Has Haruki Murakami Sold Out? (attention: Literary Fashionistas)

I like some of the older stuff, some of the newer stuff... I liked Sputnik Sweetheart for the mind-boggling climactic scene, I didn't really like After the Quake (but I put it down halfway through and I'll probably go back to the unread stories at some point)

I haven't read any of his nonfiction (Underground is nonfiction, right?)

No, HBW came right after WSC and is unrelated to the other novels. It's probably the most "Sci Fi" of his novels (but I'm not a sci fi reader so don't take my word for it). I kind of liked it -- the first Murakami I read; it's got a very odd, experimental structure which can be distracting.

Are we talking about him personally selling out now that he's an international literary superstar (which is surely about marketing), or has his work seen an appreciable decrease in quality (which would be about laziness associated to the former)? As I say, I'm not qualified to talk about his recent things.

Ditto, except I'm half way through it. ILX recommendations are way better than my Amazon ones.

Underground, as well, I have only read half of, and apparently it's the less good half. So I will persist.

I used to tell people to start reading Murakami with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but at some point I realized that I think A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, taken together, are both "better" and more pleasant reading than the long one.

Norweigian Wood = fucking grinding, massively affecting but in this soft bleak way ... I get the sense this one has more to do with the mainstream of Japanese literature than his other work, partially because the grim hopelessness of it reminds me of Kenkaburo Oe and partly because I think it sold much better than his other stuff over there. Sputnik Sweetheart I can't be objective about because I was basically just drooling waiting for new Murakami: I found it functional and entertaining but it didn't leap at me, and I got a little worried that he's becoming an actual New Yorker writer, toning down into this softer more real-world natural-Yuppie lit. (Is this what the selling-out question would be? Because the answer would be no, I think, though I'm not sure I like him pursuing this aesthetic.) What else ... the short stories in The Elephant Vanishes are great. This seems to be one Murakami thing that doesn't get discussed very much, but I think a lot of the short stories are terrific and worthwhile, both emotionally and conceptually.

I agree, I enjoyed this collection very much. "Barn Burning", in particular, is one of the best short stories I've ever read, and it might serve as a good introduction to Murakami for the unitiated.

i still think a wild sheep chase is his best book.

Anyone read "After the quake"?

Well, there is that, yes. ;-)

Fritz, I really really love Murakami -- he's one of not that many authors where I feel like I actually know his stuff well -- and I very strongly encourage the Wild Sheep Dancing plan.

You and Jess are absolutely right about Underground: I mean, he lets the people speak, so it does just accumulate details over a pretty great space. I've found myself using it more as a reference book than something to read straight through: it's just filled with all of these real voices, and every so often I'll pick it up and focus on one of them. (This has actually been hugely helpful to me with writing fiction, comparing the way these real "characters" reacted to and thought about their experiences.) The really crushing thing about it is the natural human reaction each of them have to just ignore the smell or the sick people and try to get to work.

And so in the stuff I think of as his best work -- Wind-Up Bird, Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance -- that stuff gets literalized: they start from the cardboard background of life how it's conventionally assumed to be and then complicate that. But then there's the other side where it's not literalized at all, and is just this aura: Norweigian Wood, for instance, which is completely naturalistic but still has the same sense of small-things-spiritually-important that's in the bigger novels, and the same sort of looming magical sense of totems and fetishes and disappearances and the rest.

His recent New Yorker stories have taken an even greater leap toward that naturalism, which is sort of necessary for New Yorker purposes. A lot of it is great and stuff I think he's needed to do, but I'd be disappointed if he just kept going down that track. Because at the end of that track is the worst sort of post-Carver New Yorker stuff, where it's like "And she picked the glass up from the table, leaving a ring of condensation behind DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE WHAT I JUST DID THERE?" Half of what I like about Murakami is that he's unafraid to literalize and construct that stuff and actually draw it out and face it head-on, instead of trying to hide and symbolize it and stretch to convince us that it's hidden in the way someone puts on his hat or the "meaningful glance" on page 72.

another great example of globalised Murakami-style magic realism (& of course with a huge debt to Murakami) - David Mitchell's number9dream.

(Mary, I have precisely that train edition of Norwegian Wood.)

Martin, I think one of the differences I sense in Murakami's "magic realism" is that, well, most of the stuff I've read in this vein leans on pre-modern tradition pretty heavily -- a lot of it uses the fact that we allow for "magic" in folk tales in stuff as a way of naturalizing the metaphor. Whereas Murakami is resolutely modern, and there's a lot of work put into making those elements fit properly over the cold hard modern world. I don't think it's a coincidence that western readers are attracted to magic realism that comes from or is set in Latin America, Africa, or the Indian subcontinent: we're already content with and attracted to the idea of magic and reality mixing in less western / modern contexts. (As are plenty of people in such places, where religious and cultural ideas we'd consider exotic and magical form a much larger part of people's day-to-day existence.)

Not sure if that explains it well or not. I dunno, I was thinking a lot about this when I was reading this book by an Ethiopian guy, called Notes from the Hyena's Belly -- I read it because the guy grew up like a town over from my father, at about the same time -- and he used this heavy magic-realist blending of reality/unreality, except it wasn't unreality: it was just traditional religious bits and folk wisdom and all of that, literalized in such a way that it wasn't "this is what some people believe" but rather "this is the world as it exists to some people." Which is a slightly different thing from magic realism, but I think something the bulk of magic realists lean on a little: you get a free pass to have "magical" things happen when your setting isn't the big concrete western city many of your readers live in.

I like the way Murakami makes the surreal seem so mundane and everyday. And it is more compelling to me because his style is so very Western. The Auster comparison is apt in this sense. I think the disappointment with recent Murakami is less of the surreal and more of the mundane. Really he's just retelling the same story in different ways with everything he writes, isn't he? It's all sappy and sentimental, but I like it that way.