Haruki Murakami and His Early Work

Masaki Mori is associate professor and head of the department of comparative literature and intercultural studies at the University of Georgia.

An insightful analysis of Haruki Murakami’s early works, Mori's slim yet substantive volume delves deep into the heart of Murakami’s unique standing in the canons of both Asian and Asian American literature. Never has Murakami been so thoroughly analyzed by a compatriot whose authority and command of the Japanese sensibility confer authority on the close readings. Eschewing the raw commercialism of Japan’s economic rise in the 1970s and 1980s, Murakami—from his school days onward—espoused Western culture, especially American writing. His fastidious devotion to translating works by such Western writers as Raymond Carver and J. D. Salinger afforded him the tools to create what some critics have called his postmodern style, a designation Mori challenges. Mori argues that Murakami’s works exemplify an Asian “premodern” world view in which the living and the dead intermingle. This prominent Edo period belief, Mori argues, sets Murakami apart from postmodern writers, rendering Western critics’ discussion of his books from the postmodern perspective inaccurate and imprecise. Murakami refuses to be pigeonholed into any identity as a writer. Brief and to the point, Mori’s volume makes a valuable contribution to Western literary analysis of living Asian writers. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

• Chapter 1: Murakami’s Self-Conscious Ambivalence as a Japanese WriterChapter 2: Beyond National Canonicity: Murakami and the Japanese Literary CanonChapter 3: Translation as a Beneficial Diversion for Murakami’s Fiction WritingChapter 4: “The Second Bakery Attack”: The Induced Burial of Young AspirationsChapter 5: “The Elephant Vanishes”: What Efficiency ProducesChapter 6: “TV People”: The Slick Assault by Electronic MediaChapter 7: Televisual Appropriation and Fear in “TV People” and Ringu