One of the criticisms that gets levelled against Murakami occasionally, or against Murakami’s fans, really, is that he’s not a particularly representative Japanese novelist: he’s a writer who very much looks to the West. Spaghetti, jazz, postmodern fluidity with narrative and time. I don’t think though that this is entirely the case; his characters — as Aomame here — do not respond in a predictably Western, postmodern way; this kind of certainty in reality, especially as seated in the self, is almost anti-postmodern, essentialist, and it’s the tension between that rigidity and the generic playfulness that maybe best characterizes what he does.
October 31, 2011, 11:00am Comments
