We Have to Talk About Murakami

Borges and Saramago are my favorites, but basically all major Latin American writer has somehow owns the genre in their works, even the ones who refuse it.

>and the characterizations are pretty good
... wow, I strongly disagree. All his characters reads like 12 y/o retards to me. One of his weakest point imo.

(I mean no disrespect here)

But Saramago is portuguese...

>Borges and Saramago
Two geniuses, for sure, but are they really Magic Realists ?

Alejo Carpentier, maybe ?

Not the same user but Latin American literature is sort of a cultural phenomenon than a regional genre.

Carpentier is realist magical, not the other way.

>Carpentier is realist magical, not the other way.
Ah c'mon now.

Yeah this

His main characters all seem to be the same fucking person; same interests, same temperament, same personality, etc

Also, his repetition becomes grating after a while, I mean, SS, NW, and SotBWotS are all essentially the same book, and his themes (jazz, cats, literary and philosophical figures/references, questioning reality) get tiring

>is Murakami actually good or just a meme?
Both.
>Will he be remembered as one of the greatests?
No.
>Is he on the same level as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Hugo, Cervantes, Goethe, Kafka etc?
God, no.

For what I see, Murakami is trying to be Seijun Suzuki of Japanese literature. His works are like sort of an intellectual pulp.

>Magical realism only works for Latin American writers, not in an industrial society like Japan
This is a silly claim. It's solely the competency of the writer.

>DUDE JAZZ LMAO
>DUDE TOKYO LMAO
>DUDE MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRLS WHO MAY OR NOT BE REAL???? LMAO
>DUDE REALITY IS FUCKING FALLING APART LMAO
>DUDE I'M IN ANOTHER DIMENSION LMAO
>DUDE THE BEETLES LMAO
>DUDE THE MAIN CHARACTER IS A DEAD BEAT AND YET IS SMARTER THAN LITERALLY ANYONE ELSE IN THE STORY LMAO
>DUDE CATS LMAO
>DUDE DREAMS LMAO

Not solely. Magical realism often worked as an allegorical criticism of society and government by their writers. It’s not a mere writing trick.

This might be the dumbest thing I've read today, and I've read the other posts ITT

Magical realism doesn't work anywhere.

t. Latin American

>his best his books are very immersive and the characterizations are pretty good.

Agree on the first point. Disagree on the second, although I understand what you're saying.

I think his best skill as a writer are the links he creates between his characters. Their relationships and motivations to exist as part of each other's world and the fleeting manner in which they do. The more time you spend with them, the less depth I feel they have but he always gets off to a strong start and it's a talent not many have.

Good post on the whole btw.

I think he's way more philosophical than Suzuki. Shigesato Itoi is somebody I'd liken to Murakami.

This man in my country, he is nothing

I'll say what I say about Murakami whenever he comes up.
It's easy for him, at his worst, to veer into self parody. But at his best, his writing has a sustained tone that is unique enough that I don't think a bad writer could create it.
Wind-up Bird Chronicle is his best book.

>Murakami actually good or just a meme
He's good but also a meme because of the way people react to him. Either via supreme love and adoration a la rebbit or the unnecessary amount of vitriol that is lobbed at him from here.
>Will he be remembered as one of the greatests?
I don't think so. I love reading his stuff but I don't think he's up there with the greats. However I think he's definitely capable of becoming a great if he keeps improving and comes out with some better shit. I guess it depends.
>Is he on the same level as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Hugo, Cervantes, Goethe, Kafka etc?
Not quite.

I actually really like reading Murakami's stuff. It is usually really easy to read and it's quite immersive. I often read his stuff in just one sitting because it's so engrossing. His prose is nothing special but I still like it. It's quite simple and straight forward which plays to his favor in pulling the reader in to the world. His books are very easy to read. I dig the topics he touches on to like lonely dudes, boring jobs, coffee, jazz, wacky magical shit, etc. The problem I find with him is that he hits on these notes too often in his work, literally every book has this type of stuff in it to the point where you can already tell what's gonna happen or where the story is going. I also think Murakami has some issues with characterization and plot. All of his MC's are really idle dawdlers, which would be fine if that was a choice (that's what I originally thought) but it's pretty much the only character he writes; it makes me think that that's the only MC he knows how to write. And his stories usually start strong but he has trouble wrapping everything up at the end. One of his books that I actually enjoyed was "After Dark" which is also really immersive and engaging. It has a cool midnight city vibe going and he does a great job in conveying the atmosphere to the reader. However he builds the world so well and introduces all of these questions to the reader and in the end I don't think he answers any of them. Which would be fine if there was a message in his choice of leaving those questions unanswered but it didn't seem like that to me.

