, 42, 44, 46–48
Clockwise principle, 14, 85
Collective identities, 43, 48
Collectivism, 17, 57, 61
Colorless, 6, 22, 24, 25
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
T. Wakatsuki, The Haruki Phenomenon,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7549-5
43, 51, 55, 57–61, 64, 65, 79, 101, 104
Cosmopolitan, v, vi, vii, viii, 1–30, 51, 55–61,
69–72, 75–94, 97–104
Cosmopolitan approach, 15, 56
Cosmopolitan character, 20, 82
Cosmopolitan cultural sphere, 13, 75, 90, 94
Cosmopolitanism, v, vii, viii, 1–5, 7–9, 11,
13–30, 51, 57, 69, 71, 75, 76, 82–84,
97–99, 102
Cosmopolitan moment, 9, 104
Cosmopolitan turn, 3, 9, 10, 12, 13, 18
Croft, J., 93
Cultural current, 75
Cultures, vi, vii, viii, 3–5, 8–11, 14, 17, 34–38,
40, 42, 44–47, 49, 50, 75, 77–81, 84, 85,
93, 94, 97, 98, 103
D
Democracy Without Borders, 2
Detachment, 7, 9, 10, 13, 16–19, 24–26, 28, 47,
55, 58, 98
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans
Frontières (MSF), 2
Dominant fraction, 91
E
Encountering, 2, 4, 26, 27, 69, 82, 102
Everyday, 98–104
Everyday cosmopolitanism, v, 1–9, 11, 13–30,
71, 75, 76, 82, 97, 99
107
108 Index

F Kobe earthquake, 9, 28, 29, 58

Frank O’Connor International Short Story Kodansha International, 15, 86, 90, 92
Award, 34, 77 Kogotai, 39
Franz Kafka Prize, 77 Kosmopolites, 1–3, 7, 97
Fukushima,19–21, 66 Kundera, M., 79

G L
Gatekeepers, 11, 15, 16, 75, 76, 83, 84, 86–94 Le Mal du Pays, 23–25, 28
Genbunitchi, 39, 41, 42 Lost, 6, 10, 16, 20, 26, 28, 29, 46–51, 64, 100,
386 generation, 14 101
Globalization, vi, 2, 8, 11, 13, 75, 77, 97, 98 The Lost Thing, 100–102
Goethe, J.W.von., 4 Luke, E., 86, 87, 92, 93
Great Eastern Japan earthquake and tsunami of
March 11th (“3.11”), 13, 19, 20, 23, 24,
28, 29 M
Gunzo Prize for New Writers, 33, 91 Ma Jian, 94
Man Booker International Prize, 93
Manga and anime, 80, 81
H Márquez, G.G., 79
Han Kang, 93, 94 Meiji Restoration, 36–40, 46
Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, 34, Metaphors, 16, 19, 27, 29, 55, 61, 65, 66, 70,
71, 77 100–104
Haruki phenomenon, v, vii, viii, 1–19, 30, 71, Metaphysical realm, 5–7
75–81, 83–85, 90, 97, 98 Mishima, Y., 8, 47, 83, 92
Haruki wave, 75, 76, 83–87, 90, 98 Modernization, 38, 40, 43
Homogeneous, 17, 39, 43–46, 48, 57, 70, 79 Monogatari, 6, 60, 61, 68, 79, 101
Mozart, 68
Mukokuseki, 3, 11, 48, 80–83
I Murakami, H., 1–30, 33–51, 55–72, 75–94,
Identity, vi, viii, ix, 3, 6–11, 13, 16–19, 26, 28, 97–104
30, 33–37, 42–51, 57, 60, 61, 70, 72, 76, Murakami Haruki Research Center at Tamkang
77, 80, 97–99, 104 University, 15
International Catalunya Prize, 19, 66 Myth, 9, 10, 33–51
Ishiguro, K., vii, 79 Mythology, 43
Islamic fundamentalism, 62
Israel, 55, 57, 61
N
Nabokov, V., 79
J Nameless, 18, 99, 100, 104
Japaneseness, 2, 3, 8–11, 13, 17, 18, 29, 33, 51, Narrative, 6, 7, 11, 16, 21, 23, 26, 29, 30, 35,
75–83, 98 41, 43, 50, 59–61, 63, 65, 68, 70–72, 79,
Jerusalem Prize, 7, 11, 19, 34, 55, 57 92, 99, 101, 103, 104
Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the National culture, 4, 5, 10, 17, 35, 37, 42, 44–46
Individual in Society, 19, 34, 55 Nationalism, 43, 44, 47, 81, 82, 97
Jerusalem speech, 7, 9, 10, 19, 20, 55, 57, 58, Nation-State, 2, 17, 35, 40, 42–46, 62, 65
61, 67, 70, 104 Natsume, S., 41, 83, 88
Junbungaku, 38, 42, 47, 48, 78–80 Naturalism, 39
Naturalist School, 39–41
The New Yorker, 15, 47, 79, 88, 89, 91, 92
K The New York Times, 15, 60, 88, 91, 92
Kant, I., 2, 3, 97 Nihon-bunkaron, 42–44
Kawabata, Y., 8, 47, 49, 50, 83, 92, 93 Nihonjinron, 9, 10, 34–37, 42–51, 80, 98
Kawai, H., 16, 50, 63 Nobel Lecture, 49
Knopf, 88, 89 Nobel Prize, 20, 49, 62, 93
Index 109

