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A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World (2008)

The Japan Foundation. A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2008: 151 pages

A little more than three years ago when Haruki Murakami’s thick novel Kafka on the Shore was released to both critical and popular acclaim, the grumbling of his fans grew almost as quickly as the novel raced up The New York Time’s bestseller’s list. A number of longtime fans seemingly felt that their hip, cool author was being discovered by the masses and their once clandestine literature was becoming popular fiction being read by everyone and their mom.

However, if one looks outside of the English-speaking world where their seems to be more debate whom is Murakami’s best translator, Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, or Philip Gabriel, instead of the quality of Murakami’s fiction, one will notice that Murakami is more than a author loved by a select few, but a phenomenon, the Haruki Phenomenon, in and of himself. It is with this thought in mind that the symposium titled “A Wild Haruki Chase: How the World Is Reading and Translating Murakami” was formulated by a number of Japanese professors at the University of Tokyo and Meiji Gakuin University and Murakami’s translators from four continents.

The essays within the book are a select few from the symposium, but they give the reader viewpoints on how Murakami, and especially his novel Norwegian Wood, is received in various countries. Concerning South Korea, Murakami’s translator Kim Choon Mie writes that Japanese literature was primarily limited world literature anthology collections before the appearance of Haruki Murakami because of the mutual feeling of antagonism shared between South Korea and Japan. Murakami’s literature has become so popular in fact that Kim considers knowledge of Murakami Haruki to be a prerequisite for understanding South Korean literature because his themes and writing style have been emulated so much that it borders plagiarism. Similarly, Ivan Sergeevich Logatchov, Murakami’s Japanese-Russian translator, states that Murakami has become so hip in Russia that young people prominently display their books to be sure that spectators are sure to see that they are reading Haruki Murakami and, like in South Korea, Murakami’s impact on young Russian writers has been considerable, and Murakami, the first widely translated Japanese writer in Russia has become the measuring stick that other Japanese writers, including Ryu Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, are measured against.

Besides themes of how Murakami is popular in Russia, South Korea, China, Taiwan, etc., the authors also attempt to tell why Murakami has become popular enough to be translated into over thirty languages. Their primary answer is that like Murakami’s protagonists, who live in an urban malaise fueled by a government who treats its citizens as a collective consumer group, mirrors the lives of citizens of other countries who have lost their ideals of being able to change their governments and to truly make an impact in this world. Instead they and we live in a world where materialist pursuits have come to represent individuality, individualities which represent nothing more than purchasing power.

With that said, A Wild Haruki Chase is a fine collection of essays touching on a number of subjects including globalization, postmodernism, and translation issues. While some essays seem a bit far-fetched, “Lu Xun and Murakami: A Genealogy of the Ah Q Image in East Asian Literature,” the volume represents a work of criticism that is open not only to Japanese literature scholars, but Murakami fans in general.