Speaking of Murakami

My Japanese tutor -have I mentioned here before my company is paying for a Japanese tutor?-totally killed it the other day when she brought in an article from a Japanese newspaper on Haruki Murakami and why he is popular outside of Japan. I had mentioned to my tutor that I enjoyed Murakami's work so she brought in the article and helped me go through it.

The title translates to "Facing World Chaos and Enjoying it," actually the word chaos is pulled straight from english and is written in Katakana カオス "kaosu". This was my first experience trying to work through some text in Japanese written above like a second grade level. It was quite challenging and took me about 2 hours to go through just that bit above. Trying to read a news article in Japanese was kind of disorienting. I'm so critical of everything I read in English I felt totally disarmed working my way through this. Just to work out the gist of the article took so much effort that I couldn't even begin to work on some kind of second order analysis, like should I take this seriously.

The article is broken up into two sections first it addresses Murakami's popularity in China, and in the second part the English speaking world. With respect to China, Norwegian Wood is far and away his most popular novel. The article quotes a literature professor who says that work resonated with young people who moved to large cities during the period after the Tiananmen square protests who felt isolated and disoriented in their new environment.

However, in the English speaking world all of this novels have gained a large degree of popularity. The article talks about peoples attraction to the surreal, dreamlike qualities of his stories. The article closes with a quote from Murakami himself about why he thinks his works are popular. He says something along the lines of, since the end of the cold war, there hasn't been a system that allows people to make sense of the world, events from the Kobe Earthquake and subway gas attack in Japan to 9/11 in the US make people come face to face with world chaos and that leads people to relate to his stories.