Asian and African Studies XV, 3 (2011), pp. 5968 [610922]

Asian and African Studies XV, 3 (2011), pp. 59–68

59 UDK: 821.521
COPYRIGHT ©: RODICA FRIENTIU
Contemporary Japanese Literature in Its Transition
Towards the New Postmod ern Humanism: Haruki
Murakami
Rodica FRENTIU
Abstract
Although Japan recorded no specific literary m ovement in the 1980s, in any classical sense
of the term, we may say that today we are witn essing, in terms of our historical sensibility,
a condensation of narrative viewpoints upon the present or, in other words, the transposition of the criteria of the present to another time, which is undoubtedly a
consequence of the so-called “postmodern” will to reject grand narratives. This study aims
to review and complete the inventory of th e postmodern characteristics that specialised
literature has identified in Haruki Murakami’s works, seen from the perspective of what
the author of the present paper consider s to be the “new postmodern humanism.”
Keywords : transition, postmodernism, new humanism, contemporary Japanese literature
Izvleček
Čeprav v Japonska 80. letih 20. stoletja ni zabeležila nobenih specifi čnih literarnih gibanj,
v kakršnemkoli klasi čnem pomenu besede, lahko re čemo, da smo danes, v smislu
zgodovinske senzibilnosti pri ča kondenzaciji pripovednih pogledov na sedanjost, ali
drugače rečeno, transpozicijo kriterija sedanjosti na drugi čas, ki je brez dvoma posledica
tako imenovane »postmoderne« volje po zavrnitvi velikih pripovedi. Ta študija preu čuje in
dopolnjuje popis postmodernih zna čilnosti, ki jih je specializir ana literatura identificirala v
delih Harukija Murakamija, gledano iz stališ ča, ki ga avtor sam imenuje “novi postmoderni
humanizem”.
Ključne besede: tranzicija, postmodernizem, novi humanizem, sodobna japonska
literatura

 Rodica Frentiu, Associate Professor at the Depa rtment of Asian Languages , Faculty of Letters,
Babes-Bolyai University, Romania. E-mail address: [anonimizat]

Rodica Frentiu: Contemporary Japane se Literature in Its Transition
60 “Clouds make rain, and rain makes clouds.
The environment makes man,
and man makes the environment.”
––Multiple Designs by Kobayashi Hideo 1995

1 Introduction
The literature of an epoch may be said to capture not only the present of creation,
but also the present of culture, retrieving thus, a certain face of the past, as preserved in the memory of posterity or as resuscitated by that particular epoch; in this sense, Japanese postmodernism appears t oday both as a “return to Japan,” or a
rethinking of traditional Japan, and as th e expression of the need for
“internationalism,” for assimilating new inte rnational cultural forms. Against this
background, Haruki Murakami may be read as an emblematic author of his time,
being considered a Japanese writer who h as managed to swiftly assimilate and
adapt the postmodern literary practices, overcoming the cultural frontiers that
Japanese traditionalism has strictly enforced throughout time.
Founded on the aesthetics of the fragment, on the art of sight and, generally, of
perception, postmodern fiction captures, in anti-mimetic manner, the difficulty of perceiving and understanding the contemporary world: it conveys a disquieting state of incompleteness deriving from the equally disquieting characteristics of the
surrounding universe. Contemporary writers ma y also invent new meanings in the
world and create new myths of completeness and determination.
An excellent observer of daily life, but also a subtle analyst of the banal and
the commonplace, Haruki Murakami grounds his literary work on detailed knowledge of the mythology of the ordi nary, whence he ex tracts cases that
become relevant and emblematic, due to e ither internal or external circumstances.
Living in sync with his time, Haruki Muraka mi tries to reveal this simultaneity and
concomitance. He is a contemporary man w ho attempts to survive the alienation of
his own epoch.
Haruki Murakami’s option for literature is similar to a rite of passage
comprising three dialectical moments: desire, search, and overcoming failure. The desire to write is followed by a period of experiencing literature, when he moves
from fascination to deception. Like any in itiation journey, which is waylaid by
darkness, delusions and downfalls, Mura kami’s “progress through literature” has

Asian and African Studies XV, 3 (2011), pp. 59–68
61 occasioned him to encounter both full admiration (for Western literature) and
contestation (of Japanese literature), an experience the writer has overcome by
discovering a new humanism , focused upon the human being, who is grasped in
the most concrete, physical-sensorial functions, here and now, but also upon
moments of lights and shadows, pointing towards the realm of beyond .

