Friday Column: Murakami By Any Other Name

Let's have a little pop quiz—I'm going to write down a list of clues, and you tell me what author and book I'm talking about:

1. The author is a Japanese male
2. He's writing about a first-person book about a depressed narrator with a troubled marriage who occasionally goes into a hole in the ground to think
3. Two major themes in this book are body alterations and how Japan's wartime history affects its present
4. The book draws on the American English vernacular to enrich the Japanese prose

If you said "Haruki Murakami, The Windup Bird Chronicle," give yourself half a pat on the back. If you said "Kenzaburo Oe, The Silent Cry," give yourself a full pat.

I don't often hear Oe mentioned as an influence on Murakami, but I suspect he might be. It's popular to talk up Murakami's affinities for great American authors and his frequent use of American culture in his novels, but after reading The Silent Cry I'd be surprised if Oe wasn't an influence on Murakami as well. There's just too much overlap—with The Windup Bird Chronicle in particular—for it to be a coincidence.

As I read Oe's book recently, I kept coming back to how much it reminded me of some of Murakami's work. I don't mean stylistically, where the two authors are very different, but thematically, in terms of the feelings and events from Japan's history that the authors are interested in exploring.

Not that Oe would necessarily approve of Murakami as a literary heir. Oe, among others, has accused Murakami of "failing to appeal to intellectuals" and of letting America infect his prose too much. (This is a fine line, as Oe has used American English to enrich his Japanese prose, but obviously he doesn't approve of the lengths that Murakami has taken it to.)

Despite Oe's words, though, it's clear that the two men do share some beliefs: the '60s protests in Tokyo have played a large part in the development of both men's lives and fiction; those protests loom large in both Murakami's Norwegian Wood and The Silent Cry. After reading each book, one gets the impression that the two men view the protests in a similar way. There was some confirmation that the two writers have similar ideas about Japan's history when Oe awarded Murakami the Yomuiri Prize for The Windup Bird Chronicle, arguably Murakami's most historically involved and Japanese novel.

Though there is some overlap, it's quite clear that Oe isn't Murakami, nor is Murakami Oe. The Silent Cry features a depth of psychological insight and interiority of perspective that Murakami's books just don't have. Whereas Murakami's plain prose makes the perfect building block for metaphorical structures that can at times take on the complexity of a good character portrait, Oe, by contrast, gives us formally difficult prose that challenges readers to comprehend the mind of the narrator. The Silent Cry starts "Awakening in the predawn darkness, I grope among the anguished remnants of dreams that linger in my consciousness, in search of some ardent sense of expectation. Seeking in the tremulous hope of finding eager expectancy reviving in the innermost recesses of my being . . ." From this rather convoluted opening sentence, the prose doesn't let up, although as we get used to inhabiting the mind of Oe's narrator it does become less opaque.

As with many of Murakami's novels, Oe's Silent Cry deals with the personal struggles of an alienated narrator (albeit in the '60s, not the '90s and '00s, which is more Murakami's territory) and Japan's uneasy relationship with Westernizing influences. The Silent Cry revolves around the return of it's depressed narrator and his brother to the rural community in which they were born. There, they find that a Korean marooned in Japan after being brought over as slave labor 25 years earlier during World War II has become a wealthy supermarket baron who now dominates what's left of the rural settlement.

Oe is interested in exploring the paradox of how we create our own memories of the past, but then let ourselves become dominated by them. The brothers argue over the exact roles played by their great-grandfather and his brother in a rural rebellion in 1860, and as they develop their own understanding of this historical incident, each begins to take on aspects of their favored ancestor. Whereas in Murakami the break between generations is a spiritual one, in Oe it comes from a lack of information. The narrator of The Windup Bird Chronicle comes to see how his alienation from his ancestors has made him ignorant of Japan's history and therefore susceptible to it, whereas in The Silent Cry the brothers fall under the sway of the past because they can't stop theorizing and arguing about it. They become so passionate about their pet ideas that they begin to live them out.