Murakami's a solid writer and one of the better contemporary authors but I don't think he will be remembered 100 years from now as one of the greats.

...

Like most modern Japanese authors (starting with Soseki) he is very good with symbolism, but terrible at imbuing those symbols with anything meaningful. The stories are fascinating kaleidoscopes, but are also fundamentally vapid. There's nothing to take from him.

What? Of course there are things to take from his stories, Murakami could be practically called the king of lonely characters, he reached such an understanding of loneliness that I didn't even see in any other writer in history.

Long winded sustained self referentiality and fractal-ness of his writing is standard. He is most definitely a genius and his writing is innovative and uniquely (post-) modern. He will probably be remembered as a Faulkner more than a Steinbeck

That loneliness comes from the fact that his characters never connect with one another. They lumber about like zombies fulfilling some incomprehensibly pointless vision of their creator.

>That loneliness comes from the fact that his characters never connect with one another

IKTF

juan rulfo's pedro paramo is the only magical realist novella you need

>Will he be remembered as one of the greatests? Is he on the same level as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Hugo, Cervantes, Goethe, Kafka etc?

no

Why?

Greatest living writer. No other author accurately describes and unravels the lives we lead and the world we live in today as well as Murakami, he's at least 50 years ahead of the game.

Murakami is a total hack. I dare anyone to read the narration in A Wild Sheep Chase slowly. You will see how lazy, insipid, uninspired, clunky, the prose is.

The only reason he's taken remotely seriously in American lit circles is because liberal white people love to glorify a Japanese artist who tries to ape their own quirky tastes.

There is nothing to appreciate in his novels.

And I say this as someone who went into reading him with an open mind.

Also, it's hilarious how people would denigrate him for writing in the "pop" mode, it shows the complete failure of the faculties of observation in the accuser. Murakami is a diagnostician, not a moralist, you could think of him in the same vein as Marshall McLuhan.

not in the same ballpark...honestly I think you're taking the piss

Looking at your passive-aggressiveness at people who enjoyed him, it doesn't look like you tried reading him with an open mind, either that or you didn't really understood him.

Could be true if his diagnoses were remotely compelling or thought-provoking. But instead, all Murakami does is provide us with vaguely whimsical and totally boring narrators whose musings on seemingly whatever happens to float by them are unoriginal and not even remotely entertaining.

Saying 'no' and argumenting with 'not on the same ballpark' won't convince anyone of your opinions, you understand that, right?

murakami is stuff to read on the bus whilst you go to work-tier.

He's good at what he does. He's talented and I could never write as well as he does......but he's no Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Cervantes, Joyce etc etc

so?

OK. That's fair. His work may hold value for others, and I do believe that that's worth something. I assure you I did read him with an open mind - I actually went in hoping to enjoy myself. I don't ever go into a book looking to have a bad time.

But on purely objective levels: the style/construction of a narratorial presence, the structuring of the multi-tiered plot, the distribution of information and pacing, none of it felt, to me, like it reached the kind of towering heights of some of the 'greats' mentioned above.

So you should write actual arguments instead of short-one-word answers that benefits no one other than your own ego.

You need to read closer, go "underground" as Murakami would say, he lays out the map for you it is your job to go deeper.

why?

Because it adds nothing of value to the thread and the discussion in had...

your time would be better spent close reading some of the greats listed in op's post. or even saul bellow, philip roth,....fuck, even franzen has more depth.
fuck it. read the bible. stop wasting your time with this pulp bullshit

Veeky Forums hasn't been a forum for literature discussion for years. are you new?

Where should I go for literature discussions then? r/Books?

>if everyone else is shitting on the street I can do it too!

