See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/355198156

Canon Breeds Canon: Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic
Representation of Japan in the United States *

Article  in  Archiv Orientální · September 2021

DOI: 10.47979/aror.j.89.2.339-363

CITATIONS READS

0 271

1 author:

Jordi Serrano-Muñoz
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
23 PUBLICATIONS   6 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Jordi Serrano-Muñoz on 13 October 2021.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 ARCHIV ORIENTÁLNÍ 89, 2021 • 339
DOI: 10.47979/aror.j.89.2.339-363

Canon Breeds Canon: Murakami Haruki, World

Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation
of Japan in the United States*

Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

Abstract
In this article, I explore the relationship between the reproduction of hegemonic dis-
courses of national representation in the reception of literature in translation and pro-
cesses of canonization. I argue that World Literature as a paradigm hinders our efforts
to overcome the burdens of canonization. As a case study, I analyze the implications
of building and reproducing a canon of Japanese literature in translation in the United
States for the way Japan has been represented in public discourse in the last thirty
years. I will focus on the reception of Murakami Haruki as the contemporary represen-
tative of the canon of Japanese literature in translation. My goal is to examine how the
circumstances of Japanese literature in translation perpetuate mechanisms of canon-
ization in their engagement and legitimation of an ongoing logic of representation that
is non-confrontational with respect to agents in power. I aim to test the extent to which
studying the reception of East Asian literature in translation can help us promote a
broader discussion on the appropriateness of such frameworks in our understanding of
contemporary literary phenomena.

Keywords
Japanese literature | East Asian literature | canonization | world literature | translation

* Jordi Serrano-Muñoz (jordi@serranomunoz.com) is currently a guest researcher at the Colegio de Mex-

ico and an associate professor at the Open University of Catalonia and the University of Granada.
I would like to thank the editors and the anonymous peer-reviewers for their kind work and
excellent suggestions for improving my article. I would also like to thank my PhD supervi-
sor, Dr. Antonio Monegal, as the empirical analysis of this piece was conducted as part of my
doctoral dissertation.

ArOr – Issue 89.2 ISSN 0044-8699 © 2021 Oriental Institute (CAS), Prague

Serrano.indd 339 10.10.2021 8:08:36

 340 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

Introduction

In a topographic representation of literary relationships, the space one would

devote to describe the joints and clashes between canonization and market dy-
namics could appear as a rhizome: bonds come and go between the nodes in a
way that hints at correlation but cannot be elucidated. What comes first? Does
becoming a bestseller beget canonization? Does a book sell well because it has a
canonical nature? Does canonization equal success? And how can one measure
literary success? In a recent Literary Lab pamphlet, J. D. Porter used a huge
corpus of literary works to study whether the key element that makes a book
enter the canon was prestige (that is, recognition among specialists) or popu-
larity (in the case of her analysis, measured by the number of ratings on the
website Goodreads).1 Matthew L. Jockers, one of the founders of the Stanford
Literary Lab, started working in the late 2000s on a model for the identifica-
tion of linguistic and stylistic patterns that would foretell canonization (the
“canonizer” as he called it) using data science and text mining techniques. He
ended up instead writing a book with Jodie Archer proving through a series of
algorithms how the most recent commercially successful books share a high
degree of closeness to a set of common traits.2 These two efforts can be framed
as recent attempts to break down the relationship between canon and commer-
cial fame—in their case, using quantitative approaches that freshen up the de-
bate. Disentangling this relationship becomes a bit more complicated when we
add a third axis: translation. The number of works in translation has increased
in the last fifty years to a degree that has permanently changed the landscape
of literary phenomena. The advent of World Literature and the World Liter-
ary Space in contemporary discussions is mainly a reaction to this paradigm
of shifts and flows of literary influence brought about by the expansion of the
book trade. There are certainly many different ways of approaching this issue,
like gleams of light that each illuminate a portion of a huge canvas displayed in
a dark room. Michael Emmerich explored, for instance, the different changes
in editions and translations of the Genji Monogatari 源氏物語 and how they
belong to a process of canonization of this work into a national (and interna-
tional) classic.3 Sarah Brouillette, on the other hand, has studied the framing of

1
J. D. Porter, “Popularity/Prestige,” Literary Lab Pamphlet 17 (2018). Accessed on May 15, 2021.
https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet17.pdf.
2
Matthew L. Jockers and Jodie Archer, The Bestseller Code Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel (Lon-
don: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017).
3
Michael Emmerich, The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization and World Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013).

Serrano.indd 340 10.10.2021 8:08:38

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 341

postcolonial writers’ biographies as elements of marketability that fit within a

logic of what she calls “strategic exoticism.”4
The research objective of this piece is the exploration of how a critical read-
ing of the reception of literature in translation can help us to better understand
the role of hegemonic discourses of representation in the material structures
and processes of canonization. I selected a particular case study to explore
these issues. In this article, I am going to investigate how the reception of lit-
erature in translation by Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki 村上春樹 (Kyoto,
1949) can help us problematize canonization within the debates surrounding
World Literature and the World Literary Space. I argue that the reproduction of
hegemonic discourses of national representation from the reception of litera-
ture—particularly bestselling authors such as Murakami Haruki—fits right into
the dynamics of canonization within a World Literature paradigm.
Loved and despised by readers around the world, Murakami Haruki has been
the most popular Japanese author alive for over twenty-five years. Muraka-
mi’s relationship with Japan and the way it became represented in his work
veered from ideas of detachment and apathy that marked his literature dur-
ing the early stages of his career towards commitment and veiled social criti-
cism at the turn of the millennium. Murakami’s characters work hard across
all his texts in their search for meaning in a society desensitized by consumer-
ism and selective amnesia. They all have in common a need to establish mean-
ingful relationships outside the socioeconomic logic of late capitalism.5 While
the protagonists of his early works could find hedonistic and apathetic shelter
in the windfalls of Japan’s 1970s and 1980s economic bonanza, his post-1995
heroes are aware that change is needed to overcome their tribulations.6 Since
their discontent fails to morph into activism, private mediation appears to be
their only path to find peace and meaning in their lives. No other Japanese
author has aroused as much attention and discussion as Murakami does today.
His widespread popularity means that the moment his novels get out, they re-
ceive reviews in newspapers and magazines, a phenomenon that also pushes
scholars to analyze his work in the search for the key to his success and what
it represents for Japan and Japanese literature. Murakami’s fame has grown in

4

Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (London: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2007), 7.
5
Matthew Strecher, Dances With Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki
(Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies/University of Michigan, 2002), 4; Murakami Fu-
minobu, Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary Japanese Literature, 57.
6
Matthew Strecher, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami (Minneapolis: Minnesota Univer-
sity Press, 2014), 6.