For all their literary similarities, however, Murakami and Oe do have a rather big difference in popularity, at least in America. Murakami is, of course, the most popular Japanese writer on the planet, and thinking about how Oe and Murakami compare to each other sheds some light on why certain authors become popular internationally while others don't. Every October Murakami gets bandied about as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, yet the much less famous (in America) Oe actually took home the award in 1994. In an interesting essay on reading Murakami in translation, Reiichi Miura proposes that this may be because Oe is thought of as an ambassador of Japanese culture, whereas Murakami represents something different:

There have been several Japanese authors who have achieved a more or less world-wide reputation: Soseki Natsume, Junicihiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, and the Nobel award winners Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe. Murakami is exceptional, however, in the sense that those other authors were already domestically considered to be the best when they got their international reputation. They got the chance of translation to begin with because they were seen as the best and representative of the Japanese literary scene. So when they are read in translation, they are supposed to represent Japanese culture: they were the cultural ambassadors of Japan, as it were. They represented nationality—so, I believe, they never gained better evaluation or more readership abroad than at home. Murakami, by contrast, is comparable to the cases of Steve Erickson and Stuart Dybek in the sense that the reception grows regardless of nationality: nationality has become an irrelevant parameter for them.

When being international thus means being freed from domestic limitation, their reception loses its center, making problems even for interpretation: if Murakami is tremendously popular in Italy, at the same time that there exists some antagonism to Murakami's trendy text in Japan, it actually becomes very difficult to decide whether Japan or Italy appreciates him more. . . .

If all art aspires to the condition of music, Murakami writes a novel as if it were a pop tune. Japanese love the Beatles songs even if they do not understand the lyrics.

If Murakami's books can be compared to t pop tune, then, increasingly these days, they sound like a pop tune that's been played a little too much. More prolific than ever, Murakami, to my eyes, has fallen into a creative rut. Readers who routinely scoop up the newest book from the increasingly repetitive Murakami might do better to hunt down a copy of one of Oe's works, even though many of them are no longer in print over here. His prose is a bracing break from Murakami's, and his perspective may make you think about your Murakami novels in a new light.

Comments

[Phil]

This helps shed some light on the utter tackiness of including Colonel Sanders and Co. as characters in Kafka on the Shore. I wonder if their identities are preserved from market to market, or if they change the name in translation depending on which fast-food chain has the pimpinest cartoon sponsor in the region.

[mike]

Interesting piece. I haven't read Oe, but Kobo Abe, who grew up in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and has always had an audience outside of Japan, might have been an influence too, I don't know. I haven't read much of Abe's work either, but I know he's written science fiction-type novels and postmodern surrealist stuff similar to Murakami's. Oh, btw, I read Samedi the Deafness by Jesse Ball, recommended by someone over at The Millions, but it seemed more like Auster's NY Trilogy than a Murakami novel. David Mitchell cites him as an influence, but I've only read Cloud Atlas which is not very Murakami-like.

I didn't like After Dark but I definitely don't consider "Kafka" a creative rut and realistically, I don't expect him to start writing like Oe anymore than Junot Diaz is going to start writing like Daniel Alarcon, who I happen to like more.

Reiichi Miura never mentionss jazz, which was influential on European literary modernism after WWI, but probably not until after WWII in Japan. It was American, but also black, comparable to the hip-hop influence in Junot Diaz.

Jazz wasn't really a part of pop culture in the US after the war, it was more the music of hipsters and nonconformists. I never got very far with "Underground," but it's stunning when he says how much he dislikes the salarymen, who after all, were the victims of the poison gas attack.

[Steven Augustine]

Murakami's presentations of raw, meandering narratives (along with the often worshipful receptions of same) exasperates me. I doubt that if he were named Bob, and of German descent, and living in Wisconsin, his texts would be fussed over; being Japanese, he provides for his readers the illusion of an enigma at work.

Murakami's short stories in The New Yorker, for example, have been astonishingly consistent emblems of Emperor's New Clothes syndrome.

Drawing a poptune analogy misses the point that successful poptunes are concise, highly structured and well-engineered, but the comparison *does* function, regarding a shared triteness of subject matter and language.

To be fair, someone like Paul Auster (whose semi-lauded "Brooklyn Follies" was an orgy of teleplay-grade cliché-mongering) has been getting away with a similar kind of murder for years, and for equally non-literary reasons.

[Andrew]

Interesting article; I totally agree with your comment of the repetition of Murakami. Norwegian Wood was my first story of his, every novel I've read since has a feel of a rewriting in a sense.
I will be checking Oe, thanks for the recommendation.