1st Edition
Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage
This book is a timely and expansive volume on Murakami Haruki, arguably Japan's most high-profile contemporary writer.
With contributions from prominent Murakami scholars, this book approaches the works of Murakami Haruki through interdisciplinary perspectives, discussing their significance and value through the lenses of history; geography; politics; gender and sexuality; translation; and literary influence and circulation. Together the chapters provide a multifaceted assessment on Murakami’s literary oeuvre in the last four decades, vouching for its continuous importance in understanding the world and Japan in contemporary times. The book also features exclusive material that includes the cultural critic Katō Norihiro’s final work on Murakami – his chapter here is one of the few works ever translated into English – to interviews with Murakami and discussions from his translators and editors, shedding light not only on Murakami’s works as literature but as products of cross-cultural exchanges.
Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage will prove a valuable resource for students and scholars of Japanese studies, comparative and world literature, cultural studies, and beyond.
1.Yes, Murakami Haruki is a challenge
GITTE MARIANNE HANSEN AND MICHAEL TSANG
Part 1: Temporal and spatial dimensions
2. From hara-hara to doki-doki: Murakami Haruki’s use of humour and his predicament since 1Q84.
KATŌ NORIHIRO, translated by MICHAEL TSANG, with a tribute by the editors
3. History and metaphysical narrative space
MATTHEW C. STRECHER
4. Murakami Haruki’s Tokyo: Spatial transformation and sociocultural displacement, disconnection, and disorientation
BARBARA E. THORNBURY
5. Food culture, consumerism and Murakami Haruki: The kitchen in ‘Zō no shōmetsu’
NIHEI CHIKAKO
Part 2: Narrative and genders
6. Murakami’s first-person narrators and female character construction
GITTE MARIANNE HANSEN
7. Voyeuristic gaze, narratological construction, and the gender problem in Murakami Haruki’s After Dark
MICHAEL TSANG
8. Man without Woman: Sexual relationship in the postmodern era
ASTRID LAC
9. Escape from stereotype? Male–male sexuality in the fiction of Murakami Haruki
ANNA ZIELINSKA–ELLIOTT
Part 3: Literary dialogues10. Ask the horse: Murakami’s views on literary creation and the nature of inspiration
GIORGIO AMITRANO
11. Modern Japanese and European genre history in Murakami’s and Sōseki’s coming-of-age novels
ANNETTE THORSEN VILSLEV
12. Trumping 1Q84/Nineteen Eighty-Four? Reading Murakami and Orwell in a dystopian era
PATRICIA WELCH
13. Manifestations of creativity: Murakami Haruki as translator
AKASHI MOTOKO
Part 4: Personal stories from the industry
14. Chasing wild sheep: The breakthrough of Murakami Haruki in the West
ELMER LUKE
15. Two old translators recall the Murakami phenomenon
JAY RUBIN AND TED GOOSSEN
16. To build a pile of sleeping kittens, trying not to wake them: Rebecca Suter interviews Murakami Haruki
REBECCA SUTER, WITH MURAKAMI HARUKI
Biography
Gitte Marianne Hansen is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Newcastle University, UK. An AHRC Leadership Fellow, she is PI for the project ‘Gendering Murakami Haruki: Characters, Transmedial Productions and Contemporary Japan’ and the author of Femininity, Self-harm and Eating Disorders in Japan: Navigating Contradiction in Narrative and Visual Culture (2016).
Michael Tsang is due to take up lectureship in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow at Newcastle University, UK. His research interests lie in world/postcolonial literatures and media with an East Asian focus. He has published in Japan Forum, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Wasafiri, and others, and is the founding editor of Hong Kong Studies.