Serrano.indd 341 10.10.2021 8:08:39

 342 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

parallel to the setting up of a new discursive paradigm where cultural exports

have a more significant mediating role.7
My decision to analyze a body of texts accounting for the reception of Mu-
rakami particularly in the United States is based on three main factors. First,
the United States still exerts a strong cultural influence over the Western world,
while hosting the most significant amount of Japan-related literature outside
of Japan. Moreover, it has had an important role in the global canonization of
Murakami, especially during the first half of his career in translation. Finally,
once Murakami became widely available in other languages, differences started
to appear that expose more clearly the material and discursive structures of his
process of canonization and the evolution of its relationship with the idea of Ja-
pan held in the West via the mediation of the US publishing ecosystem (editors,
translators, and reception) during the last thirty years. I use the terms “West”
and “Western” in this paper with some skepticism. I work with the premise that
“the West” emerges in the construction and reproduction of narratives regard-
ing World Literature as an acritical and indeterminate but operationally valid
identity that serves to bind a shared space of discursive interaction.
Choosing to analyze the national narrative of Japan offers an exceptional op-
portunity to enrich this study of the relationship between literature, discourse,
and hegemony with a test of resistance to the existence of “the West” as a co-
hesive discursive space that feeds on the canonization of so-called “peripheral”
literatures while including them in the project of World Literature. The sway of
projection of a so-called cohesive West, even when it is not explicitly assumed,
is ingrained in Pascale Casanova’s construction of the World Literary Space, a
point that other postcolonial authors have criticized before and that I will de-
velop later on. Japan occupies a singular position in a mechanism of identifying
the circuits of global literary transmission as parallel to those of hegemonic
reproduction of national identities in a system of center–periphery. In this
piece, I intend to explain how Japan’s non-Western/non-colonized identity in
a national narrative of identification can be grasped from the way Murakami’s
literature is received abroad. The elements from this narrative open up many
different debates. I will focus, however, on how these tropes relate to debates
over canonization and World Literature.
In my study, I first look at the way in which Murakami Haruki fits into a his-
tory of Japanese literature in translation. In the second part of my study, I ana-
lyze the reception of Murakami’s works in translation. My corpus is composed
of newspaper and magazine articles, academic journals, academic books, and

7
Iwabuchi Koichi, “Pop-culture Diplomacy in Japan: Soft Power, Nation Branding and the
Question of ‘International Cultural Exchange,’ ” 422.

Serrano.indd 342 10.10.2021 8:08:41

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 343

reviews by non-specialized readers. These are texts that meet two criteria: dis-
cussing Haruki Murakami at length and establishing a relationship between his
literature and the idea of Japan or the idea of World Literature. I call this body
“critical texts.” For the selection of academic texts, I have limited my scope to
representative monographs. I have filtered texts intended for wider audiences
according to a combination of wide-spanning market reach and a tradition of
featuring cultural criticism. My analysis is based on eighty-nine pieces pub-
lished between August 1985 and April 2021 in The New York Times, The Washing-
ton Post, The New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. The
New York Times provides the largest number of texts with a total of forty-eight
articles, followed by The Washington Post with twenty-five, The New Yorker with
ten, and The New York Review of Books and Los Angeles Times with four and three
pieces respectively. I will look at two things when analyzing these critical texts:
first, how reception and canonization are entangled in a dynamic of self-repro-
duction and justification. I want to expose how discourses of representation
emerging from reception correlate with processes of canonization of translated
literature. What is published is canonized to legitimate its worthiness, and in
this process, there are material and discursive structures at play, from editorial
decisions to literary interpretations put into circulation in print. The second el-
ement that I will extract from these texts is a study of the correlations between
how literature is articulated to extract discourses of national representative-
ness (in this case of Japan), and how this idea of representativeness emerges as
capital for the construction of value within the World Literature paradigm. By
combining both analyses, my objective is to take a look at how contemporary
literature in translation perpetuates certain logics of canonization within the
grammar of World Literature, and how these logics can be explored and studied
by paying closer attention to its reception rather than to the literary texts.

World Literature and the World Literary Space

The work of three authors has been hailed as representative of the present un-
derstanding of World Literature: Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and David
Damrosch. Casanova offers her idea of the World Literary Space as an arena of
literariness, a space and set of traits where literature can be, grow, and evolve
outside of a materially and politically contingent world. She defends, there-
fore, the notion that literary evolution has happened beyond national lines and
beyond political divisions, although, of course, it is not unaffected by them.8

8
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, xii.

Serrano.indd 343 10.10.2021 8:08:42

 344 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

Moretti also engaged with an understanding of World Literature as a cohesive

but intrinsically unequal system of internal dynamics that emulate global rela-
tions. In his seminal piece “Conjectures on World Literature,” Moretti argues
that the discussion should move beyond what is comparative literature or
world literature to focus instead on its methodological conundrum: how to do
comparative literature and how to approach World Literature.9 His suggestion
that scholars change the scale of the unit of analysis from the text to larger
objects (like tropes, devices, or networks) in what he called “distant reading”
sparked controversies that have cooled down with the years and with the natu-
ralization and the spread of tools for quantitative analysis in the humanities.
David Damrosch’s main thesis is that there is nothing intrinsic in a literary
work that provides it with ontological “World Literariness.” The inclusion of a
work within the paradigm of World Literature is instead set on its capacity to
move around different markets. A literary work, according to Damrosch, there-
fore becomes a part of World Literature when it is sold and translated. World
Literature is seen “not [as] a set canon of texts but [as] a mode of reading,”10 or
rather, a mode of putting books into circulation.
The rise and spread of translation practices is one of the main reasons why
World Literature is a topic of discussion at all. As Damrosch posits, it is in the
act of translating and moving around the translated book that it can acquire
world literariness. Translation practices and dynamics, however, are not free
from the power structures conditioning global literary phenomena. Emily Ap-
ter hailed the position of suspiciousness towards any universalistic aspiration
of World Literature based on the promise of boundless translation by discuss-
ing the matter of the “Untranslatable.”11 These are terms, concepts, or ideas
that resist untroubled translation, and which reveal the difficulties of aspiring
to a model of horizontal equivalence and substitutability. The act of translating
is, at the same time, an exercise of power: when a dominant culture decides to
translate, it is providing a work with cultural capital that may or may not be re-
lated to any other considerations of subjective quality. In a world where there
is a tendency for corporate concentration, the decisions made by a narrower
cohort of publishing firms, the majority of them located in the Global North,
have a consequential role in shaping not only what is read, but also how, when,
and where it is read.
This is one of the main theses of Sarah Brouillette in her study of the ma-
terial structures of World Literature as a system of market dynamics. In her
9
Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in Distant Reading, edited by Franco
Moretti (Verso, 2013), 43–62.
10
David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 281.
11
Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013).

Serrano.indd 344 10.10.2021 8:08:43

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 345

view, what matters the most is not that World Literature is a business or that
it commodifies literary works, but that it is a system based on unequal rela-
tionships that naturalize oppressive and unfair international power structures.
She suggests that merely literary criticisms, like those offered by Apter when
pointing at the Untranslatable as the alleged weak link of World Literature,
fail to properly address neoliberal logics.12 Pieter Vermeulen agrees with this
view, noting that Apter’s criticism, while still valid, falls a bit short as “it may
underestimate the machine it rages against: it undervalues the power of con-
temporary capital to convert singularities into marketable differences, and to
design niche markets for experiences that may initially seem too insignificant
to count.”13 I believe discussing the reception and construction of discourses of
representation can be included within this critical approach to the structures
of World Literature as a machine that reproduces via legitimation relationships
based on inequality between different partners.
How does reception fit into these debates addressing canonization and
World Literature? I argue that the discourses of national representation re-
flected in critical texts engage with processes of canonization and a paradigm
of World Literature as a material structure that reproduce unequal relation-
ships. In the case of Japanese literature in translation, by looking at how Japan
is described from the reception of the literature of Murakami, I suggest two
outcomes. First, discourses of national representation legitimate publishing de-
cisions and perpetuate the logics of canonization. A circular logic is established
in which translation creates a canon, the canon is considered representative
of a nation, and reception extracts national representation from the translat-
ed, now canonized works, ensuring prospective translations’ place within this
mechanism. Second, discourses of national representation are inscribed within
a logic of center–periphery where the West (that is, the center) dictates certain
patterns of description out of literary interpretation that are based on a gram-
mar of domination and inequality. I will develop the details of this discourse
of representation and how it engages with questions of epistemic inequality in
my analysis.

