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A little
more than three years ago, when Haruki Murakami's thick novel
Kafka on the Shore was released to both critical and
popular acclaim, the grumbling of his fans grew almost as
quickly as the novel raced up The New York Times bestseller's
list. A number of longtime fans seemingly felt that their
hip, cool author was being discovered by the masses and their
once clandestine literature was becoming popular fiction read
by everyone. However, if one looks outside of the English-speaking
world, one will notice that Murakami is not an author loved
by a select few, but a phenomenon, the Haruki Phenomenon,
in and of himself.
It is
with this thought in mind that the symposium titled A
Wild Haruki Chase: How the World Is Reading and Translating
Murakami was formulated by a number of Japanese professors
at the University of Tokyo and Meiji Gakuin University and
Murakami's translators from four continents.
The essays
within the book are a select few from the symposium, but they
give the reader viewpoints on how Murakami, and especially
his novel Norwegian Wood, is received in various countries.
Concerning South Korea, Murakami's translator Kim Choon Mie
writes that Japanese literature was primarily limited to world
literature anthology collections before the appearance of
Murakami because of the feelings of antagonism shared between
South Korea and Japan. Murakami's literature has become so
popular, in fact, that Kim considers knowledge of Murakami
to be a prerequisite for understanding South Korean literature;
his themes and writing style have been emulated so much in
the country that it borders plagiarism.
Similarly,
Ivan Sergeevich Logatchov, Murakami's Russian translator,
states that Murakami has become so hip in Russia that young
people prominently display their books to be sure that spectators
are sure to see that they are reading him. As in South Korea,
Murakami's impact on young Russian writers has been considerable,
and Murakami—the first widely translated Japanese writer
in Russia—has become the standard by which other Japanese
writers, including Ryu Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, are
measured.
Besides
themes of Murakami's popularity in other countries, the authors
also attempt to tell why Murakami has become popular enough
to be translated into over thirty languages. Their primary
answer is that Murakami's protagonists, who live in an urban
malaise fueled by a government who treats its citizens as
a collective consumer group, mirrors the lives of citizens
of other countries who have lost their beliefs of being able
to change their governments and to make a true impact in this
world. Instead, they—both the characters and the readers—live
in a world where materialist pursuits have come to represent
individuality, and individualities represent nothing more
than purchasing power.
Unlike
some of the other works concerning the literature and historical
groundings of Murakami's literature—particularly Mathew
Carl Strecher's Dances with Sheep: The Quest for Identity
in the Fiction of Murukami Haruki and Michael Seats's
Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese
Culture—the essays in A Wild Haruki Chase
are easy to read. The information they convey, while interesting,
do not delve into much of the more complex issues of Murakami's
work and make the collection more accessible for those who
want to do more than simply read Murakami's literature on
its own.
A
Wild Haruki Chase is a fine collection of essays touching
on a number of subjects including globalization, postmodernism,
and translation issues. While some essays seem a bit far-fetched
(including "Lu Xun and Murakami: A Genealogy of the Ah Q Image
in East Asian Literature"), the volume represents a work of
criticism that is open not only to Japanese literature scholars
but Murakami fans in general.
(June,
2008)
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