What is or was Postmodern Fiction?: Murakami after Borges

If Haruki Murakami’s fictions are symptomatic of what has happened to the (Jamesian) notion of a “central intelligence” as necessary to the novel, they present a new level of postmodernist “blank pastiche” and require new reading habits. While Jorge Luis Borges’s characters often offer literary/philosophical explanations of post-modernity’s break with the traditional reader’s narrative expectations, Murakami succeeds in cyber-spacing and de-centralizing human consciousness. Readers are learning to surf.