Murakami and Postmodernism

 What characterizes Murakami's work as so distinctive and appealing to me is the dreamlike quality of his works. They inherently feel a little absurd, especially when you look at a collection of his novels and compare some of the plots: fish falling from the sky, talking cats, a sleeping woman stuck in a tv, philosophical ideas coming to life in the form of a Japanese-ified version of a character from Mozart's Don Quixote opera, supernaturally attractive ears, traveling across the country to find a very specific sheep for basically no reason, etc. What grounds his works is his careful yet abundantly vivid descriptions of settings and characters, the calm narration of Boku, the sense of ma, and Boku's shouganai attitude. I figured that his surrealism was unique to his writing style, and a result of his merging of Western literary themes and Japanese style in general. One moment Boku would be drinking whiskey and listening to Western classical music and jazz while eating Western food, and the next he would be traversing the Japanese countryside or studying traditional Japanese painting. (While it's true that the metaphorical borders between countries and cultures are becoming more and more obsolete as the world globalizes and veers towards internationalism, how Murakami deliberately blurs the line between Japanese and Western shows that in some sense, they are sort of separate.)

After the readings and class discussions on postmodernism though, it kind of began to make me rethink what it was that makes Murakami's works so surreal. As Professor Mashood Raja of the University of North Texas explains, postmodernism inherently focuses on the question of existence instead of facts and knowledge (ontology vs epistemology). The postmodernist will question or decenter overarching narratives or philosophies, usually modern, or even outright reject them. In a word, postmodernism plays with the absurd, and doesn't seek to ground itself in inherent truths, or any narrative. This rang true with a lot of Murakami's works. In fact, it's what I found so disarming when I first began reading his books: the fact that the book will never point you towards a certain conclusion about what happened in the plot or why anything was important. His books embody death of the author in a way that add to the dreamlike quality of his writing: there's no moral of the story that Murakami is trying to feed you. X and Y happens and Z is the outcome. Anything beyond that is completely up to the reader, much like anxiously texting your friends when you wake up to help you figure out the meaning of some crazy dream you had. In that way, Murakami's books are completely unique to the reader.

There's definitely not one reason why Murakami's writing is so surreal and dreamlike. He does take inspiration from postmodern works and authors, and his books are even listed in the Wikipedia article listing postmodern novels. He does write about Western themes in a Japanese style, or write about Japanese themes in a Western style. He takes the absurd seriously. He does utilize ma, and he does linger on the mundane details of Boku's life. He builds rich scenery for his characters to have these crazy experiences in, and he does it all with a straight face. When you ask him what it all meant, he just shrugs.

Juliana