Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on October 2012

for

by Miho Matsugu

When I teach Haruki Murakami to undergraduates in Chicago, his work always inspires breakthroughs. Students struggle to see Kawabata Yasunari’s work as anything more than a rare antique; they experience involuntary discomfort with Oe Kenzaburo’s political avant-garde. Upon reading Murakami, they are “sucked in,” as one student put it. They’re not merely engaging in praise or worship; they read his literature analytically. His work broadens their thinking and produces thoughtful conversations about difficult issues: abortion, suicide, cultism. He is a monumental writer for their time, one whose language—through translation—transcends the boundaries of the archipelago.

His nonfiction work is particularly memorable: Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2001) shows how walking past things we pretend not to see generates “a distorted image of ourselves in a manner none of us could have foreseen.” He lays bare that which produces an “unnamable dread, a disgust beyond” our understanding. His memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2009), demonstrates his own desire to gaze unflinchingly: “Once when I was around sixteen and nobody else was home, I stripped naked, stood in front of a large mirror in our house, and checked out my body from top to bottom. As I did this I made a mental list of all the deficiencies.”

Some prominent Japanese literary critics detect a worrisome ideological apparatus beneath Murakami’s prose—one that relies on, even promotes, the injustices fundamental to a modern, capitalist status quo. University of Tokyo Professor Komori Yoichi’s critical study, On Haruki Murakami: a Close Reading of Kafka on the Shore (2005) accuses Murakami of effacing historical trauma by shrouding it in layers of seductive metonymy. The text conflates warfare with personal violence, argues Komori, and the killing of cats is confused with the killing of people; a reference to Adolf Eichmann’s trial is invoked to draw a metaphorical connection between the Holocaust and the protagonist’s feline bloodletting. Komori argues that Murakami invokes a collective memory of violent crimes committed by youth, of recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then directs readers to a place where they can live in comfortable denial of injustice and violence.

But how can we truly know the ideological effect of a piece of literature on our political consciousness? Writing about the same novel, John Updike described Murakami as “a tender painter of negative spaces,” and said that “Beneath his feverish, symbolically fraught adventures lies a subconscious pull almost equal to the pull of sex and vital growth: that of nothingness, of emptiness, of blissful blankness.”

The very fact that such dissimilar interpretations of the same work exist suggests Murakami is controversial and provocative, two attributes common to great writers. Regarding Murakami’s alleged trivialization of the Holocaust, I would point to his critical interest in the intersection between contemporary Japan and Nazi Germany. In Underground, where he discusses the way the Japanese public averts its eyes from the Aum cult, Murakami writes: “Very likely, German intellectuals during the Weimar period behaved in a similar fashion when they first saw Hitler.” Komori Yoichi also criticizes Murakami’s marketing scheme for Kafka on the Shore, which relied on mass emails and included a 9/11 publication date. These tactics constitute a critical part of Murakami’s literary experiment—the willingness to address himself to the contemporary. Komori notes that Kafka was in many ways a response to 9/11. Similarly, Murakami has said that 1Q84 (2011), which has him poised to receive the Nobel, responds to the collective psychic landscape that has emerged in the last 11 years.

One thing is certain: Murakami’s novels are commodities. They bring profit to the wealthy. They are well-received by educated, urbane young professionals. To reach a global audience, Murakami has worked closely with a select group of translators, editors and publishers. This ruffles critics who see him as a businessman first and author second. But such criticism is misplaced. Kawabata once said that great works amount to nothing if there is no space to publish them. He too was an enthusiastic marketer, not only of his own work, but of Japanese literature in general. Murakami’s is a similar variety of literary entrepreneurship.

Alfred Nobel’s will indicates the Nobel should go to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” What is an ideal direction? It has been said that Murakami’s literature is a source of soothing in our fevered political and economic times, and in recent years the endings to his novels have grown hopeful and redemptive. Meanwhile, the anxiety and fear that underlie so much of life in the early 21st century have reached a hideous boil. Some of us have recognized this, and cannot accept that Murakami writes—at least in part—for those who have not. Yet in positioning his literature at the abrupt edge of these questions of consciousness, Murakami has crafted a more honest portrayal than his detractors—one that implicates us all.