12
Sarah Brouillette, “World Literature and Market Dynamics,” in Institutions of World Literature:
Writing, Translation, Markets, edited by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen (London and
New York: Routledge, 2015), 97.
13
Pieter Vermeulen, “On World Literary Reading,” in Institutions of World Literature: Writing,
Translation, Markets, edited by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen (London and New York:
Routledge, 2015), 80.

Serrano.indd 345 10.10.2021 8:08:44

 346 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

Murakami Haruki within the history of Japanese literature

in translation

To properly understand the context surrounding the reception of Murakami Ha-

ruki, the creation of discourses of representation, and how this relates to the log-
ics of World Literature and canonization, it is worth giving a brief tour of the his-
tory of Japanese literature in translation and the role of the US publishing ecosys-
tem. According to Edward Fowler’s exhaustive analysis of the history of Japanese
literature in translation after the war, the appearance in the market and relative
success of authors like Kawabata Yasunari 川端康成 (1899–1972), Mishima Yukio
三島由紀夫 (1925–1970), and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō 谷崎潤一郎 (1886–1965) are
the result of a mix of serendipity and historical convenience.14 The US literary
market has traditionally granted little room to non-Western works in transla-
tion and has conventionally left their circulation to small publishers with little
reach in terms of audience. The case of Japanese literature in translation is dif-
ferent, however. To study the success and popularity of Japanese literature in
translation, one must not downplay the importance of a powerful editor’s tastes.
In this case, Harold Strauss (1907–1975), editor-in-chief of Knopf from 1942 to
1966, knew Japanese, had visited the country, and was friends with the most im-
portant Japanologists of the time—people like Ivan Morris (1925–1976), Donald
Keene (1922–2019), or Edward Seidensticker (1921–2007). During his time in of-
fice, Strauss used his influence and power to push for the translation of contem-
porary Japanese authors into English. Fowler argues that this canonized corpus
reinforced through the themes and personality of these writers the hegemonic
national narrative of a perceived-as-exotic, pre-modern Japan whose depolitici-
zation would ease the way for the transition of the Japanese from enemy to ally.15
Larry Walker’s work on the so-called Knopf Program, which spanned from
1955 to 1977 and introduced to the market thirty-four books in hardcover, is
an outstanding piece of insight into the inner workings behind the process of
conducting such a project. He explores the habitus of editors, translators, and
authors in creating certain market logics that defined the establishment of Jap-
anese literature abroad. Walker disagrees with Fowler, however, in assessing
Strauss’s motivations. He claims that there is no evidence in the editor’s per-
sonal and professional archives when it comes to the process of selecting and
editing a book that has exoticization as a prime objective.16 The program was a
14
Edward Fowler, “Rendering Words, Traversing Cultures: On the Art and Politics of Translat-
ing Modern Japanese Fiction,” Journal of Japanese Studies 18, no 1 (1992): 1–44.
15
Ibid., 3.
16
Larry Walker, Unbinding the Japanese Novel in English Translation: The Alfred A. Knopf Program,
1955–1917,” PhD Thesis (University of Helsinki, 2015), 110.

Serrano.indd 346 10.10.2021 8:08:45

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 347

security and economic asset for the US at the time, but it would be overstating
its agency to say that it fully represented American views on foreign policy to-
ward Japan, which were more complex and multifaceted.17 Both authors never-
theless agree on the impact of Knopf’s program on shaping academic curricula
(many of the translators were or would become scholars of Japanese) and in
Strauss’s ability to commission reviews in major newspapers to promote his
books and generate public discussion.
The outcome of what Roland Kelts calls the “third wave of Japanophilia” re-
sulted in the largest foreign engagement with Japan on record.18 Murakami fits
right into this process: he first appeared in translation at the end of the 1980s,
and throughout his prolific career he has been riding the wave of canonization
as the most popular of contemporary Japanese novelists of the past thirty years.
In his book Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, David Karashima ex-
plores the behind-the-scenes story of how Murakami got published and acquired
fame in English up until 1998, through interviews and archival work. His work
catalogues a similar process to that described by Fowler and Walker, in which
a mix of individual preference, serendipitous timing, and institutional backing
propelled Murakami’s fame beyond initial expectations. As acknowledged by
Elmer Luke, Murakami’s editor at Kodansha International (the first publishing
house for his works in English), his works appeared in translation at the best pos-
sible moment, just before the burst of the economic bubble and with the yen in a
very strong position. Kodansha was at that time flush with money, but ten years
later it would have been more difficult to promote an unknown author to the
US market.19 Luke’s connections with the press in New York eased the way for a
warm reception of Murakami’s early novels in the US.20 The decision by The New
Yorker to start publishing his short stories also greatly boosted Murakami’s cul-
tural capital.21 During his stay in Princeton in 1991, Murakami attended a panel
for the Association of Asian Studies that became, according to one of his later
translators, Ted Goosen, a turning point for his position in Japanese literary stud-
ies.22 Material and discursive structures were at play early on in his rapid canon-
ization as a writer of so-called World Literature.
The turn of the century saw a relative democratization of publishing houses
engaging with Japanese literature in translation. In a moment of business con-

17
Ibid., 121.
18
Roland Kelts, Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U. S. (New York: St. Martin
Press, 2006), 179.
19
David Karashima, Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, 60.
20
Ibid., 63.
21
Ibid., 198.
22
Ibid., 97.

Serrano.indd 347 10.10.2021 8:08:46

 348 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

glomeration, independent firms like Tilted Axis or New Directions attempted to

release onto the market alternative contemporary Japanese writers. This pro-
cess was possible thanks to the multiplication of translators from Japanese, an
inheritance from the first postwar translator-Japanologists who worked with
Knopf and who occupied new departments in different universities across the
US. Best-selling authors like Murakami, however, still sign for big firms. Ac-
cording to Gisèle Sapiro, this phenomenon is not unique to Murakami but actu-
ally quite common in the contemporary publishing world, where small firms
make risky bets and big publishing houses later reap the benefits and launch
authors into fame.23 By material means, Murakami reached other Western mar-
kets ready to be canonized, stewarded by some of the best editors and transla-
tors and covered by the media. The process, however, is not that straightfor-
ward. While some publishing houses in Europe followed the criteria established
in the US, hence enhancing its canonization powers, others decided to ap-
proach Murakami using their own standards. This division revealed in turn the
dimension of translation practices in the process of canonization. Translations
into English have been heavily edited in terms of language and even content,
with entire passages of some of his novels cut out. The reasoning behind these
decisions (made by both Kodansha International and Knopf, and suggested or
agreed upon by Murakami’s different translators) is that it would make his nov-
els more appealing in terms of familiarity and especially the pacing of the nar-
ration for Western readers.24 As the English translations were considered he-
gemonic,25 translations into other languages that were made from the English
blueprint preserved this editorial filter, re-domesticating the original work and
transmitting the changes made to appeal to the US reader as if they were part
of the source material. The debate surrounding the appropriateness of these
decisions is engaging but it extends beyond the scope of this paper. Zielinska-
Elliott points out how today’s conditions for the easy exchange of points of
view and versions between translators have made it easier to escape from the
English hegemonic model and enter into a conversation that creates in turn a
more collective standard.26
It is fitting to point out that even for those cases in which translations were
made from the original in Japanese and therefore escaped editing in English,
Murakami’s fame and popularity was not seen as being too severely affected. As
a matter of fact, it is because editions in multiple languages have proliferated

