Haruki Murakami
3 books analyzed
Biography
Haruki Murakami (born 1949) is Japan's most internationally celebrated living novelist. He ran a jazz bar in Tokyo before becoming a writer, and music — jazz, classical, rock — permeates every novel. He is a marathon runner, a translator of Fitzgerald and Carver into Japanese, and a cultural outsider in Japan's literary establishment. He writes in a deliberately 'un-Japanese' style influenced by American fiction, which has earned him both a global audience and domestic criticism for being insufficiently Japanese. He wrote Kafka on the Shore after the Aum Shinrikyo subway attack and the Kobe earthquake, events that pushed him toward more directly engaged fiction. He is frequently mentioned for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Haruki Murakami at a glance
Works
Kafka on the Shore
2002 · 467 pages · ★★★★☆ Advanced
A fifteen-year-old boy flees home to escape a prophecy that mirrors Oedipus — while across Japan, an old man who talks to cats walks toward the same convergence.
Norwegian Wood
1987 · 296 pages · ★★☆☆☆ Moderate
The novel about grief that a generation of Japanese readers recognized as the first honest description of their own inner lives — and then couldn't stop giving to people they loved.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
1995 · 607 pages · ★★★★☆ Advanced
A man descends into a dry well to find his missing wife — and discovers that Japan's buried wartime guilt lives in the darkness beneath ordinary life.
Diction Across Works
flat-surreal
plain-lyrical
conversational-spare