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The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan

and the United States

Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

Monumenta Nipponica, Volume 64, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp.

219-223 (Review)

Published by Sophia University

DOI: 10.1353/mni.0.0050

For additional information about this article

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Chapter 5, The Japanese Womans Film of the 1950s, focuses directly on a groupof films that were largely based on popular novels and stories serialized in magazinesof the time, thus doubly situating Naruse within everyday mass culture. Naruses mar-

riage films of this period sparked a public debate on gender roles, and his emphasison the desiring female subject is most visible in his adaptation of Kawabata YasunarisSound of the Mountain, which in Naruses hands privileges the female, rather thanthe male, point of view. Considering the 1960s, when television and the Japanese NewWave made older directors like Naruse seem out of touch, Russell argues in chapter6 for the relevance of his continued vernacular modernism. She demonstratesNaruses skill as an ethnographic director in her analyses ofWhistling, a thought-ful treatment of Japanese colonialism and the Ainu, and When a Woman Ascends theStairs, which details the life of Ginza hostesses. Naruses film noir thriller of 1966,Stranger Within a Woman, makes sense in the context of similar films by Kurosawaand Teshigahara Hiroshi, as does his renewed focus on class issues. Naruse remained

open to new technologies to the very end of his life, and Russell has exposed thisquiet, unassuming director as a brilliant innovator and experimentalist.

This book will be useful to undergraduates and older scholars alike, whether theyare studying Japanese film history, feminist film criticism, or the roles of women intwentieth-century Japanese society. A comprehensive study of Naruse in English haslong been needed, and this book does not just fill that gap, it adds greatly to our over-all understanding of Japanese mass media and popular culture in the twentieth cen-tury.

The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and theUnited States. By Rebecca Suter. Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.236 pages. Hardcover $39.95/29.95/36.00.

IRMELA HIJIYA-KIRSCHNEREITFreie Universitt Berlin

Murakami Haruki is doubtless among the best known of Japanese authors; oneobserver has even gone so far as to call him the most successful and influential cultauthor in the world today.1 According to the UNESCO Index Translationum,Murakami is fourth among Japanese language authors, behind Toriyama Akira,2

Mishima Yukio, and Kawabata Yasunari, with 189 book translations into numerouslanguages.3 This circumstance alone is reason enough to study this author and his

BOOK REVIEWS 219

1 See Stephen Armstrong, Ten things you need to know about Haruki Murakami: The keyfacts about the coolest writer in the world today, The Sunday Times, 20 July 2008.

2 This manga author, born in 1955, creator of Dr. Slump (19801984), Dragonball(19841995), and other popular manga series and video games, is one of the most successfulauthors of comics of all times with more than 250 million copies sold all over the world so far,according to his German publisher, Carlsen Verlag.

3 See UNESCO, Index Translationum Statistics, http://ftp.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransList.a(accessed 22 February 2009). The Japanese Literature in Translation Search available in theUseful Data section of the Japan Foundations Web site lists more than four hundred titles for

Murakami, among them 159 in English, but it includes numerous reprints of the same translationand does not distinguish between books and shorter works. http://www.jpf.go.jp/e/db/index.html(accessed 22 February 2009).


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impact. In the wake of works by Jay Rubin, Matthew Strecher, and Michael Seats,4

Rebecca Suters The Japanization of Modernity is the fourth book-length study onMurakami to appear in English.5 But whereas Rubin offered a fans guide to the

authors life and works, Strecher focused on exploring identity and ideology inMurakamis fiction, and Seats interpreted his works as a critique of orthodoxy and assymptomatic of the postmodern destruction of referential meaning, Suter has cho-sen as her theme Murakamis role as mediator between Japanese and American liter-ature and culture. Murakami, she claims, not only influences Japanese views ofAmerican literature, life, and culture through his translations of writers such as F.Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, Tim OBrien, J. D. Salinger, and Raymond Carver,through his translated works he also represents contemporary Japan to a growing num-ber of U.S. readers. By looking at Murakamis work as Japanese-American culturalcross-representation, however, Suter also aims to gain original insight into two majorinterrelated contemporary debates, namely, issues of modernity and postmodernityand theorizations of the concepts of postcoloniality and globalization (p. 1).Consequently, her book deals with conceptual issues as well as with Murakamisworks. Leaving aside his translations from English into Japanese, Suter focusesmainly on Murakamis short stories, because, she holds, they are less widely knownand less translated in the West than the novels, on the one hand, and because theyare free from the coherent and organic narrative structure of his longer works (p. 9)reasons that may leave readers slightly perplexed given Suters overall objective aswell as the ample evidence that might be adduced in favor of propositions to the con-trary. But let us see how she develops her theme.

Suters first chapter, The Japanization of Modernity, sketches some of the debates

over the terms modernism, modanizumu, and kindaishugi and over postcolonial the-ory. She refers to a wide range of key figures in Japanese intellectual history, fromMaruyama Masao to Kobayashi Hideo, and to scholars from Harumi Befu to NaokiSakai, Richard Minear, Yoshioka Hiroshi, Seiji Lippit, and Edward Said, and con-cludes this outline by stating, after Koichi Iwabuchi, that Japans transnational cul-tural power is reasserted and articulated in terms of indigenized modernity (p. 34).Next, in chapter 2, Suter deals with both American and Japanese views of Murakami,summarizing and quoting from a number of reviews of his books. In the case of U.S.voices, she observes that they invariably insist on Westernization and un-Japaneseness as the defining features of his fiction (p. 42), whereas Japanese crit-icsincluding U.S.-based scholars such as Masao Miyoshi and Hosea Hirataare

represented as more varied in their views of Murakamis works. The significant dif-ferences in how Murakami is perceived by American and Japanese audiences relatepartly to the way in which this author actively presents himself to his respective read-erships, Suter contends, and she concludes this chapter with hints at Murakamisavoidance of a clearly defined position, his playing on his double positioning ininterviews and statements about his work (p. 60).