23
Ibid., 150.
24
Ibid., 54.
25
Anna Zielinska-Elliott, “No Translator is an Island,” 13.
26
Ibid., 19.

Serrano.indd 348 10.10.2021 8:08:46

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 349

that he has been able to reach a truly global audience. English editions were
essential for Murakami’s success and entry into the canon, but not necessarily
for his endurance there. For Zielinska-Elliott, this has to do precisely with Mu-
rakami’s embedding of Japanese references in a way that is identifiable but not
nationally exclusive: “If these qualities are not always reflected in the English
versions of his work, that has more to do with translatorial and editorial ap-
proaches than with the character of the original Japanese.”27 Recently, English
translations have moved towards cultural accuracy and edits have become less
common. In any case, either through domestication or faithful rendering, de-
spite Murakami’s constant labeling as a World Literature author, the fact that
Japan is seen, read, and interpreted in his literature remains an important ele-
ment of his process of canonization. It becomes important, therefore, to un-
derstand how Japan has been described in the country and the market that
launched Murakami to fame and which is still its main source of cultural clout.

Reproducing Japan from Murakami Haruki

I move on to focus on the empirical part of this work’s main research objective:
the study of the relationship between discourses of representation that emerge
from the reception of Murakami’s literature in translation and questions of
canonization within the debates surrounding World Literature. I organize my
interpretation around the description and development in the United States of
tropes, common associations, and questions that arise from conflicting read-
ings in texts about Murakami Haruki, contemporary Japanese literature, and
Japan. I illustrate, justify, and legitimate these themes through a selection of
the most suitable quotes extracted from the selected texts.
Murakami is presented as a bestselling author, first one of the most and then
the most popular writer in Japan, from the first article and throughout all the
rest. This serves the function of emphasizing his work’s representativeness and
to a point auctoritas as a gateway to und erstand the depicted reality—be it Japa-
nese or, as is the case in Murakami, also a greater global contemporary identity
or sensibility, 28 as he “appeals to a vast number of readers around the world.”29
These appraisals, more common at the beginning of his success, allow many
pieces to take the chance to discuss the state of Japanese literature. Regardless
of the place or time of the text’s publication, the central points of the debate are

27
Ibid., 19.
28
David L. Ulin, “Book Review: ‘1Q84’ by Haruki Murakami.”
29
Christian Caryl, “Gods of the Mall.”

Serrano.indd 349 10.10.2021 8:08:47

 350 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

the same. Murakami is constantly associated with what is considered a change

of paradigm in Japanese letters: the replacement of, and even break in style
from, the postwar generation of authors (Mishima, Kawabata, and even Ōe). He
is portrayed as leading this generational replacement along with other best-
selling authors like Hiromi Kawakami 川上 弘美(*1958), Murakami Ryū 村上
龍 (*1952, no relation), and Yoshimoto Banana 吉本 ばなな (*1964). Elisabeth
Bumiller called them “The Japanese Brat Pack,”30 a nickname popular during
the early 1990s.31
This fame is also commonly attributed to his popularity among younger
generations, a consideration that seems to hint at lasting representativeness.
Although taste and approval in youth may change with age, desires and pref-
erences for new generations are indicative of changes and rifts in society. A
profiling exercise of his readership based on what the article authors believe
leaves us with an image of the Japanese youth as urban, modern, predominant-
ly white-collar, and alienated from and dissatisfied with social conventions:

More recent books are populated with introverts and social outsiders, the kind
of character with whom an alienated younger generation of Japanese can in-
creasingly identify.32

A lot of people are quite lonely […] In Japan he [Murakami] serves as a father fig-
ure to young readers […] a lot of young Japanese don’t have close relationships
with their father figures.33

The great Japanese author Haruki Murakami grew famous writing about the
tender melancholy of youth. (“Norwegian Wood” made him so recognizable in
Japan that he left.)34

Along the same lines and based on this consideration, the fiction of Mu-
rakami Haruki is treated as a mirror of the Japan of his times. It is an urban and
cosmopolitan country, a mix of new and old, a postmodern hub where cultural
references from all over the world merge and coexist: “Murakami echoes the
state of mind of the ordinary Japanese, caught between a fading old world and
a new one still being invented.”35 Many of these articles are published along

30
Elizabeth Bumiller, “Japan’s Fiction Turns a Page.”
31
T. R. Reid, “Japan’s Brat Pack”; Bruce Sterling, “Down a High-Tech Rabbit Hole.”
32
Todd Zaun, “Tokyo Tales Onstage.”
33
Roland Kelts quoted in Julia Carpenter, “Haruki Murakami’s Advice Column…”
34
Charles Finch, “Haruki Murakami Turns His Gaze Toward Middle Age.”
35
Alan Ryan, “Wild and Woolly.”

Serrano.indd 350 10.10.2021 8:08:47

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 351

with pictures of Tokyo and other urban landscapes, reinforcing this idea that
Murakami’s literature holds up a mirror to cosmopolitan contemporary Japan.
The New York Times website combined Sam Anderson’s travel story, for which
he travelled to Tokyo to interview Murakami, with an interactive piece with
scenes and settings of Tokyo. These are accompanied by short audio clips in
which Anderson explains how these scenarios are linked to Murakami’s life and
work. These pictures include the Jingu Stadium (where he reportedly had the
epiphany that led him to become a novelist), a Denny’s franchise restaurant,
a Prada store in Aoyama, the luxurious Hotel Okura, or a Nakamuraya Café in
Shinjuku.36 Kim Choon Mie, one of Murakami’s translators into Korean, and
Sato Koji, deputy director of the Japan Foundation, also endorse this image of
Japan (and other modern countries) as defined by consumerism.37
Japan transitions throughout these texts from being considered a politi-
cized entity throughout the first half of the twentieth century to becoming a
country solely understood as the paradigmatic model of late-capitalist society
during the 1990s. The placement of Japan in a contemporary global landscape is
marked by the tension between internationalist and particularist approaches.
Tokyo becomes a synecdoche for the whole of Japan. The city is described as
a supposed melting pot of East and West and a hyper-technological city that
works as a window display for consumerist attitudes: “The melancholy soufflé
Murakami whips up in these pages is decidedly masculine, a rainy Tokyo of un-
faithful women, neat single malt, stray cats, cool cars and classic jazz played on
hifi setups like the one described in dudeular detail.”38 Tokyo is introduced as a
“multinational location for the postmodern experience,”39 a city that we are re-
minded is part of the global village. We are invited to approach Tokyo—and, by
extension, Japan—through the elements it has in common with our own urban,
cultural, and contemporary daily experience instead of trying to shoehorn in
uniqueness and exclusivity as has been the convention for decades.
Consumer goods and industrial imagery are consubstantially associated with
Japan. The capital is presented as an ambivalent place, “a disconcerting space”
as Janice Nimura puts it,40 “more international than specifically Japanese,”41 ex-
changeable for any other modern megalopolis like London or New York. This
consideration strengthens the argument in favor of presenting Japan as part of
the global village: “If it weren’t for the author’s name, and our awareness that

36
“Murakami’s Tokyo.”
37
Kay Yokota, A Wild Haruki Chase, 36.
38
Jay Fielden, “News From Murakami.”
39
Matthew Strecher, Haruki Murakami: Challenging Authors, 87.
40
Janice Nimura, “Rubber Souls.”
41
Janice Nimura, “Separate Souls.”