2 The Postmodern Literature in Japan
The development of postmodern Japanese lite rature was occasioned by the gradual
disappearance of influential models: Junichir ō Tanizaki in 1965, Yukio Mishima
in 1970, Naoya Shiga in 1971 and Yasunari Kawabata in 1972. Even if after
Kawabata’s demise the modern tradition of “pure” literature could still be sensed
in the works of writers like Masuji Ibuse, K ōbō Abe and Kenji Nakagami, after
their death (Nakagami in 1992, Ibuse and Abe in 1993), Kenzabur ō Ōe was the
only one left to defend this type of litera ture, which amounted to “teaching” rather
than to “entertainment” (Strecher 1998b, 373).
Therefore, Japanese postmodernism appears, on the one hand, as a “return to
Japan,” namely the “return to Japan” as described in Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow
Country , with its world being limited to feeling (Beauty), and, on the other hand, it
verges on “internationalism” (Karatani 198 9, 45), given its attempt to lay the
foundation of feeling (Beauty) at the junction between knowledge (Truth) and will
(Good). Haruki Murakami once confessed that as a child he had rejected the idea
of becoming a writer after having read Ta nizaki and Kawabata, whom he saw as
holding literature “in good hands” (Strech er 1998b, 375); however, today he is
considered to be the author who has br ought postmodern Japanese literature to the
forefront of contemporary critical appraisal.
Kenzabur ō Ōe considered that “pure” literature must have a certain social
responsibility and should essentially be a didac tic model, an attitude which has, to
some extent, prevented the developmen t of postmodern literature in Japan
(Strecher 1998b, 372). He stated once that Haruki Murakami’s work failed in its attempt to address the intellectuals, in a broad sense, since it did not succeed in
providing “models” for the present and the future of Japan (Rubin 1992, 499). In a similar manner, the critic Masao Miyosh i dismisses Haruki Murakami, accusing
him of displaying an exotic Japan, “i n an international version for foreign
purchasers,” which discourages any attempt to approach his work critically, with

Rodica Frentiu: Contemporary Japane se Literature in Its Transition
62 possibly only a few exceptions: “only a ve ry few would be silly enough to get
interested in deep reading” (Miyoshi 1989, 153).
However, without paying any tribute to concession, Haruki Murakami remains
interested in describing a society that is obsessed with comfort, renewal, and crazy
consumption, a society experiencing conval escence after the demise of great ideas
and ideals, sickened by overproduction, a society whose connection with the past
and tradition is getting weaker and weaker, wh ich engenders a sense of loss that is
connoted negatively, as the source of both pessimism and nostalgia.
The Japanese generation of the 1980s, whose representatives include Haruki
Murakami, faced the necessity to chart new pathways into the novelistic space, by
either approaching new themes or a ttempting to explore new territories.
Postmodernism, which appears as a resu lt of the phenomena generated by the
society of information, and is seen as the cultural logic of late capitalism,
determines a split in the unity of personality and gives rise to an identity crisis. Moving the emphasis from centrality to marginality is likely to confuse values, cultivate indeterminacy, overbid relativism and foster continuous de-structuring.
Nothing is stable any longer, anything is possible and may evolve in any direction: shōsetsu , the Japanese type of novelistic creation, becomes, to some extent, more
similar to “annals” than to “narrative history” (Miyoshi 1989, 153):
Without doubt, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8 was a story told by Cinnamon.
He had put sixteen stories into the computer under the title The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle , and it just so happened that I had chosen and read #8. Judging
from the length of one story, sixteen such stories would have made a fairly
thick book if set in type. What could “#8” signify? The word “chronicle” in the title probably meant that the stories were related in chronological order, #8 following #7, #9 following #8, and so on. That was a reasonable assumption,
if not necessarily true. Th ey could just as well have been arranged in a
different order. They might even run ba ckward, from the present to the past. A
bolder hypothesis might make them sixteen different versions of the same story told in parallel. […] I had no way of telling how much of the story was true. Was every bit of it Cinnamon’s creation, or were parts of it based on
actual events? […] Still, it was conceivable that some of the details were
based on historical facts. […] From the stories he had heard repeatedly from his mother, he derived further stories in an attempt to re-create the enigmatic figure of his grandfather in a new setting. He inherited from his mother’s
stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely,
the assumption that a fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual .
(Murakami 1997, 350–351)

