Have you ever heard of Haruki Murakami? who is he? If you know that he is a famous writer in Japan, have you read his works? Do you like his work? If your answer is yes, let’s discuss what the so-called “Haruki Murakami phenomenon” is all about.
Taiwan's "Haruki Murakami" is very popular, at least in newspapers and TV media. This phenomenon is due to the rapid and complete translation of Murakami's works in the publishing industry; The social phenomenon factor of literary works that "feels very Murakami". The style and feeling presented by Murakami's works have become an ideological adjective, often used to explain the inexplicable feelings of modern people. Therefore, we will see advertisements written about someone's music or music. The works are "very Murakami" and so on.
In fact, the "Murakami Haruki phenomenon" also exists in Japan, but this phenomenon is not special. Roughly after the 1950s, Japanese pure literary works broke out of the niche closed society. Especially after the novel "Season of the Sun" was widely discussed by Akutagawa, the readership of pure literary works gradually expanded to the general public. Since then, From then on, the winning works that won various literary awards and the writers’ every move became a topic of media concern.
And Murakami himself does not like to interact with the media, refuses to make his works into movies, and is even insulated from the literary world. Such actions to oppose the social modernization of literary works have only accelerated the so-called Murakami phenomenon.
Since the publication of Murakami's first novel "Listening to the Song of the Wind" in 1979, Murakami has always had a group of loyal "Murakami fans". Until the book "Norwegian Wood" was published, with sales exceeding 3.7 million copies, Murakami's fame instantly reached its peak. The readers of a purely literary work can easily exceed 100,000, and the mystery is indeed worth exploring.
The "mood" of the work is very modern
If you ask Murakami's readers, what is the charm of Murakami's works? Their first words are all: "That mood (feeling)!" The biggest feature of Murakami's works is that the protagonist in the story has no name. The protagonist usually calls himself "servant" , and Murakami can be said to be the first writer to use only the personal pronoun "servant" (with the exception of "The End of the World and Cold Strange Land"). What readers call "mood" is the "servant" that often appears in Murakami's works, showing an indeterminate attitude towards life towards all things. Although there is a distance between the era of "servants" in the work and the younger generation today, the "certain" personality traits and moods represented by that way of living are consistent with the attributes of this generation.
Many girls in Murakami fandom like to write, and the vocabulary in Murakami's works is quite concise, and does not use difficult Chinese characters, but uses a lot of katakana (Japanese uses katakana when expressing foreign things). In addition, Murakami likes to use numbers to express a situation or concept, and he often uses Arabic numerals to express it. For example: "The Marble Toy of 1973" (the second novel after "The Song of the Wind"), which at that time was an unprecedented pioneering work in terms of direct writing.
Murakami's first work "Listen to the Wind" won the 23rd Group Portrait Newcomer Award, setting an example for young people who love creation. Currently, not only literary works and literary magazines are not selling well in Japan, but some long-standing literary magazines, such as "Novel Lord" and "Wild Times", have also ceased publication. However, the number of candidates for the New Talent Awards sponsored by literary magazines such as "Literary Circle" and "Group Portrait" has continued to increase. Especially after Ryu Murakami and Haruki Murakami won the award, the number of candidates has continued to increase in the past ten years, with the number last year reaching 2,000. This craze for popular writers has also created a craze for publishing novel writing models. I wonder how many Haruki Murakami will appear in Japan in the future?
Murakami’s unique rhetoric, or metaphor, is also an important factor in forming the style of Murakami’s works. The metaphors used by Murakami are always unconstrained and unreasonable. Even if the metaphor is not within the reader's experience, the vocabulary itself can create a picture. This kind of text expressions where reality and fantasy are intertwined and integrated. Instead, it has become something that Murakami fans can't put down. Maybe Murakami's words can express the feelings they can't express!
Murakami is based in the American literary world
Murakami’s works are deeply influenced by modern American literature, a fact that Murakami himself acknowledges.
When Murakami was a teenager, he regularly read "The Complete Works of World Literature" by Kawade Shobo and "The Literature of the World" by Chuo Renshasha, which his family subscribed to the bookstore every month. Therefore, all he read was foreign literature, most of which were Japanese. On the contrary, it has never been involved in modern and contemporary literature. Among American writers, Murakami especially admires Fitzgerald. The stage of Murakami's works is always in the city, and the theme is always related to lost things - that is, "lost". This may not be purely coincidental.
Murakami’s works are very friendly to Americans because the characters in Murakami’s works have an American lifestyle. For example: "Servant" and Mouse like to go to a jazz bar to drink beer ("Listen to the Song of the Wind"), "Servant" likes to enjoy pasta alone, etc. Murakami loves to write about wine or meals, so he can gain a wealth of knowledge about Western food from his works.
Some people describe Murakami’s works as American novels with a Japanese lyrical flavor, which is just right. Because Murakami's style is deeply influenced by European and American works, and the world he describes and the characters in his novels are easy to evoke emotions, for example, every work is indispensable for music, so even if foreigners do not understand the unique Japanese The details or ideas can also be integrated into the situations in the novel.
The popularity of Murakami’s works in the United States can be seen from the fact that the most credible literary magazine “New Yorker” in the United States has repeatedly published Murakami’s works. The significance is that Murakami is a writer whose works can be directly appreciated in English in the American literary world, rather than just a Japanese writer in the American literary world. It is the dream of countless young writers to have their works published in the "New Yorker". In Japan, this is like winning the Akutagawa Prize, and Murakami is the only Japanese writer to win this honor.