Serrano.indd 351 10.10.2021 8:08:47

 352 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

we’re reading a work translated from the Japanese, it might never occur to us
that the action takes place in Japan.”42
There are no claims of uniqueness in the landscape exhibited by Muraka-
mi. His international success is attributed precisely to this ambiguity of space
which allows for the action and characters to be effectively replaced by indi-
viduals living in any other metropolis of the world with the same empathic
force. Murakami has claimed on different occasions that he writes about Japan
and the Japanese, so the fact that his fiction pulls strings in many different
countries is not his explicit will but most probably a consequence of describing
life in a globalized society. Ambiguous or not, there is a consensus on claiming
that Murakami’s settings are placed in Japan, a space that emerges with a need
for redefinition.
Despite this representativeness and perhaps due to it, Murakami is depicted
as a constant critic of the late-capitalist model. His characters are always de-
scribed as regular everyday Japanese who function within this system but are
openly dissatisfied with it. This portrayal makes the heroes appear estranged,
“adrift in a postmodern, postatomic world,” wounded by a sense of “displace-
ment and dislocation,” where “identities are provisional,” as Michiko Kaku-
tani describes it.43 Murakami’s individuals are framed as being excluded from
a society described as marked by a strict group mentality44 that entraps them
and from which many people dream of breaking out: “unremarkable men, less
driven by the ethic to succeed and less enmeshed in the powerful webs of fam-
ily and business and community than most Japanese,” 45 a blatant renunciation
of the frenetic, male-dominated ethos of modern Japan.”46
The discontent of Murakami’s characters fails to morph into activism and
remains a search for individual mediation. This social model is based on the
sacrifice of self-determination by trading it for the false sense of empowerment
and security induced by indulgence in conspicuous consumerism. Change only
happens from within and on the level of the individual. The sense of communi-
ty, meanwhile, is lost in the exchange. In his work Murakami Haruki: the Simula-
crum in Contemporary Japanese Culture, Michael Seats believes Murakami’s quest
is not to create a renewed contemporary Japanese identity, but to criticize mo-
dernity as a process that remains incomplete in Japan. Japan emerges in this
text with a set of already common associations, most of them related to the idea
of the late-capitalist country in crisis that suits Seat’s argument of social criti-
42
Caryl, “Gods of the Mall.”
43
Michiko Kakutani, “Worlds Where Anything Normal Would Seem Bizarre.”
44
Tim Parks, “The Charms of Loneliness.”
45
Jay McIerney, “Roll over Basho.”
46
Jamie James, “East Meets West.”

Serrano.indd 352 10.10.2021 8:08:48

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 353

cism. Japan is already described in the introduction as “the most information-

alized and mediatized of post-industrial societies,”47 an idea that is reinforced
further into the book by the depiction of the country as “the affirmation of
late-capitalist orthodoxies of consumption” and “the complete ascendancy of
systems of social control based on technology, information and irredeemably
corrupt political practices.”48
This resistance to social conventions, even if only from the personal point
of view, is greeted with surprise in the articles. The idea of Japan functioning as
if it possessed a hive mentality has been rooted in the national narrative since
the Pacific War. A reading that subverts this order is therefore accepted with
reluctance. It is unclear whether the target of this criticism is the economic
system itself or the social model it produces. Any attempt to pull Japan and the
Japanese closer to ideals of individualism would consciously or unconsciously
be taken up by hegemonic discourses as a triumph of Western ideals, especially
US-centered narratives of Cold War victory. A critique of the capitalist recipe
for societal configuration, however, fails to be categorized in the vacuum pro-
duced by the alleged defeat of communism. In the end, these depictions seem to
boil down to the idea that, for now at least, individuals may complain, but the
system regrettably prevails.
This exercise of criticism is one of the main points sustained throughout the
national narrative. Japan is defined as a country in crisis, haunted by mistakes
past and present, where the Japanese try to look for a new identity that would
escape the disaffecting consequences of late capitalism. Most authors translate
Murakami’s acceptance by young readers into an expression of the desire by fu-
ture generations of Japanese to achieve a greater degree of individuality, bend-
ing the frame without formally breaking it. The effects of the Japanese financial
crisis in the country became more evident as the years passed. The number of
texts that identified social criticism in Murakami’s plots and style increased
concurrently. This change is particularly evident after the events of 1995 and
the publication of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Underground, and after the quake.
The shift is meaningful. Murakami goes from representing Japan through
his fiction to critically commenting on it. Ian Buruma’s “Becoming Japanese,”
written in 1996, studies Murakami’s process of exploration and reencountering
Japan, to conclude:

His political engagement would probably enrich his fiction. For he can look at
Japan from the inside, and he also knows what it looks like from the outside. He

47
Michael Seats. Murakami Haruki – The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture, xi.
48
Ibid., 117.

Serrano.indd 353 10.10.2021 8:08:48

 354 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

is detached from Japanese society, yet committed to it. He can fix a cool, dry gaze
on his wet native soil. The time for escaping is over. He is closer now to where
he came from.49

Murakami’s literature expresses, according to this narrative, a generational

sense of disapproval of social conventions while revealing aspects of what Eliza-
beth Ward calls the Japanese “dark society” or “parallel wastelands.”50 In another
piece, Buruma labels this state of crisis “the Japanese malaise.”51 From the start
of the new century, Japan appears in the texts as a lost nation ashamed of its con-
sumerist excesses. This interpretation holds weight precisely because Murakami
himself supports it. If 1995 was the beginning of his shift towards commitment,
I would like to highlight how seminal the year 2011 was for the establishment
of Murakami as a social commentator.52 In March, the Tōhoku natural disaster
and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi meltdown deepened the breach that had been
opened fifteen years before and emphasized the nation’s sense of generational
crisis. Murakami, who spent the year abroad promoting the translation of 1Q84,
openly attacked the Japanese system. This entity is built discursively as a loose
signifier of everything that seems to go wrong with Japan: an unapologetic gov-
ernment, big corporations and their uncontested power, and the institutional
promotion of a culture of living only to work and consume.
Murakami’s criticism positively shocked his adversaries in the Japanese
old guard, made foreign scholars reconsider their definitions of intellectually
committed Japanese literature, and justified a political and national reading
of his work by anyone who was commenting on it. Just four months later,
Sam Anderson went to Japan to write a long piece for The New York Times on
Murakami, 1Q84, and Japan after the crisis. When asked about his kinship with
Orwell, he replied: “I guess we have a common feeling against the system.”
When questioned about his statement above, Murakami’s answer contained
the same message he had shared back then:

I think many Japanese people think that this is a turning point for our country.
[…] After 1945, we have been working so hard and getting rich. But that kind
of thing doesn’t continue anymore. We have to change our values. We have to
think about how we can get happy. It’s not about money. It’s not about effi-
ciency. It’s about discipline and purpose. What I wanted to say is what I’ve been

49
Ian Buruma, “Becoming Japanese.”
50
Elizabeth Ward, “The Long Sayonara.”
51
Buruma, “The Japanese Malaise.”
52
Deborah Treisman, “The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami”; David L. Ulin, “Review:
Haruki Murakami’s ‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki’ paints haunting picture.”