Asian and African Studies XV, 3 (2011), pp. 59–68
63 The rhizomatic logic which characterises postmodern narrative is governed by the
principle of “connection” and “heterogene ity,” which means that any point on the
rhizome may be linked to anything else:
As he began to understand language, Cinnamon asked me to tell him the story
again and again. I must have told it to him a hundred, two hundred, five
hundred times, but not just repeating the same thing every time. Whenever I told it to him, Cinnamon would ask me to tell him some other little story contained in the main story. He wanted to know about a different branch of
the same tree. I would follow the branch he asked for and tell him that part of
the story. And so the story grew and grew . In this way, the two of us went on
to create our own interlocking system of myths. (Murakami 1997, 297)
It reunites disconnected forces and impulses, which are not only distinct, but may
also originate from completely different orders. Moreover, the rhizome never
builds permanent structures, but perceives th e life of things as a continuous change,
as a permanently renewed “movement” aw ay from fixed forms and towards new
possibilities. The rhizome operates through variation, expansion, conquest or
interception.
A rhizomatic perspective does not allow for a complete separation of things.
Accordingly, Haruki Murakami perceives the world as being composed of organised bodies which, paradoxically, are reminiscent of “the body without organs,” as the foundation of forms of organisation:
“Who are you?” I asked. The faceless man handed me the flashlight as if
passing a baton. “I am the hollow man,” he said. Faceless face toward me, he
waited in the darkness for me to speak, but I could not find the right words.
(Murakami 1997, 384)
Haruki Murakami belongs to the generati on of writers of the 1980s, who intended
to capture the electrical and eclectic styl e of the life of Japan’s great cities.
(Strecher 1998b, 354) His postmodern fiction tries to express, in anti-mimetic fashion, the difficulty of perceiving and understanding the world, outlining a disquieting state of incompleteness that derives from the equally disquieting
characteristics of the surrounding universe. (Pavel 1989) Through his creation, which promotes the aesthetics of the fragment, the art of sight and the art of perception, of aural perception in partic ular, Haruki Murakami considers himself
to be, first and foremost, a Japanese writer:
The opinion that my books are not really Japanese seems to me to be very
shallow. I certainly think of myself as being a Japanese writer. I write with a

Rodica Frentiu: Contemporary Japane se Literature in Its Transition
64 different style and maybe with different materials, but I write in Japanese and
I’m writing for Japanese society and Japanese people. So I think people are wrong when they are always saying that my style is really mainly influenced
by Western literature. As I just said, at first I wanted to be an international
writer, but eventually I saw that I was nothing but a Japanese writer. But even in the beginning I wasn’t only borrowing Western styles and rules. I wanted to change Japanese literature from the inside, not the outside. So I basically
made up my own rules. (Gregory 2002, 115)
The evolution of his work in modernity could be compared to the trajectory of
Zenon from Elea’s arrow, which vibrates, flies yet it does not fly at all , in other
words, it hints at no objective destination.
Contemporary writers may invent new m eanings in the world and may create
new myths of completeness and determin ation. Speaking about his generation
colleagues, Banana Yoshimoto and Ry ū Murakami, Haruki Murakami (Gregory
2002, 116) appreciates the honesty they write with, their letting loose of any tormenting thoughts or emotions experienced about the new world of Japan today. This is also what preoccupies boku, the protagonist from Haruki Murakami’s
debut novel, Kaze no uta o kike (1979) ( Hear the Wind Sing! ). For him, writing
has become a way of life, attempting to salvage, through his own language, a strip of the real. However, sincerity in writing is by no means easy to achieve, not only
because of the desire to conceal the truth at times, but also given the difficulty of
reaching the linguistic accuracy necessary to reproduce precisely the authenticity
of living and feeling:
Still, it’s awfully hard to tell things honestly. The more honest I try to be, the
more the right words recede into the dist ance, I don’t mean to rationalize, but
at least this writing is my present best. There’s nothing more to say. And yet I
find myself thinking that if everything goes well, sometime way ahead, years,
maybe decades from now, I might discover at last that efforts have been my salvation. (Murakami 1994, 6)
In Haruki Murakami’s fiction, modernity relies on assuming the real and
exerting the rights of an unlimited subjectivity: “But you don’t belong to that world, sorry. The world you belong to is above that or below that.”
(Murakami
1997, 37) Selfhood has imposed itself vigorously, but has been contested as well, to the point of identifying with alterity . Postmodernism entails change, but also
seeks a synthetic, integrative vision of the world, which is momentarily marked by
uncertainty. In a context where history is threatened by the loss of meaning,
everything must be reconsidered with a view to providing memory with a new

