Beyond "Pure" Literature

Mimesis, Formula, and the Postmodern in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki

Bibliographic Data

ID3619784
AuthorsMatthew C Strecher (corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume57
Issue2
Pages354-378
Publication date1998-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9118 • E-ISSN: 1752-0401
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/2658828
OpenAlexW2069354937
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited14

With the publication ofKaze no Uta o Kike(Hear the Wind Sing; 1979), Murakami Haruki (b. 1949) found himself more or less at odds with well-known members of the Japanese literary establishment. If one takes Murakami at his word, this was not the result of conscious effort on his part, but rather a matter of his own individualism, a certain indifference (feigned or not) toward the conventions and opinions of professional critics in Japan's literary community. He commented to journalist Kawamoto Saburō in a 1985 interview that "[i]t never occurred to me to resist the paradigms of existing 'pure' literature, or to offer some kind of antithesis to it.... I don't think I worried about whether existing types of works would go on existing, so long as I could write what I wanted, how I wanted" (Kawamoto 1985, 39-40). Such a statement might be taken as a reflection of the author's anxiety not to be labeled "anti-bundan"or otherwise standing against the proliferation of so called "pure"literature, orjunbungaku.And yet, given the general trend of Japanese literature from 1980 onward, beginning perhaps with Tanaka Yasuo's plotless novelNantonaku, Kurisutaru(Somehow, Crystal; 1980), Murakami appears to belong to a growing new set of contemporary authors who do precisely that: resist the concepts and definitions of "pure"literature, redefining the term to suit their own needs

Aesthetics · Antithesis · Art · Epistemology · Individualism · Literature · Political science · Postmodernism · Reflexive pronoun · Set (abstract data type) · Sociology · Statement (logic) · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · History · Law · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy

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