Serrano.indd 354 10.10.2021 8:08:48

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 355

saying since 1968: we have to change the system. I think this is a time when we
have to be idealistic again.53

Japan emerges from this discourse as an urban, late-capitalist country in ex-

istential crisis, populated by a generation of Japanese more and more openly
dissatisfied with the way things have been imposed on them. This generation’s
discontent identifies a systemic structure that impedes the creation and nurtur-
ing of healthy social and emotional dynamics outside the logic of neoliberalism.
Murakami’s characters establish themselves on the margins of such a society to
test their borders and explore the challenges of personal and discrete resistance.
So far, these are the fundamental aspects of Murakami’s oeuvre that have
found agreement across authors, sources, and countries. I move on now to a
discussion of conflicting aspects and debates that produce disagreement among
reporters. The first and most complex subject is the way authors try to frame
originally Western cultural references into the national narrative of Japan. The
schism appears when determining the cultural ownership of these elements.
This decision reveals a lasting conflict between defining cultural globalization
as actual Westernization and trying to restrict cultural affinities to national
particularism. There are two streams of interpretation with respect to this mat-
ter. The first insists on the foreignness of Western cultural references in the
context of Japanese society. Authors like Mitgang or Nimura believe Murakami
borrows these references and uses them to appeal to US audiences through
the familiar and Japanese audiences through the exotic. They usually refer to
Murakami’s role as a translator of US novelists (mostly Raymond Carver and
Raymond Chandler) as one of the main reasons for the inclusion of such refer-
ences, suggesting they would otherwise be alien to Japan. 54
Murakami actively disdains the national naturalization of cultural refer-
ences. When he was asked in a recent interview by The New York Times whether
he believed The Great Gatsby could be interpreted as a tale about the limits of
the so-called “American dream,” he replied by defending the idea that Scott
Fitzgerald’s novel is

a book about a dream—and how people behave when the dream is broken. This
is a very important theme for me. I don’t think of it as necessarily the American
dream, but rather a young man’s dream, a dream in general.55

53
Sam Anderson, “The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami.”
54
Herbert Mitgang, “Looking for America or is it Japan?”; “Pronouncements, Critiques, Catcalls
and Plaudits.”
55
Sarah Lyall, “Haruki Murakami Says He Doesn’t Dream. He Writes.”

Serrano.indd 355 10.10.2021 8:08:49

 356 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

The second group of authors defies foreignness and is closer to Murakami’s

interpretation of the role of popular culture in Japan. Instead of naturaliza-
tion, they defend a model of assimilation articulated in the shape of the hybrid
country. Cultural references still bear a label of origin as “Western” or “Japa-
nese,” but their presence is thought of as the result of a combination of differ-
ent sources, which are entwined but distinguishable from each other. Christian
Caryl asserts that “no other non-Western culture has endured and embraced
Western-style modernization for as long and as deeply as Japan”56 and Matthew
Strecher believes that “the reason Murakami has done so well in and out of
Japan is the fact that he has brought Japan up to date, offering an alternative
picture of Japanese culture that shows how one can affect foreign cultural icons
and still be ‘Japanese.’”57 In The Music of Words, Jay Rubin, one of Murakami’s
translators, argues that the country has been permeated by foreign references
for decades already, so it should not be surprising if Murakami reflects this
reality with ease in his fiction: “Murakami has been called the first writer com-
pletely at home with the elements of American popular culture that permeate
present-day Japan.”58
In the debate over cultural belonging, Rebecca Suter is quick to label US or
Western cultural references as superficially alien to Japanese society but con-
cedes that they possess a familiarity that can be understood as relative inte-
gration. Western cultural references are present in everyday Japan, and while
their status is apparently recognized as non-native by Japanese, their pres-
ence is not perceived as exotic but is described instead as friendly and part of
a common custom. For Suter, it is precisely this middle state between foreign
and indigenous that makes Western cultural references a powerful tool to
define and redefine contemporary Japanese identity through estrangement.59
These authors contribute with these readings to the prevalent use of Japan to
remodel and re-signify foreign ideas in order to legitimize their appropria-
tion.
There is consensus on indicating the absence of traditional Japanese fea-
tures in Murakami’s display of his country regardless of whether or not jour-
nalists consider originally Western elements to belong to contemporary Japan.
Murakami’s explicit framing of his literary settings and characters as Japanese
is treated with disdain and skepticism. The network of references that consti-
tute the cultural environment is declared to be not conventionally Japanese

56
Christian Caryl, “Gods of the Mall.”
57
Matthew Strecher, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle: A Reader’s Guide, 83.
58
Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, 17.
59
Rebecca Suter, The Japanization of Modernity, 133–39.

Serrano.indd 356 10.10.2021 8:08:49

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 357

because it fails to meet the expectations Western readers have of what has been
Japanese:

In these books, there are no shoguns, no tea ceremonies, no hara-kiri. The sto-
ries and novel excerpts here deal with the daily stuff of today’s Japan.60

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. Of his generation […] he is the most fa-
mous, and perhaps the most important, Japanese writer. Yet there is something
curious about his work: the almost complete absence of references to Japanese
culture. Murakami’s characters eat steaks, pizzas, or pasta. They listen to Ella
Fitzgerald or Rossini.61

This interpretation regarding the usage of cultural references echoes two

of the most prevalent tropes employed when describing Japan, also present
when discussing Murakami: the tension between old and new and the mix of
East and West. Cultural references present in Murakami are both “new” (icons
of popular culture and consumerist behavior) and “Western” (independently
of whether they have been integrated or not). The failure to meet expectations
is not translated into a rejection of the new setting and definitions as not Japa-
nese. In the end, Murakami’s Japan may not be traditional, but it is approached
and understood using very similar conventional temporal and spatial tropes.
This debate feeds the discussion of the next two major conflicts: the percep-
tion of Murakami as culturally Japanese, and whether Japan is a unique country
or part of the global village. Murakami’s nationality is never openly contested,
and he constantly reaffirms in interviews his identity as Japanese: “I don’t want
to write about foreigners in foreign countries. I want to write about us. I want
to write about Japan, about our life here.”62 These texts reflect, however, a hesi-
tation when it comes to defining the level of affinity and “Japaneseness” of
Murakami. For instance, some authors either separate him from or frame him
ambiguously within the literary canon when compared to former generations
of Japanese writers. 63 In some other cases, the task of questioning his “Japane-
seness” is attributed to and to an extent legitimized by external sources, mainly
from within the Japanese literary establishment. Some authors take for granted
reported doubts and assume that there are actually grounds to hold suspicions,
regardless of how undescribed they might be, instead of trying to define “be-

60
T. R. Reid, “Japan’s Brat Pack.”
61
Ian Buruma, “Becoming Japanese.”
62
Tim Parks, “The Charms of Loneliness.”
63
John Updike, “Subconscious Tunnels.”

