Concept
Haruki Murakami
Overview
Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹, Murakami Haruki; born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Tanizaki Prize, Yomiuri Prize for Literature, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Noma Literary Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Princess of Asturias Awards.
Growing up in Ashiya, near Kobe, before moving to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, he published his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) after owning a small jazz bar for seven years. His notable works include the novels Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka on the Shore (2002) and 1Q84 (2009–10); the last was ranked as the best work of Japan's Heisei era (1989–2019) by the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun's survey of literary experts. His work spans genres including science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction, and has become known for his use of magical realist elements.
His official website cites Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan as key inspirations to his work, while Murakami himself has named Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, and Dag Solstad as his favorite contemporary writers. Murakami has also published five short story collections, including First Person Singular (2020), and non-fiction works including Underground (1997), an oral history of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), a memoir about his experience as a long-distance runner.
His fiction has polarized literary critics and the reading public. He has sometimes been characterized by Japan's literary establishment as un-Japanese, leading to Murakami's recalling that he was a "black sheep in the Japanese literary world". Meanwhile, Murakami has been described by Gary Fisketjon, the editor of Murakami's collection The Elephant Vanishes (1993), as a "truly extraordinary writer", while Steven Poole of The Guardian praised Murakami as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his oeuvre.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The greatest actor of the country is here. He belongs in Osaka, his name is Ganjiro, and we have a box for Thursday. The play is the one that was given in New York called "Bushido." It is much longer than as given there. It is called by another name and is acted quite differently. On Sunday we are going again to the Noh Dance, or if no good tickets are to be had for that, we are going to a theater where women act…
John Dewey, Letters from China and Japan
States what Haruki Murakami is.
From without, Japan is threatened with the risk of war against America or of a revival of China. From within, there will be, before long, the risk of proletarian revolution. From all these dangers, there is only one escape, and that is a diminution of the birth-rate. But such an idea is not merely abhorrent to the militarists as diminishing the supply of cannon-fodder; it is fundamentally opposed to Japanese…
Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China
Close in meaning to Haruki Murakami; the term itself is not named.
By such separation of imagination and intellectual capacity, he is destined to be a poet or a neurotic, and he belongs to that race of beings whose realm is not of this world. So it happens that his interest is fixed upon a bas-relief which represents a girl walking in an unusual manner, that he spins a web of fancies about it, invents a name and an ancestry for it, and transports the person created by him into…
Sigmund Freud, Delusion and Dream
Close in meaning to Haruki Murakami; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Haruki Murakami
Related ideas
- The Independent
- Franz Kafka
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- George Orwell
- Gustave Flaubert
- Japanese language
- Bachelor of Arts
- Jack Kerouac
- Censorship
- Harvard University
- Leo Tolstoy
- The Observer
- The Guardian
- Netherlands
- Nobel Prize in Literature
- Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Fantasy
- The Daily Telegraph
- Princeton University
- Soviet Union
- Science fiction
- Shinto
- Jerusalem Prize
- Surrealism
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Antireligion.