Enjoy your time looking back into the rear-view mirror, lol at "pulp bullshit", showing yet again that all criticisms of Murakami are just due to failures to understand him.

gotta disagree...
in my opinion, at best, you can say murakami does a decent job of rehashing some ideas that have already been used plenty of times. he has male narrators filled with ennui lead on different somewhat meta-fictive journeys into the weird corners of japan.

how have his ideas not been covered by kurt vonnegut, paul auster, for chrissakes?

has any novel he's written done something structurally or thematically *new*? has any novel he's written illuminated a previously dark area of knowledge, of the world, of the human psyche? has he attempted to dramatize anything difficult besides the boredom of being a middle class japanese guy with nothing better to do? not saying that that has no value, but for 10 god damn books in a row?

we get it... you find his incorporations of noir and sci-fi tropes into japan compelling. if you do, great. but don't try to kid yourself into thinking his ideas even come close to those of kafka, joyce, and faulkner.

has he done a single goddamn challenging or brave thing in any of his novels? as far as I can tell, they are pretty high quality pulp. People need that in the world, but to pretend like he exists on a plane of writers who have shaped epochs and heralded whole movements within literature and the arts in general, is pretty insulting to those writers, and a demonstration that you have inadequate respect for what their contributions to the world have been.

Agreed. He won't truly be appreciated for how innovative he was till decades after his death. That's really one of the high points of his work, how normal seeming it all is when you're looking at it close-up.

It's kind of impossible for us Westerners to judge, it is really up to the Japanese to decide

He will be remembered as the best British writer of his generation

problem is British literature is in a really bad state these days so it means little

Murakami is his *own* epoch and movement within literature.There's really only a few other writers I can think of that were doing anything similar to him who Murakami takes direct influence from, like Raymond Carver, but Murakami completely recontextualizes his work. Just look at the way Murakami thematizes home, especially in his masterpiece "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World". In contrast to the real world where the hero lives, which is an incomplete world being real insofar as he “may not be much,” the walled town of “The End of the World” is a variation of home: where one truly belongs, where one retrieves one’s authentic self. When this becomes clear, however, the hero refuses to return to that home. The difficulty in distancing oneself from home, well depicted with all accompanying nuances, gives the ending the sophisticated sentimentality that is one of Murakami’s strongest merits. For all the nuanced grieving, the novel’s message is clear: home, which, self-contained, contains all the paradoxes of everything/nothing, is something that must be rejected. Home should be conceived of as strange since, if the invention of home is that of the only place one could return, to return there is self-defeating. The meaning of home is to be related to the matter of globalization is the deconstructive nature of reality the de-centered home eventually entails. This is clearly strikingly relevant to what is happening in the world today, and no other author is addressing the same concerns as Murakami because he can see the forest for the trees, Murakami's works are an anti-environment, he is probing the unconscious all pervading environment that surrounds us. Of course Murakami is drawing on "pulp" material, he has his roots so deep in our time that he has to embrace the most vulgar commonplace fantasies and aspirations. His work is prophetic, he's introducing us to new social and psychic targets in the time required for us prepare to cope with them. Murakami is the only one diagnosing what is happening to the old culture, the old world, the only one documenting the transition.

I shouldn't say *only* there a few other writers like Houellebecq that are addressing these things but none do it as well as Murakami imo.

>judging the "prose quality" of a translation
You're an idiot

Fair critique here tho (and I actually agree with you)

>Murakami actually good?
He's okay, very entertaining in his best books.
>Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Hugo, Cervantes, Goethe, Kafka etc?
Not even close.

I think Julian Barnes is better, but considering Ishiguro won the Nobel he probably will be more remembered.

how is pamuk?

Talking about Murakami, do you rate "After the Quake"?
I found half of the short stories boring and the other half quite good.

>The reason he's taken seriously in American lit circles is because liberal white people love to glorify a Japanese artist who tries to ape their own quirky tastes.

read four of his novels and I definitely ended up thinking this.

I genuinely enjoyed Wind Up Bird Chronicles and Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki though, Norwegian Wood not so much, and After Dark was okay, and I might still read IQ84 one day.