Noma Prize, 88 Shadows, 22, 24, 65, 67, 71, 72, 93

Nostalgia, 25, 28, 100, 101 Shaseibun School, 41
Novelist, 9–11, 13, 15, 16, 18–20, 28, 34, Shincho, 88, 89
37–40, 49, 56–58, 60, 61, 63, 67, 69–72, Slimani, L., 94
76, 78, 79, 88, 92, 93, 98, 104 Space, 1, 27, 29, 67, 69, 99, 102, 103
Stoicism, 2
Surreal, 67, 92, 99, 102, 103
O System, 2, 5, 11, 16–18, 35, 37, 42, 43, 55,
The Observer, 89 59–67, 69–72, 91, 97, 101, 102
O’Brien, T., 20–22
“Odorless” (mushu), 46, 80, 81
Ōe, K., 10, 49, 50, 72, 83 T
Openness, 3, 51, 57, 61, 101, 102 The Tale of Genji, 92
Ordinary, 1, 5, 59, 98, 104 Tanizaki, J., vii, viii, 8, 88, 92
Orwell, G., 50, 67 Tan, S., 98–104
The other, 5, 7, 22, 26, 28, 30, 35, 39, 40, 45, Theroux, M., 21, 22
50, 57, 61, 67, 69, 70, 76, 101, 102 Tohoku, 21, 23, 29
Otherness, 27, 30, 61, 69, 98–101 Tokarczuk, O., 93
Other world, 5–7, 24, 28–30, 68, 69, 79, 99, Tokyo subway attacks, 9
101–104

U
P Unabomber, 60
Pilgrimage, 6, 7, 9, 13, 15, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28, Updike, J., 89, 91, 92
29, 64, 72 “Us” vs. “them”, 59
Place, 1, 8, 10, 17–19, 24–30, 33, 35, 41, 44, Utopia, 27, 28, 59
47, 56, 58, 59, 69, 71, 77, 80, 82, 88, 90,
92, 93, 99, 101–103
Polis, 1, 3, 97 W
Walls and Eggs, 7, 11, 55, 61
R Watakushi shōsetsu (I-novel), 10, 37–40
Reporters Without Borders, 2 Welt Literature Prize, 70
Westernization, 10, 37, 38, 46–51, 77
Wood-high Sheep-low, 85, 86
S World Literature, 3–4, 9, 12, 78, 88, 90–94
Salinger, J.D., 14, 89, 94
Second World War, 10, 35, 47–49, 62, 63, 82
Seidensticker, E., 93 Z
Self, 5–7, 26, 29, 36–39, 46, 53, 60, 61, 65, 94, Zeno, 2
104 Zionism, 62