Asian and African Studies XV, 3 (2011), pp. 59–68
65 self-image and fostering a new project of reconstruction and prospection. This is
the moment of a dialectics of the “eternal present,” of the relativity of knowledge, of lags, dissymmetry, the pluralism of interpretations, fragmentariness and
discontinuity, the de-ideologisation of discourses.
The characters from Haruki Murakami’s first novels seem, indeed, to lack
social commitment and the awareness of belonging to a place, but they evolve and turn from isolation and social irresponsibility to political and civic consciousness. Similar to boku from the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World ,
whose shadow was let loose, Haruki Murakami also seemed, at the time of his debut, to be much more detached from the cu lture and society that had created him:
I don’t write political novels––or at least when I write I don’t think of politics
except subconsciously. But I agree with you that all my books, even the early
ones, have all involved political factors; it’s just that these factors were never
treated directly. So these political issues were present in my books only in the background; even though it is undeniable that politics and economics have helped produce the circumstances that my characters find themselves in, I
have never been interested in writing about such things directly. (Gregory
2002, 117)
One more point about writing. And this will be the last. For me, writing is
extremely hard work. There are times when it takes me a whole month just to write one line. Other times I’ll write three days and nights straight through,
only to have it come out all wrong. Nonetheless, writing can also be fun.
Compared to the sheer difficulty of living, the process of attaching meanings to life is altogether clear sailing. (Murakami 1994, 9)
On attempting to surpass the traditional judgement that has always surrounded
terms like “serious” and “popular,” “mimesi s” and “formulaic” (“full of formulae,
clichés”), postmodernism illu strates the idea that the entire literature is just a
continuum between the two poles of i nventiveness and conventionalism: “Of
course, the mimetic and the formulaic re present two poles that literary works lie
somewhere between.” (Strecher 1998b, 356) Haruki Murakami plays a sort of
structuralist game with his readers, as he creates texts that are obviously
“formulaic,” although displaying goals and results that are truly “postmodern” in
nature.
Haruki Murakami also becomes postm odern by reshaping the concept of
“freedom,” which, he argues, is not “n atural” or “true” for human nature, but
represents an ideal, an intellectual construct.

