“No amount of work is going to make it any better. Murakami emphasizes that, technically and stylistically, Fuka-Eri’s “writing” is amateurish, incompetent.“First of all, look at this style,”says Komatsu, the editor who plucks the manuscript from the slush pile.
Indeed, we soon learn that she is actually unable to write she is severely dyslexic, and the manuscript was actually dictated to a friend, who surreptitiously entered it for the prize. Its author, Fuka-Eri-the pen name of Eriko Fukada-is a 17-year-old girl with no previous experience in writing. At the core of 1Q84 lies a novel-within-the-novel called Air Chrysalis, a short manuscript that is submitted to a literary contest. It is also, not coincidentally, a book about the writing and publishing of fiction.
Japan Today made the same argument in so many words, writing that Murakami’s success was owed to “the continued hegemony of American publishing interests who understand that English readers have little tolerance for the foreign.”ġQ84, Murakami’s biggest book, is an ideal text for confronting these questions, since its perspective is at once local-almost the entire story takes place in Tokyo-and cosmic-playing with questions about the fundamental nature of reality, and whether that reality is permanent or mutable.
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Rather than mastering the full resources and history of the Japanese language, the way Oe and Mishima did, the suggestion is that Murakami writes a version stripped for export. He’s created a place for himself in the international literary scene in a way that Yukio Mishima and myself were not able to.” The compliment barely conceals the implication that Murakami’s success abroad is owed precisely to his simple, or simplified, language. He is translated into foreign languages and is widely read, especially in America, England, and China. In a Paris Review interview, Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese novelist who won the Nobel Prize in 1994, made the point diplomatically, saying, “Murakami writes in a clear, simple Japanese style. Scott Fitzgerald, and he spent several years living in the United States.īut in a world literary ecosystem where the domination of the English language is seen as the source of many ills, Murakami’s very success in and with English inevitably becomes a point of criticism. He has translated a wide range of American writers into Japanese, from Raymond Carver to F. As the New York Times summarized it, “in Japan, the traditional literary critics regard his novels as un-Japanese and look askance at their Western influences, ranging from the writing style to the American cultural references.” Murakami’s interest in American culture and literature is indisputable. Indeed, the criticism leveled at Murakami by the Japanese literary establishment has been remarkably consistent. Yet in 2014, Murakami told an interviewer that he considers himself “a kind of outcast of the Japanese literary world,” an “ugly duckling” who has never been embraced by writers and critics. His work has been translated into 50 languages, and he is often named as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize. Murakami’s celebrity in his native country is almost matched by his popularity abroad. In 2009, when he published 1Q84, a huge novel in three parts, it immediately became one of the best-selling books in Japanese history, selling a million copies in just one month. But when she writes that “Japan’s best and brightest have turned their backs on literature,” there is a pointed and inevitable reflection on Murakami, who is by far the most popular novelist writing in Japan today. The name of Haruki Murakami does not appear in this passage or in Mizumura’s book at all. One hundred years from now, readers of those works will have no idea what it was like to live in the current Heisei period (starting in 1989) of Japan.” Like many other critics, Mizumura sees Americanization as a synonym for deracination, commodification, and dumbing-down: “Works of contemporary fiction tend to resemble global cultural goods, which, like Hollywood blockbuster films, do not require language-or translation-in the truest sense of the word.” “Representative works of today’s Japanese literature,” she writes, “often read like rehashes of American literature-ignoring not only the Japanese literary heritage but, more critically, the glaring fact that Japanese society and American society differ. In The Fall of Language in the Age of English, Minae Mizumura offers a harsh judgment on the state of Japanese literature.