Murakami International Japan | culture

As Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata did in the 1960s and 1970s, Haruki Murakami, 74, is the author who, so far in this century, has done his utmost to bring Japanese culture and literature closer to wide sections of the entire world’s population. And the reason is that, today, publishers big and small are combing the Japanese literary market so well…

As Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata did in the 1960s and 1970s, Haruki Murakami, 74, is the author who, so far in this century, has done his utmost to bring Japanese culture and literature closer to wide sections of the entire world’s population. It is for this reason that publishers big and small today are combing the Japanese literature market for similar veins. In more than two dozen novels, several dozen short stories, and more than half a dozen essays, Murakami deals with the harrowing and often futile practice of individual conscience—imported from the West—in a collectivist society like that of Japan.

indicated by some segments institution The literary leader of his country with his back on traditional culture, Haruki Murakami has clothed Western pop culture (particularly in music), some universal themes such as searching for loss, and fused magic realism and science fiction, with simple dialogues developed in a nostalgic setting. , with an easy and engaging narration, is largely responsible for the success, with the audience more than with the critics, who overstepped the bounds. A mass phenomenon and perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, he is the most translated writer of his generation–readable in more than fifty languages–and the literature of his country. Beneath the rubbish of this universal acceptance and lavish veneer of production Murakamyana (Jazz, Bach, Beethoven, beer, pop culture), a serious analysis of his fictional work reveals not only the deep Japanese nature of Murakami, felt, for example, in the descriptions, sometimes miserable, sometimes dreamlike, of the uprooting of the Japanese generation. This, which was revolutionary at the end of the sixties, succumbed to the exacerbation of consumerism during the next two decades and led to the collapse of the old social and familial models, but also its insistent repetition of the thematic axes of universal validity: the reality of emptiness – the subject in the repeated disappearances of its characters, the loneliness and dehumanization of the individual big cities.

The fact that Haruki Murakami appears in his works as a “Japanese who does not look Japanese” causes completely different opinions among the crowd of admirers and critics of his work. For many, it is one of the reasons for its wide international acceptance; For others, on the other hand, a disappointing submission to the emulation of the West that has dominated Japanese society for a hundred and fifty years – with particular intensity since the writer’s birth in 1949. Even for some of the most rebellious Japanese, the disregard for the country’s traditional culture, with which this writer has turned his back ( Despite some weak gestures in my folder The death of the leader (2018-2019); For the cruelest, even treason against the “tribe”. In this way, Haruki Murakami becomes, perhaps without wanting it, the daring hero of a fantasy novel in which he asserts his individuality against the law of loyalties, turnedfor the social compatibility of traditional Japan.

Hunting wild sheep This was Murakami’s first work published in Spanish. She did it in 1992, despite having appeared in Japan ten years earlier. This difference between the date of publication of the work Murakamyana In Japan and Spanish it was fixed until not so long ago. Thus the work that brought him to fame, Tokyo Blues (Norwegian Wood), from 1987, not published in Spanish until 2005. The two novels that venture so emphatically into the realm of magical realism, with characters caught between the real and the unreal – and for some critics, those with the greatest literary and social burden – are Chronicle of The Bird That Winds Up the World (1995) and Kafka on the beach (2002). The city and its uncertain wallswhich was published in Japan last month, will be the next major novel that we will be able to read in Spanish.

We’ll have to wait, according to editor Tusquets, until spring 2024.