Rodica Frentiu: Contemporary Japane se Literature in Its Transition
66 The predictability of a formula––“I’m very interested in structure,” Haruki
Murakami admits (Gregory 2002, 113)––suc h as the adventure novel, the SF novel
or the love story, juxtaposed with the unpredictability of the contemporary world, in other words, the infusion of mimetic in what is, by definition, non-mimetic literature may help Haruki Murakami’s fiction transcend, in a “postmodern”
direction, the aesthetic canons which de lineate “pure” from “consumerist” literary
creation: “(…) in this combination of the mimetic and the formulaic, and
consequently of ‘high art’ and ‘mass culture’, Murakami produces a quintessentially postmodern tone in hi s literature.” (Strecher 1998b, 370)
More exactly, the Japanese author’s writing does not fail to achieve “pure”
literature ( junbungaku ), but suspends the opposition, affixed at the beginning of
the twentieth century in Japan, betw een “high” and “mass” literature ( taishū
bungaku ).
Conveying meaning that is concealed between the lines, sometimes rather
difficult to decipher, and at other times displaying “story-less stories,” Haruki Murakami’s fiction fascinates because it ove rsteps the boundaries of the world we
call “real,” moving beyond into a surreal and even hyperreal world: “Murakami experiments with language, genre, realism, and fantasy, in order to explore the
outer limits of postmodern expression.” (Strecher 1998b, 356) Postmodern literature is characterised not only by a para doxical reclusion in the area of silence,
but also by complementary displacement into unidentified regions of the fantastic.
Haruki Murakami’s literary creation focuses upon the problem of achieving a
valid form of the self in a fictional worl d where it becomes ever harder for oneself
to arrive at self-definitions. The “normal” condition of the postmodern man, this
“weak being,” as Nietzsche might call him, is to be located in a world where
intensified communication (liberated either at the “technical” or at the “political” level) opens a gateway towards an act ual experience of individuality as
multiplicity. In this context, the Japan ese writer’s novel provides the imaginary
with a formal caution against the real, imparting it at the same time with the ambiguity of a double sign, both real and veri similar, since it is believed that “the
true is supposed to contain a germ of the universal or, to put it differently, an essence capable of fecundating by mere reproduction several orders of things
among which some differ by their remoteness and some by their fictitious character.” (Barthes 1987, 56) The mission of literature becomes thus to put on a mask and designate it at the same time. To create fiction is, in fact, a way of

Asian and African Studies XV, 3 (2011), pp. 59–68
67 eluding reality and especially of annulling the notion that reality is truth.
Consequently, fiction could also entail th e creation of an autonomous reality, after
the model of the real world and still diffe rent from the latter. The reference is
specific: it may be that of self-referentiality or of internal reference, as opposed to
external reference. Haruki Murakami’s fictional worlds replace the illusion of
knowing the reality “here” with the dreaming of another world, from “beyond.” No longer decorative or prudent, the huma nism of the postmodern age proposes a
different moral of the “joy of living.” The new humanism no longer loves man against his body, the spirit against its la nguage, values against facts, but speaks in
a sober and chaste tone about man and a bout spirit, about the way in which man
and spirit emerge through the movement whereby “the body becomes gesture,
language becomes creation, and coexiste nce becomes truth.” (Eco 1989, 272)
Lifted from the abyss in which thought seemed to soar gleefully above words,
the Japanese novel writing of the twentieth cen tury passed through all the stages of
gradual solidification: it was at first an object of sight (Yasunari Kawabata), then of action (Kenzabur ō Ōe) and, eventually, of crime (Yukio Mishima),
experiencing a new avatar today: absence (Haruki Murakami). In this last type of writing, characterised as “neutral” and also called “writing degree zero,” one may easily detect a tendency towards negation and the incapacity to fulfill it continuously, (See Barthes 1987, 52) as if, having attempted for an entire century to relocate its contours into a shape with no ancestry, literature would only be able
to find its purity in the absence of any sign, in white writing.
What does Haruki Murakami represent for contemporary Japanese prose? An
apathetic observer who over the years has b ecome an ever more active participant
in political and social life. A writer who has erased the border delineating the
“high” and the “pure,” traditionally characterising Japanese literature, and had made the “common” and the “ordinary” po ssible thematic “pretexts” for literary
creation in the novelistic genre. This does not mean, however, that Haruki Murakami only writes about quotidian experience. As a matter of fact, his performance resides in trying to grant ever y moment its price, in the hope that
there is always something “beyond” appear ances. This is not the extinction of a
tradition, but perhaps its rebirth: “Far from heralding the death-knell of Japanese culture, we might choose to view this me rely as a new chapter in the fascinating
story of Japan’s cultural evolution.” (Strecher 1998a, 69)

Rodica Frentiu: Contemporary Japane se Literature in Its Transition
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