I can totally see why people enjoy him certainly, but the hype seems excessive and I can only think to ascribe it to that 'ol white liberal sycophancy

mfw there are people in bookstores who confuse 1984 with 1Q84

Never thought of it this way. Pretty good analysis there user.

No, he is not nearly on the same level as the writers you listed.

However, considering the quality of most modern day mainstream literature, Murakami is one of the better writers today.

>joyce
>literature
when will this meme end?

Very clever.

Well, Bob Dylan is considered literature nowadays...

>the way people react to him. Either via supreme love and adoration a la rebbit or the unnecessary amount of vitriol that is lobbed at him from here.
Yes, if only people existed beyond reddit and Veeky Forums.

To be honest you need to have really high IQ to post on some boards of Veeky Forums and some subreddits, if one doesn't use one of those sites for meaningful discussion, then one's not worthy of any acknowledgment as a literate person.

Murakami is unironically better than Joyce and Faulkner.

You're forgetting awkward sex scenes.

>I ONLY LOOK AT THE SURFACE QUALITIES LMAO
>IT'S NOT LIKE TONS OF GREAT AUTHORS REUSE THEMES AND SYMBOLS LMAO

you need to go back

You forgot:
>DUDE UNNECESSARRILY LONG DESCRIPTIONS OF FOOD AND BEVERAGES LMAO

He just follows a best-seller formula on all his books, i cant even distinguish him and his main characters in all of his works
that said, i like him but hes nowhere near guys like Tolstoy

He's great if you like reading about loners with an ear fetish

>>DUDE TOKYO LMAO
>>DUDE MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRLS WHO MAY OR NOT BE REAL???? LMAO
>>DUDE REALITY IS FUCKING FALLING APART LMAO
This seems comfy but I hear his writing is shit so if I'm gonna read only one of his books what should it be lads?

Well, an autist wrote an entire book on Murakami's prose and writing style, so it's most likely not 'shit'.

penguin.co.uk/books/1052586/haruki-murakami-and-the-music-of-words/

For his best works, I would recommend Kafka of the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, there are anothers that are good, but I think those two are the best.

>Magical realism only works for Latin American writers

You should consider reaading Bruno Schulz then

I've been wondering...are they actually supposed to be awkward? I mean they're really fucking awkward. Not sure if it's the translation but I suspect not.

TBQH Murakami is somebody I've appreciated more with age. I remember having a conversation with some girl a few years ago about him and I said I didn't really like him. The closer I got to 30, the more I loved his work, if mostly as an escape from the sheer tedium of the real world. He encapsulate a desire to escape very well.

Is he a great novelist? Hell no but he's a decent writer.

You enjoy his works but says he's a bad novelist...?

I mean in terms of the question posed regarding whether he's a timeless novelist in the vein of (insert all those names here)

If you like him, then one would assume you'd find his works timeless. This proves you don't like him so much.

I think that as a contemporary author, Murakami is very good. He writes books that I really enjoy, with a really good track record of nailing the dream-like feeling that he tries for. He's hit or miss, with both of his recent novels being very "meh" as far as I've heard, and in no way is he one of the greats

But I think if you're looking for an enjoyable read by a modern author, you could be doing so much worse. Personally I really enjoy his works, but that's really all it is, enjoyment. I think Kafka on the Shore and Wind-Up Bird Chronicle will be remembered for some time after his death but doubtful anything else will, and they certainly won't persist for hundreds of years.

DUDE I HAVE NO SUBSTANTIAL CRITICISMS AND CAN ONLY COMMUNICATE THROUGH MEME PHRASES LMAO

Any recs for someone who likes Murakami's style/themes? I've already read Raymond Carver's stuff and thought it was great.

I like Stephen King's stories but I don't consider them good writing.

Murakami is one of the comfiest authors of our time.

Raymond Chandler, Tim O'brien

WILL I ABLE ABLE TO GET PAST MY PRETENSION TO READ WINDUP BIRD BECAUSE IT LOOKS FUN BUT IF IT READS LIKE VONNEGUT OR CAMUS I DON'T KNOW

Are you trying to say that reading like Vonnegut or Camus would be a bad thing?

It doesn't read anything at all like either of them anyway