Serrano.indd 357 10.10.2021 8:08:49

 358 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

ing Japanese” and then justifying their hesitation in applying that definition to
Murakami.
Murakami’s “Japaneseness” is constantly contested precisely by the virtual
impossibility of properly defining such a label without falling into a question-
able and at this point hardly tenable sense of cultural particularism. If “Japane-
seness” has proven to be a term that cannot be centered exclusively on traits
that are considered native to Japan—regardless of whether this perception
would be accurate following a more critical study of their nature and origin—
what is it exactly? Again, authors seem to have trouble defending a stable and
consistent idea of Japan that would be compatible with their place in a global-
ized world where the transfer of cultural influences has been established as a
multidirectional process of exchange. On this point, Strecher says:

Part of the reason for this lies in his fondness for images of popular culture fa-
miliar to the Western world […] but does this make Murakami “un-Japanese”? Is
it really fair to say that these images, though they originate in Euro-American
culture (primarily American) have not become Japanese in the sense of being
internalized by the Japanese by now?64

In those instances in which they stress the influence of US literature on Mu-

rakami’s style, suggesting that he is a pupil of Western education, authors infer
that cultural endogamy and autarchy are the only true ways to identify the
Japanese artist. At the very least, they advocate that there are limits to the
foreign influence that a particular national identity can endure before being
engulfed by it. Where these limits lie and how to measure the proposed purity
in both means and content is an uncomfortable step that authors avoid mak-
ing, most probably because it is impossible to complete. Japan’s particularism
and uniqueness seem indefensible, and perhaps more importantly, it appears
time and again to be practically undefinable. However, that does not stop many
authors from claiming and insisting on its existence.
This is not a unanimous position. Many authors believe that Murakami’s use
of ambiguous cultural landscapes is precisely what makes his novels so close to
a contemporary rendition of Japan. Some authors make an effort to highlight
the point that props and scenarios are just a carcass, a theatrical setting that is
contingent on the historical moment in which the work is set. These authors
defend the idea that one should look for underlying themes and marks of style
to find a presumably Japanese sensibility. Murakami’s approach allegedly re-

64
Matthew Strecher, Dances with Sheep, 1.

Serrano.indd 358 10.10.2021 8:08:50

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 359

fuses to mimic traditional conventions. He is regarded as a modernizer of ca-

nonic subjects and aesthetic concerns. 65
There is an even larger group of critics that interpret his culturally ambigu-
ous landscape as a way to represent a global sensibility. According to this read-
ing, Murakami shows how Japan has overcome cultural isolation and exoticism
to become an example of the triumph of transnationalism and globalization.
The equation is simple: if Murakami can both represent the Japanese and de-
pict Japan while being a success around the world it is not because Japan has
become “Westernized” or because the world has somewhat become “Japanese,”
but rather because we are all located in a space in between, a point of “inter-
national identity.” This is what critic Yomota Inuhiko called “cultural scent-
lessness.”66 The late-capitalist, urban, reactive-to-an-oppressive-system profile
used before to define Japan emerges here too as a common denominator across
readers and sympathizers. In this process, cultural ambiguity and representa-
tiveness become perfectly compatible.
I would like to close this analysis by commenting on the potential sunset
of Murakami’s fame in the near to mid-term future. The attention he receives
upon the release of a new book, either a collection of short stories or a novel,
has become less eager and the reception more mixed. Although he has always
been subjected to criticism, the reasons behind it have changed over the years.
While at the beginning of his career he was framed as popular because of his
outsider status, canonization has erased that inherently subversive nature of
the new and different. Murakami’s works are notoriously formulaic (a matter
he has never denied), so he is turning back to his original status as a niche
writer in the sense that his works are more appealing to those with an acquired
taste than to readers wishing for something new. More critical, however, than
fear of redundancy, is the unraveling of Murakami’s depiction of women as in-
herently sexist. This debate jumped into the public discussion after a rare but
consequential interview with novelist Kawakami Mieko (1976–) in 2017. Then,
Kawakami pointed out to him how many of his female characters were mere
vehicles for the progression of the male characters. Murakami’s answer was
tepid and evasive.67 In her tough review of his latest book, First Person Singular,
published in April 2021, Hillary Kelly accuses Murakami of not having learned
from that admonition.68 It is worth noting how David Means’ review in the NYT

65
Richard Bernstein, “An Obsessive Attraction that Cripples Two Lives”; John Updike, “Subcon-
scious Tunnels”; Hari Kunzru, “In Haruki Murakamiʼs New Novel, a Painterʼs Inspiration Is
Supernatural.”
66
Kay Yokota, A Wild Haruki Chase, 36.
67
Literary Hub, “A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, with Murakami Himself.”
68
Hillary Kelly, “Review: How Murakami Fell Down a Literary Well.”

Serrano.indd 359 10.10.2021 8:08:50

 360 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

tiptoed around the issue.69 His fixation on his formula makes incorporating
change and reacting to criticism even more difficult. Whether he can dodge
this wave of disapproval and stay within the canon is yet to be seen, but he is
facing a challenge different from any other before, spearheaded by a younger,
female Japanese author popular in translation who is virtually his generational
replacement. Time will tell.

Final Thoughts

Throughout this piece, I have explored how a critical interpretation of dis-

courses of representation that emerge from the reception of Murakami offers
clues to the relationship between hegemonic processes of canonization that are
inscribed in the practices of publication of works in translation and the chang-
ing geopolitical needs conditioning the unequal arrangement of power agents
in the World Literature paradigm. Murakami has unquestionably been framed
within the dominant canon of Japanese literature. Is it then surprising that the
discourse generated by commentary on his work is so close to the hegemonic
national narrative? By agreeing to work based on the artificial—albeit never-
theless operational—parameters of the canon, this study was revealing but also
reproducing its structures of enshrinement. However, acknowledging the close
relationship between hegemony and processes of canonization does not neces-
sarily imply the automatic validation of power’s interpretation by discourses
that discuss canonic literature. The apparent interdependence between canon
and power must be exposed and accounted for. It would be dangerously reduc-
tionist, though, to assume correspondence without analyzing the circumstanc-
es of the original texts and their reception and placement within the greater
frameworks of literary tradition and national narrative construction.
To test to what extent the state of canonization of literary works determines
the hegemonic affinity of their derived discourses, a suggested approach would
be to conduct a separate study of creation and reproduction of a literature-
based national narrative. This time, the researcher would put together a body
of critical texts based on the work of non-canonic writers. By following a meth-
odology similar to the one employed in this article, it would be possible to com-
pare the outcomes of the two investigations to find out to what extent the posi-
tion in relation to the canon of a literary source text influences the shaping of

69
David Means, “Eight Ways of Looking at Haruki Murakami.”

Serrano.indd 360 10.10.2021 8:08:51

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 361

an intertextual discourse. In principle, this would help to clarify in more detail

the relationship between canon, power, and discourse.
There is, however, an additional layer of complexity to this experiment that
has to do with the particular conditions of working with a canon in translated
literature. Alongside the controversy already associated with the creation, up-
holding, and regular revisiting of a “national” canon, it is important to take into
account the potential décalage between canonization by domestic and foreign
national communities. Not every author who is deemed part of a national canon
gets translated and made available for other communities of readers. Instead,
literature in translation forges its parallel canon via the mediation of transla-
tors and publishing houses in choosing what (and whom) to translate. There
are indeed spaces of correlation and overlap between domestic and translation-
based canons, but in the end, to the foreign reader, only what is made available
can become representative.
Therefore, we need to accept the state of inevitable intervention in the
shaping of a canon that is connatural to the structures of publishing litera-
ture in translation. Being subject to this intervention, the previously suggested
comparative study is also biased by design. Any selection of literary texts in
translation would be part of a canon—either a “national” canon or one molded
by the logic or conditions of the publishing circuit, commercial or otherwise.
Literature in translation also engages in the shaping of domestic national can-
ons in ways that blur distinctions. It questions the extent to which the concept
of a national framework or the idea of a canon of World Literature can be use-
ful in cataloguing culture if they disguise transcultural transference. The role
of canonization in the articulation of national narratives therefore remains a
challenging topic to the researcher and a subject that would benefit from fur-
ther development and analysis.

