The Unbound Brilliance of Haruki Murakami

How the Japanese writer draws us into his surreal world

As soon as you think that you have a grasp of what is happening in one of Murakami’s novels, the next page will flip your notions upside down. Apparently ordinary settings and characters are drawn into tales of parallel universes; inhabited by miniature people, mysterious cults and vanishing felines.

Trying to define Murakami’s writing as a genre is futile. His narratives are voyages through the subconscious of his protagonists, often surreal, and sometimes utterly bizarre. However, it is the contrast between the mundane and the surreal that makes Murakami’s work so compelling. Murakami’s ability to focus on quite mundane aspects of life, and turn them into the stuff of fantasy, (or nightmare) forces us to look at life in ways we never would have done before.

In an article by The Guardian (11 October 2018), Murakami suggested that his writing appeals particularly in times of political chaos, such as 1990s Russia. Many of Murakami’s novels do seem to reflect the cold war era paranoia of being watched or manipulated by a greater power, with ‘1Q84’ being the obvious example. However, rather than state paranoia, it is the social paranoia of his protagonists that linger long in the mind. In his more recent novel, ‘Killing Commendatore’, the main protagonist is tormented by the image of a stranger who inexplicably knows his sins. In this respect, Murakami’s greatest antagonists are the demons inside our own minds.

Although Murakami will always flourish his own brand of fantasy, it is his power of observation of life’s minutest details that changes your perception of the everyday – and yourself. Be it meticulous descriptions of an apartment’s interior, or fixating on the particular model of a car, Murakami weaves these details in unexpected and intriguing ways. It is as if you have had memories implanted into your subconscious; where a character’s childhood becomes your own, or an inanimate, commonplace object, suddenly becomes eerily familiar.

What’s more, these more ordinary details also act as a sleight of hand away from the more supernatural surprises in store, which creep up on you unexpectedly. Not all of the demons in his novels are metaphorical.

Yet, despite Murakami's often dream-like, surrealist worlds, they can also be incredibly relatable stories of internal human struggle, and myriad conflicting emotions. Incredibly, the fact that fish might start falling from the sky on the next page doesn't detract from his novels' impact. Events such as these simply open your mind to life's often bizarre nature.

Never has the obscure made so much sense.

(image from nytimes.com)