The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States (review)

When Murakami Haruki (b. 1949) began his career in 1979 by winning the Gunzō Prize with the novella Kaze no uta o kike (1979; Hear the wind sing), few if any outside Japan paid attention. It would be a full decade before some of his work was released in English translation in the United States, in contrast with Murakami Ryū, whose maiden work (Kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū, 1976; trans. 1977 as Almost Transparent Blue) was translated only a year following its release. Indeed, while a body of secondary writing on Murakami Haruki grew in Japan from the early 1980s onward, and controversy raged as to his place in the literary world, he remained largely ignored by English-language studies in the field of Japanese literature until the early 1990s.

Today, bookstores both in and out of Japan stock his works, and a considerable body of secondary literature in non-Japanese languages has been amassed, from master's and doctoral theses to journal articles and book-length studies. In this last category, the most recent to emerge is Rebecca Suter's The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States. This timely and thought-provoking work, which focuses on Murakami's short stories and applies a mixture of sophisticated literary theory and close reading, is a most welcome addition to previous critical writing on the author. This includes, in English, Jay Rubin's Murakami Haruki and the Music of Words (2002) and my own Dances with Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki (2002), which were released almost simultaneously, and Michael Seats's Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture (2006). While Rubin's work appeals to professional and casual readers alike with a collection of well-considered impressions of Murakami and his works, Dances with Sheep is aimed at a more academic readership and explores the author's utilization of the literary tropes of postmodernism to critique the appropriation of the individual self by the Japanese state. Seats's work, sophisticated in its application of theory but ponderous in style, attempts to demonstrate that Murakami's fiction, using the structure of the simulacrum, represents a critique of contemporary Japanese culture.

Suter's text, while making no mention of Seats's work (which may have come out too late to enter into her deliberations), builds upon—and to some extent challenges—previous assertions about Murakami, particularly the common practice of categorizing him first and foremost as a postmodern writer. Arguing rather that Murakami's work exhibits a strong affinity to certain modernist tendencies as well, she issues a call for Murakami to be taken seriously as a writer of social commitment—not in a political sense, she is careful to note, but in the sense of a commitment to the stories, and their attendant realities, that Murakami creates in his fiction. "Imagination is therefore central to Murakami's definition of social commitment," writes Suter late in the text. "It is only by descending into our inner selves and passing through 'other worlds' that we can reach toward others and really 'do something.' Social responsibility is thus strongly situated in the realm of imagination and of interiority" (pp. 177–78).

The Japanization of Modernity is organized into five principal chapters. The first two lay out Suter's contention that Murakami's writing more closely resembles the style and methodology of certain prominent Western writers of the early twentieth century (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce are noted in this regard) than it does the postmodernism of the 1980s and beyond. Responding to (among others) Toshiko Ellis's argument that Murakami's use of nameless characters, nostalgia, loss, and lack of confrontation between his characters are aspects of his postmodernism,¹ Suter contends that these features are in actuality more "reminiscent of European and American modernist writers of the 1920s...