Murakamis work, specially his novels divide the critics into two
main categories.
On one hand those who praise his style as 'revolutionary' and 'captivating'
with a unique bi-cultural touch and puritiy.
On the other hand there are those that call him boring and predictable.
Main arguments are that his novels are very much alike in style
and that he obsessively uses brand names and music references in
nearly all his work.
A nice example on how the critics-community is divided when it comes
to Murakami happened in June 2000. In the TV programme 'Das literarische
Quartett' (the most important of its kind for German Literature)
the discussion about Murakamis 'South of the Border..' and 'Wind-up
Bird' heatet up in a way that was never seen before.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki, THE critic in Germany praised the books while
one of his counterparts, Sigrid Löffler (Austria) found the
stories to be 'Literary Fastfood unworthy of attention' and 'pornographic'.
The intense argument finally led to the break up of the TV show
as such - after having been broadcast for over 20 years.
| And yet, despite his disclaimers,
despite his three-year self-imposed exile in the Mediterranean,
despite -- or because of -- his alienation from rootless,
monied Tokyo, Murakami is very much a writer of modern
Japan, nostalgic for missing idealism, aghast at sudden
wealth. For in his Japan, the old has been destroyed,
an ugly and meaningless hodgepodge has taken its place,
and nobody knows what comes next. |
|
| |
Fred Hiatt
/ The Washington Post / 25.12.1989
|
| |
|
|
| His bold willingness to
go straight-over-the-top has always been a signal indication
of his genius (.....) A phenomenon in Japan, Murakami
is a world-class writer who has both eyes open and takes
big risks. A gifted translator, he has introduced Fitzgerald,
Carver, Irving and Theroux to the Japanese audience. Murakami
himself deserves similar attention from this side of the
Pacific. |
|
| |
Bruce Sterling
/ The Washington Post / 11.8.1991
|
| |
|
|
There are no kimonos, bonsai plants or tatami mats in
Murakami's novels. His work (...) is shot through with
a reverence for Western culture, particularly American
pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Except for references
to place names and certain foods, Murakami's protagonists
might as well be living in Santa Monica (.....) Products
of an affluent, educated culture, they exhibit a curiously
American style of ennui and are always bemoaning their
shallow, materialistic lives. |
|
| |
Lewis Beale /
The Los Angeles Times / 8.12.1991 |
| |
|
| Whereas the characters in early-twentieth-century
Japanese fiction could and usually did choose traditional
Japanese ways, Murakami knows that no such choice is possible
now. Japan has come too far. If a conflict still exists,
his characters are not engaged in or even aware of it.
So enmeshed are they in the forms of Western, and particularly
American, culture that they accept these forms as integral
to contemporary Japanese life. Nonetheless, their essential
Japaneseness is never truly lost in spite of what the
works appear to say. |
|
| |
Celeste Loughman
/ World Literature Today / Winter 1997
|
| |
|
| The Japanese novelist Haruki
Murakami has built an international following because
his stories move so effortlessly between the surface reality
of materialistic yuppie life and the horrors of a sensitized
imagination. His tools are a flatly realistic prose (influenced
by Raymond Carver, whom Mr. Murakami has extensively translated)
and what you might call a psychological metaphysics. His
first-person narrators are at once reliable and half-crazy. |
|
| |
Philip Weiss
/ The New York Observer / 1.2.1999
|
| |
|
| Mysterious disappearances and
equally unexplained sadness, even madness -- such is the
gloomy psychological landscape in which Haruki Murakami
sets his novels. Geographically, it is Tokyo, but it might
be any of the world’s vast, unforgiving cities, where
people get lost like tears in the rain and finding love
is sometimes as hard as solving Rubik’s cube in the
dark. (...) This is not to say that the books are no good.
Reading Murakami is an unsettling, disorienting experience
that can leave you feeling, well, immeasurably empty. |
|
| |
The Economist
/ 17.5.2001
|
| |
|
| You don't have to be Martin
Amis to be provoked by Murakami's narrators, with their
propensity to cliche and fondness for hackneyed, low-pressure
generalisations about life (.....) To describe Murakami's
characteristic mode of expression as childlike would be
unfair to children: his clunky yet oddly weightless prose
often seems to aspire to the banal. (...) And yet there
is something bold and exhilarating about Murakami's writing,
and always has been |
|
| |
Julian Loose
/ New Statesman / 4.6.2001
|
| |
|
| Murakami has long been obsessed
with subterranean realms; his stories often wander into
physical and psychic netherworlds. At the becalmed center
of even his most extravagantly plotted fiction lies a
steadying imperative: to make sense of the senseless.
(...) Murakami not only renders the banalities of day-to-day
life with a precision that borders on the tactile, he
somehow evokes the queasy coexistence of something unnameable
and altogether more bizarre. |
|
| |
Dennis Lim /
The Village Voice / 12.6.2001
|
| |
|
The most perturbing -- and
attractive -- aspect of Murakami's books is that they
usually amount to far more than the sum of their parts.
They resist definition, yet they seem to stand for an
unnamed something - they seem to have a life outside themselves.
|
|
| |
Julie Myerson
/ Daily Telegraph / 16.11.2002
|
