Haruki Murakami: Japan’s best-selling living novelist at 75

They are quirky characters in quirky stories, portrayed with affectionate detachment. They are stories about love, loss and abandonment – ​​and a lot about sex. There is smoking and drinking; when music is played, it is rock or jazz. And this is no coincidence: Haruki Murakami loves music, and the Japanese editions of some of his novels have the same titles as famous songs.

There is no negative publicity

Murakami published his first novel in the late 1970s, but international recognition came later.

In Germany, this happened in June 2000, when the panel of a weekly television talk show where literature critics gathered to discuss current releases became involved in a bizarre argument. “Literarisches Quartett” (“Literary Quartet”) had cult appeal, with good reviews thanks to the high entertainment value offered by its intellectual cast.

On this occasion, the program’s éminence grise, the legendary German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, argued with his colleague Sigrid Löffler about Murakami’s novel “South of the Border, West of the Sun”, causing a media scandal. The point of contention was the book’s sex scenes, which Löffler called a “mute, listless stutter”, dismissing the novel itself as “literary fast food”. Reich-Ranicki responded by accusing Löffler of being against pleasure.

A modern image of Japan

As the saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and “South of the Border, West of the Sun” became an overnight bestseller in Germany. And Murakami – who like no other created a new picture of everyday life in modern Japan, where great emphasis is placed on food preparation, music and nightlife – has become a cult author.

Many of his books have become international bestsellers, including “A Wild Sheep Chase,” “Norwegian Wood” and “Kafka on the Shore.”

Recipient of several awards, Murakami has been one of the favorites for the Nobel Prize for literature for years. And it is largely thanks to him that contemporary Japanese literature has gained global popularity.

Murakami began writing by accident, as he recounted in his 2022 memoir/writing guide, “Novelist as a Vocation,” where he wrote: “[…] I didn’t have any training. It’s true that I majored in theater and film at university, but times being what they were – it was the late 1960s – I rarely attended classes. Instead, I grew long hair and a scruffy beard and walked around in clothes that weren’t at all clean. I had no special plans to become a writer.”

But in 1978, while watching a baseball game in Tokyo, he suddenly had an epiphany: “In that instant, and without any basis, it suddenly occurred to me: I think I can write a novel“

That first novel, 1979’s “Hear the Wind Sing,” immediately won him the Japanese literary magazine’s New Writers’ Award. Gunzo. And the die was cast. “I became a professional writer without ever having to study the craft,” he wrote in “Novelist as a Vocation,” “It all seemed too easy.”

A love of English-language literature

Murakami, who was born in Kyoto on January 12, 1949, the grandson of a Buddhist priest, described writing as something between riding a bicycle slowly and walking quickly. He said this makes it unsuitable for really smart people who like to formulate ideas precisely.

He was exposed to books from an early age by his parents, who were taught Japanese literature. Murakami spent his childhood in Kobe, a port city with an American military base, which gave him access to works by Western writers. In 1968, Murakami began studying theater at Waseda University in Tokyo.

It was there that he met his wife, Yoko, whom he married in 1971, after completing his studies. While at university, he worked in a record store, which sparked his great love for contemporary Western music and led him to run his own jazz bar in Tokyo, Peter Cat, from 1974 to 1982.

From 1991 to 1995, Murakami was a visiting researcher in the United States, including at Princeton and Harvard universities. During this time, it was translated into Japanese novels by English-language writers such as Raymond Chandler, John Irving, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Truman Capote. He returned to Japan in 1995.

Murakami encouraged translators of his own works into English to create adaptations rather than faithful translations. Initially, it was these English adaptations that were translated for the German market, raising the question of how much of the original author’s intention still survived in the text. Since then, several of his novels have been published in new German editions translated directly from the Japanese originals.

Infallible bestsellers

Although the gaps between Murakami’s books have widened in recent years, he remains a prolific writer—of novels, but also of short stories, essays, and other nonfiction works—who continues to attract a large number of readers.

His last novel published in English, “Killing Commendatore”, in two volumes, was published in 2018.

2023 saw the Japanese release of “The City and its Uncertain Walls”, which has not yet been published in English. Over the course of 640 pages, readers are once again immersed in the familiar Murakami world, a world of enigmas, secrets and fleeting moments, and once again it is about melancholy, love and searching.

Although every new Murakami release is practically a bestseller, there has been increasing criticism of his work in recent years. Some critics have accused him of producing light fiction at best, while others complain that he regularly resorts to the same stylistic elements. They accused him of a certain lack of originality when he repeatedly characterizes his protagonists through external appearances, such as their style of clothing, their preference for exotic dishes or erotic rituals. But this is probably a matter of taste.

Murakami said he doesn’t care whether a book he’s currently working on will go down in literary history. He only cares about finishing.

“I don’t know how many books I can write before I die. It’s like a countdown. So with each book, I’m praying — please let me live until I finish.”

This article was originally written in German.