The Japanization of Modernity - Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States (Paperback)

Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. Despite Murakami s critical and commercial success, particularly in the United States, his role as a mediator between Japanese and American literature and culture is seldom discussed.

Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami s fiction, Rebecca Suter complicates our understanding of the author s oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific. Suter concentrates on Murakami s short stories less known in the West but equally worthy of critical attention as sites of some of the author s bolder experiments in manipulating literary (and everyday) language, honing cross-cultural allusions, and crafting metafictional techniques. This study scrutinizes Murakami s fictional worlds and their extraliterary contexts through a range of discursive lenses: modernity and postmodernity, universalism and particularism, imperialism and nationalism, Orientalism and globalization.

By casting new light on the style and substance of Murakami s prose, Suter situates the author and his works within the sphere of contemporary Japanese literature and finds him a prominent place within the broader sweep of the global literary scene.