The central characteristics of post modern literature such as fragmentation, magic realism, and metafiction all play a major role in Haruki Murakami’s writing. Despite being criticized as un Japanese by many, Murakami’s writing has played an important role in Japanese literature. Murakami was born into a very cross cultural movement, which explains why his writing is very different than most traditional Japanese literature. He was born in the late 1940’s in Kyoto, which was a very confusing time due to America’s post war occupation. He has been considered the first “post-post war writer” because he was the first to get rid of the darkness that was associated with post war writing and bring about a sense of lightness. As a writer, Murakami has very unique methods and inspirations and was often influenced by many western figures including Kurt Vonnegut and Franz Kafka. Murakami’s undeniably individual style of writing has stemmed from his passion for music, running, and western literature.

Music of all genres have played a central role throughout Murakami's life. In 1974, Murakami and his wife Yoko opened a jazz bar called Peter Cat in Tokyo. They owned and operated this bar for seven years, and Murakami’s record collection numbers beyond 6,000. Murakami himself never became a musician, but his appreciation for rhythm shows through in his writing and is a central part of what makes his writing style so unique. In a talk at University of California Berkeley, Murakami spoke about his writing,

...the sentences have to have rhythm. This is something I learned from music, especially jazz. In jazz, great rhythm is what makes great improvising possible. It’s all in the footwork. To maintain that rhythm, there must be no extra weight. This doesn’t mean that there should be no weight at all- just no weight that isn’t absolutely necessary. You have to cut out the fat. (Rubin 2)

 

As you can see, Murakami is very precise about his writing. He does not include a single word that isn’t perfectly necessary. His words are written to the rhythm of the music that Murakami hears in his head. This rhythm that he hears is often translated into surrealist style stories. Jay Rubin, the author of Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, reflects on this, “For Murakami, music is the best means of entry into the deep recesses of the unconscious, that timeless other world within our psyche. There, at the core of the self, lies the story of who each of us is: a fragmented narrative that we can only know through images,” (Rubin 2).This exemplifies the idea of how music has influenced Murakami. He claims to be a very ordinary man that sometimes is able to tap into a well of creativity. Music is one way for him to get to that place. In order for Murakami’s mind to work this way and for him to be as successful as he is, concentration, determination, and discipline are very important characteristics to master. This is where running comes into the picture.

    Murakami is what he considers to be a “serious” runner. He decided he had become a serious runner when he reached the point where he was running thirty six miles a week. For over twenty two years, he ran a marathon once a year. He began running when he was thirty three, an age that he considers to be a cross road in his life. This age was also when he sold his jazz bar in Tokyo and started his life as a writer. A lot of the methods that Murakami employs when writing correlate with his methods for long distance running. In his memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami speaks of this,

Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write no more. Do that, and the next days work goes surprisingly smoothly. (Murakami 5)

 

Murakami has evidently worked out exactly what works for him when writing. A lot of this can be attributed to lessons he has learned when running. To suddenly decide to become a marathon runner halfway through your life takes a lot of determination. So does deciding one day to be a novelist, which is exactly how Murakami did it. He was at a baseball game one day and was suddenly struck with the idea of writing a novel. So he did, in a very Murakami like style. That is the way he does things. His ways of going about doing things like training for a marathon and writing a novel are very similar. These methods clearly work for him, seeing as he has ran over twenty two marathons including the New York Marathon and is a critically acclaimed author with many awards for his writing. He has gotten to that point through sheer concentration. Once he sets his mind on doing something, he does it. He also is very suited for things like long distance running and writing because he is a very introverted person and always has been. “I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring,” (Murakami, 15). This is why he has had such success. His writing would be very different without running, and he wouldn’t be able to become the “serious” runner he has without his ability to be alone and focused for hours on end.

    The other major factor that has shaped Murakami into the writer he has become is the influence western literature had on him. Growing up and throughout his life, Murakami was an avid reader. As he grew up, Murakami became an individualist always trying to evade becoming part of a group in Japan where its normal to be part of groups. He never even became a member of groups of writers. He is a solitary person who was more interested in western works than he ever was of Japanese literature. Sam Anderson, The New York Times critic at large writes about this,

He has consistently denied being influenced by Japanese writers; he even spoke, early in his career, about escaping “the curse of Japanese.” Instead, he formed his literary sensibilities as a teenager by obsessively reading Western novelists: the classic Europeans (Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Dickens) but especially a cluster of 20th-century Americans whom he has read over and over throughout his life — Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut. (Anderson)

 

These writers that Anderson mentions are the ones that made the lasting impact on Murakami, not any Japanese ones. This makes a great deal of sense when it is considered that it has been said that Murakami’s writing seems as if it has been written first in English and then translated to Japanese. This is where a lot of the short sentence style that is often seen in his writing came from. Murakami was very caught up in the appeal of western culture growing up, but he never had the patience to study the English language very thoroughly in school. When he began writing, this resulted in him not having a full grasp of the language. He found it easier to write in English and then translate to Japanese, but this led to his writing having a rhythm of short sentences. This was also a style he had noticed in Vonnegut's writing. Murakami himself has even spoken of the direct influence that F. Scott Fitzgerald had on his writing:

