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

Murakami Haruki is doubtless among the best known of Japanese authors; one observer has even gone so far as to call him "the most successful and influential cult author in the world today."¹ According to the UNESCO Index Translationum, Murakami is fourth among Japanese language authors, behind Toriyama Akira,² Mishima Yukio, and Kawabata Yasunari, with 189 book translations into numerous languages.³ This circumstance alone is reason enough to study this author and his impact. In the wake of works by Jay Rubin, Matthew Strecher, and Michael Seats,⁴ Rebecca Suter's The Japanization of Modernity is the fourth book-length study on Murakami to appear in English.⁵ But whereas Rubin offered a fan's guide to the author's life and works, Strecher focused on exploring identity and ideology in Murakami's fiction, and Seats interpreted his works as a critique of orthodoxy and as symptomatic of the postmodern destruction of "referential meaning," Suter has chosen as her theme Murakami's role as mediator between Japanese and American literature and culture. Murakami, she claims, not only influences Japanese views of American literature, life, and culture through his translations of writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, Tim O'Brien, J. D. Salinger, and Raymond Carver, through his translated works he also represents contemporary Japan to a growing number of U.S. readers. By looking at Murakami's work as "Japanese-American cultural cross-representation," however, Suter also aims to gain original insight into two major interrelated contemporary debates, namely, "issues of modernity and postmodernity" and "theorizations of the concepts of postcoloniality and globalization" (p. 1). Consequently, her book deals with conceptual issues as well as with Murakami's works. Leaving aside his translations from English into Japanese, Suter focuses mainly on Murakami's short stories, because, she holds, they are "less widely known and less translated in the West than the novels," on the one hand, and "because they are free from the coherent and organic narrative structure of his longer works" (p. 9)—reasons that may leave readers slightly perplexed given Suter's overall objective as well as the ample evidence that might be adduced in favor of propositions to the contrary. But let us see how she develops her theme.

Suter's first chapter, "The Japanization of Modernity," sketches some of the debates over the terms modernism, modanizumu, and kindaishugi and over postcolonial theory. She refers to a wide range of key figures in Japanese intellectual history, from Maruyama Masao to Kobayashi Hideo, and to scholars from Harumi Befu to Naoki Sakai, Richard Minear, Yoshioka Hiroshi, Seiji Lippit, and Edward Said, and concludes this outline by stating, after Koichi Iwabuchi, that "Japan's transnational cultural power is reasserted and articulated in terms of indigenized modernity" (p. 34). Next, in chapter 2, Suter deals with both American and Japanese views of Murakami, summarizing and quoting from a number of reviews of his books. In the case of U.S. voices, she observes that they "invariably insist on Westernization and un Japaneseness as the defining features of his fiction" (p. 42), whereas Japanese critics—including U.S.-based scholars such as Masao Miyoshi and Hosea Hirata—are represented as more varied in their views of Murakami's works. The significant differences in how Murakami is perceived by American and Japanese audiences relate partly to the way in which this author actively presents himself to his respective readerships, Suter contends, and she concludes this chapter with hints at Murakami's avoidance of a clearly defined position, his "playing on his double positioning" in interviews and statements about his work (p. 60).

Chapter 3 deals with what Suter sees as "one of the main intercultural strategies of Murakami's texts": the use of language and writing, particularly of foreign vocabulary and of katakana (p. 63). Taking short stories such as "Rēdāhōzen" ("Lederhosen...