Who You’re Reading When You Read Haruki Murakami
Books are a product unlike most others. Novelists are not iPhones. The new doesn’t render the old obsolete. No matter how much you loved Sally Rooney, you would not suggest that because of her, Oscar Wilde is history. An adoration of Emma Cline would not lead you to say that she eclipses Joan Didion. One does not replace the other. Yet this is how Haruki Murakami was introduced to the world stage.
Alfred Birnbaum was the first to translate Murakami’s novels into English. And this is how he describes Murakami’s work: “the total antithesis of heavy-handed dour pain-in-your-face voices like Kenzaburō Ōe, Kōbō Abe, Jūrō Kara, and Kenji Nakagami.” This attitude was evident in the 1989 New York Times review of A Wild Sheep Chase, his first publication aimed at the American market. Herbert Mitgang described it as a “bold new advance in a category of international fiction … This isn’t the traditional fiction of Kōbō Abe … Yukio Mishima … or … Yasunari Kawabata.” Other American critics echoed these sentiments, separating Murakami from these Japanese writers in order to celebrate him.
Murakami has said he is more influenced by American fiction than Japanese. But