REFERENCES
Anderson, Sam. “The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami.” New York Times, October 21, 2011.
Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. New York: Verso, 2013.
Archer, Jodie, and Matthew L. Jockers. The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel. London:
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017.
Bernstein, Richard. “An Obsessive Attraction that Cripples Two Lives.” Review of South of the Bor-
der, West of the Sun, by Murakami Haruki. New York Times, February 17, 1999.
Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2007.
―. “World Literature and Market Dynamics.” In Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation,
Markets, edited by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen, 93–108. New York and London:
Routledge, 2015.

Serrano.indd 361 10.10.2021 8:08:51

 362 • Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

Buruma, Ian. “Becoming Japanese.” New Yorker, December 23, 1996.

Bumiller, Elisabeth. “Japan’s Fiction Turns a Page.” Review of Monkey Brain Sushi, edited by Alfred
Birbaum. The Washington Post, June 1, 1991.
Carpenter, Julia. “Haruki Murakami’s Advice Column is Surrealist and Sweet and so, well, Mu-
rakami.” Washington Post, February 5, 2015.
Caryl, Christian. “Gods of the Mall.” Review of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, by Murakami Haruki.
New York Review of Books, March 1, 2007.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
Emmerich, Michael. The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization and World Literature. New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2013.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1983.
Fielden, Jay. “New From Murakami: Tales of Cool Cars, Shinto Spirits and Lost Love.” Review of
Men Without Women, by Murakami Haruki. New York Times, May 9, 2017.
Finch, Charles. “Haruki Murakami Turns His Gaze Toward Middle Age.” Review of Killing Commen-
datore, by Murakami Haruki. Washington Post, October 8, 2018.
Fowler, Edward. “Rendering Words, Traversing Cultures: On the Art and Politics of Translating
Modern Japanese Fiction.” Journal of Japanese Studies 18, no 1 (1992): 1–44.
Iwabuchi, Koichi. “Pop-Culture Diplomacy in Japan.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 21, no. 4
(2015): 419–32.
James, Jamie. “East Meets West.” Review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Murakami Haruki. New
York Times, November 2, 1997
Kakutani, Michiko. “Worlds Where Anything Normal Would Seem Bizarre.” Review of after the
quake, by Murakami Haruki. New York Times, August 20, 2002.
Karashima, David. Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami. New York: Soft Skull Press,
2020.
Kelly, Hillary. “Review: How Murakami Fell Down a Literary Well.” Review of First Person Singular,
by Murakami Haruki. Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2021.
Kelts, Roland. Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S. New York: St. Martin
Press, 2006.
Kunzru, Hari. “In Haruki Murakami’s New Novel, a Painter’s Inspiration Is Supernatural.” Review
of Killing Commendatore, by Murakami Haruki. New York Times, October 16, 2018.
Literary Hub. “A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, with Murakami Himself.” Accessed
June 25, 2021. https://lithub.com/a-feminist-critique-of-murakami-novels-with-murakami-
himself.
Lyall, Sarah. “Haruki Murakami Says He Doesn’t Dream. He Writes.” New York Times, October 10,
2018.
McIerney, Jay. “Roll over Basho: Who Japan’s Reading, and Why,” New York Times, September 27,
1992.
Means, David. “Eight Ways of Looking at Haruki Murakami.” Review of First Person Singular, by
Murakami Haruki. New York Times, April 6, 2021.
Mitgang, Herbert. “Looking for America or is it Japan?” Review of Dance Dance Dance, by Mu-
rakami Haruki. New York Times, January 3, 1994.
Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” In Distant Reading, edited by Franco Moretti,
43–62. Verso, 2013.
Murakami Fuminobu. Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary Japanese Litera-
ture. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Serrano.indd 362 10.10.2021 8:08:51

 Murakami Haruki, World Literature, and the Hegemonic Representation of Japan in the United States • 363

“Murakami’s Tokyo.” New York Times, October 21, 2011.

Nimura, Janice P. “Rubber Souls.” Review of Norwegian Wood, by Murakami Haruki. New York
Times, September 24, 2000.
Parks, Tim. “The Charms of Loneliness.” Review of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrim-
age, by Murakami Haruki. New York Review of Books, October 2014.
Porter, J. D. “Popularity/Prestige.” Literary Lab Pamphlet 17, 2018. Accessed June 13, 2021. https://
litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet17.pdf.
“Pronouncements, Critiques, Catcalls and Plaudits.” Washington Post, June 1, 1997.
Reid, T. R. “Japan’s Brat Pack.” Review of Monkey Brain Sushi, edited by Alfred Birnbaum. Washing-
ton Post, August 11, 1991.
Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. London: Vintage, 2005.
Ryan, Alan. “Wild and Wooly.” Review of A Wild Sheep Chase, by Murakami Haruki. Washington Post,
November 12, 1989.
Sterling, Bruce. “Down a High-Tech Rabbit Hole.” Review of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of
the World, by Murakami Haruki. Washington Post, August 11, 1991.
Strecher, Matthew. Dances with Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki. Ann
Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies/University of Michigan, 2002.
―. Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007.
―. The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2014.
Strecher, Matthew, and Paul L. Thomas, ed. Haruki Murakami: Challenging Authors. Rotterdam: Sense
Publishers, 2016.
Suter, Rebecca. The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.
Treisman, Deborah. “The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami.” The New Yorker, February
10, 2019.
Ulin, David L. “Book Review: ‘1Q84’ by Haruki Murakami.” Review of 1Q84, by Murakami Haruki.
Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2014.
―. “Review: Haruki Murakami’s ‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki’ Paints Haunting Picture” Review of
Colorless Tsukuri Tazaki, by Murakami Haruki. Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2014.
Updike, John. “Subconscious Tunnels.” Review of Kafka on the Shore, by Murakami Haruki. New
Yorker, January 24, 2005.
Vermeulen Pieter. “On World Literary Reading.” In Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Transla-
tion, Markets, edited by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen. Routledge, 2015.
Walker, Larry. “Unbinding the Japanese Novel in English Translation: The Alfred A. Knopf Pro-
gram, 1955–1917.” PhD Thesis, University of Helsinki, 2015.
Ward, Elizabeth. “The Long Sayonara.” Review of Dance Dance Dance, by Muarkami Haruki. Wash-
ington Post, January 16, 1994.
Yokota, Kay, ed. A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami around the World. Berkeley, CA: Stone
Bridge, 2008.
Zaun, Todd. “Tokyo Tales Onstage.” New York Times, July 19, 2004.
Zielinska-Elliott, Anna. “No Translator is an Island: the Changing Dynamics of Murakami Haruki
Translations around the World.” Japan Forum, 2021.

Serrano.indd 363 10.10.2021 8:08:52

View publication stats