My theme at that time was, how far can I go with writing stories in the style of realism? So in order to train, the camouflage of “writing what you hear” was an absolute necessity. That I took the method of writing what you hear owes directly to the fact that I have long had a fascination with the narrator from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book The Great Gatsby, a man called Nick Carraway. Of course there’s no meaning in the man Nick Carraway himself. However, by coming up with the character Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald does succeed beautifully in relativizing himself and creating a portrait of the character Jay Gatsby. I thought that there probably wasn’t any entrance to realism besides this. And that’s precisely why I decided to restrict the listener to myself. (Morales)

 

This is an example of how Murakami was inspired by the way Fitzgerald wrote and how he incorporated his style into his own writing; in this case he is speaking of writing in the style of realism. Realism is a style that is uncommon with Murakami. The majority of his writing is very peculiar and supernatural; the opposite of realistic. As a result, when he decided to attempt to write in a different style he turned to the western authors that have influenced him the most.  

    Murakami’s writing style is something that will never cease to be surprising. He writes in a way that makes it hard to determine whether the characters are dreaming or not. His stories often start of realistic and then quickly descend into fantasy like dream states. Anderson spoke of this in his New York Times article:

The signature pleasure of a Murakami plot is watching a very ordinary situation (riding an elevator, boiling spaghetti, ironing a shirt) turn suddenly extraordinary (a mysterious phone call, a trip down a magical well, a conversation with a Sheep Man) — watching a character, in other words, being dropped from a position of existential fluency into something completely foreign and then being forced to mediate, awkwardly, between those two realities. (Anderson)

 

This theme of realities emanates within Murakami’s writing. His characters are forced to try and balance between the shift of two opposite realities; one normal and ordinary, one bizarre and surreal. The characters have to learn to translate between these two worlds as does the reader. Murakami’s writing is an odd combination of genres that few have explored as deeply. Hi writing jumps between fantasy, reality, sci fi, and even hard boiled at times. That mix combined the influences of the two cultures that have affected him the most, Japan and America, have caused Murakami to create extremely unique stories time and time again.

    Great writers have always had diverse motivations and experiences that manifest their writing. Haruki Murakami is no exception. The experience of owning and operating the jazz bar Peter Cat taught Murakami many lessons involving hard work and determination. Murakami’s writing style can be largely attributed to his focus, rhythm, and concentration that he developed through long distance running. Lastly, the voice that he has developed through his novels was inspired through Murakami’s extensive reading of western literature. Murakami has found happiness and success in his life through concentration and hard work. His passions and strengths; music, running, and reading, have all led to his strange dream like style of writing.

 

Annotated Bibliography

 

Anderson, Sam. "The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami." The New York Times. The New

York Times, 22 Oct. 2011. Web. 29 Jan. 2015. Sam Anderson, the critic at large for the

New York Times Magazine, writes about Murakami's life and what has made him the writer that he has become. He also talks about going to Japan and meeting Murakami, and what he is like as a person. He explains how Murakami wrote his longest book, 1Q84 intending for it to be an amplification of one of his short stories.

 

Morales, Daniel. “Neojaponisme RSS.” N.p. 12 May 2007. Web. 28 Jan. 2015.

    Daniel Morales explains the techniques Murakami uses in various pieces of his work. In

order   to do this, he uses specific examples such as experts of Murakami’s short story,

Baseball Field. He examines Murakami’s unique writing style and how his thought process is developed. As the majority of Murakami’s writing is in a surrealist style, Morales explores the few pieces of Murakami’s realist writing.

 

Murakami, Haruki. “What I Talk about when I Talk about Running.” New York, NY: Alfred A.

Knopf, 2008. Book. Haruki Murakami discusses two of his passions, writing and running

in this memoir. He discusses his training for the New York Marathon. He writes about how his obsessions with running and writing connect and what inspired him to start running. He talks about lessons that he has learned through forcing his body to be pushed to it’s physical brink.

 

Rubin, Jay. “Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words.” London: Harvill Press, 2002. Book.

    Jay Rubin is a writer who took it upon himself to write a book for people who want to

know more about Haruki Murakami, who has tendencies to be reclusive. A lot of

information written about Murakami’s life and his writing is in Japanese and has not been translated. This book explores what is known about Murakami’s life and how his distinctive writing style was born.

 

Wadell, Katie. “Quarterly Conversations RSS.” N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Jan. 2015.

In this essay published as part of the magazines “Murakami Roundtable”, author Katie Wadell speaks about the impact of war used in American novels, and how Murakami’s writings about war are different. She discusses how war is used to represent things like the strengthening of the foundation of the perfect “American family” and how racism comes into play in American writing often, and how in some of his writings, Murakami paints a picture of entirely different implications of war.