Monumenta Nipponica 64:1 (2009)220

4 Matthew Strecher, Dances with Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of MurakamiHaruki (University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 2002); Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakamiand the Music of Words (London: Harvill, 2002); and Michael Seats, Murakami Haruki: TheSimulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2006).

5 Apart from the above-mentioned comprehensive studies, Matthew Strecher has also pub-

lished Haruki Murakamis The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Readers Guide (London, N.Y.:Continuum, 2002).


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Chapter 3 deals with what Suter sees as one of the main intercultural strategies ofMurakamis texts: the use of language and writing, particularly of foreign vocabu-lary and of katakana (p. 63). Taking short stories such as Rdhzen (Lederhosen)

and Tairando (Thailand) as examples, she points out a double operation of domes-tication and estrangement of Western languages and cultures (p. 73). Murakamisparodic treatment of the detective story is also a theme in this and the next chapter,where Suter is concerned with his references to pop culture, commercialization, andWestern influence used as the basis for . . . play and irony (p. 133). Chapter 5 takesup Nemuri, another short story, to show the dynamics of the formation of indi-vidual identity . . . through the use of foreign culture/literature (p. 140). For Suter,this work summarizes the main intertextual and metatextual strategies present in theworks of Murakami (p. 140). She shows his parodying of Western feminist libera-tion narratives through striking similarities to [Kate] Chopins The Awakening (p.142) as well as his use of literalized metaphors and parallel or imaginary worlds. In

her conclusion, Suter reads Murakamis introduction to a recent edition of translatedAkutagawa stories as an indication of his growing importance as mediator of a newimage of Japanese literature and Japan abroad. She sums up Murakamis role andpositioning across cultures by stating that, in his fiction, he provides a very origi-nal perspective on the issue of national and international social relations in the era ofglobalization . . . [as his] texts do not represent Western influences as something dan-gerous and corrupting, but instead use Western culture as a basis to construct a mul-tilayered image of reality (p. 189). She also regards him as a socially committedauthor in the sense that he makes us aware of the constructed nature of identity andreality (p. 190).

The originality of this book lies, perhaps most of all, in its effort to map Murakamisposition as mediator between cultures and Suters decision to frame this mappingunder the rubric Japanization of Modernity. Unfortunately, however, her approachand procedures do not allow her to address adequately the questions implicit in suchan interpretation. Much space in the book is dedicated to summarizing the work ofothers, beginning with an infelicitous jumble of statements concerning key conceptsin the modernity/modernism and orientalism debates. Condensing almost necessarilyleads to simplification, and Suter would have done better simply to refer readers tothe original texts. To posit a discussion of Murakami within the context of thesedebates is a bold and potentially worthwhile venture, but to carry it off requires a bal-anced and highly sophisticated analysis incorporating recent theoretical arguments

not considered here, such as the international debate on multiple, entangled, andshared modernities, and excluding aspects not of direct relevance to the subject athand.

Suters discussion of the way in which Murakami is viewed in the United Statesand in Japan is likewise disappointing, as it is not clear to what extent the critical state-ments she summarizes are representative of more general trends. She offers no sta-tistical data, no reasons why, out of the many reviews of and essays on this author,she chose to focus on the ones she has. For a minimally valid picture of Americanand Japanese views, other sources of information should have been tapped. It shouldhave been possible, for instance, to make use of indicators such as the distribution ofbooks; translations published in anthologies and journals; the respective prestige of

publication venues; Murakami intertexts and transmedial representation; and

BOOK REVIEWS 221


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institutional permeation, including passages from works by Murakami incorporated inschool textbooks and the like. Regrettably, Suter relies mostly on impression and hearsayconcerning Murakamis influence and weight in the United States and in Japan.6

In her close readings in chapters 3 through 5 of a number of Murakami short sto-ries, Suter concentrates on their references to Western commodities and texts. By iden-tifying polygraphy, parody, identity, and imagination as interpretive keys toMurakamis works, she validates earlier research done by Strecher, Seats (whom shedoes not mention), and many others who have dealt with Murakamis works as post-modern creations. But Suter seems to ignore the fact that some characteristics, suchas the adoption of a large number of katakana terms, as well as certain particular usagesof them, are features typical of many contemporary texts. What makes Murakamistand out in this respect against, say, Yamada Eimi, It Hiromi, or Mizumura Minae?Graphematic and lexicographical analyses of Murakami texts can be found even inWestern languages, with one dating as early as 1990.7 Interestingly enough, such stud-

ies tend to relativize the oft-claimed particularity and originality of Murakamis useof language and script. Suter also makes sweeping statements (which then are left dan-gling) on Murakamis employment of different languages in his texts, demarcatinghim, for instance, from Joyce, Pound, Nabokov, and Beckett in this regard, since itinvolves not simply the relationship between different cultures, but the relationshipbetween East and West, with all of its historical, political, and philosophical impli-cations (p. 79). We repeatedly get the impression that to better serve the authorsargument, this study is recreating the age-old East-West divide that generations ofscholars, even before the days of postcolonial studies, have worked hard to prob-lematize and dismantle.

Perhaps one factor contributing to this impression is that Suter tends to frame theissue under discussion too broadly, as when she begins chapter 3 with a descriptionof language and writing in Japan going all the way back to the introduction of Chinesescript and its adaptations to Japanese. The general readership for whom such back-ground is presumably intended might have been better served by a note listing rele-vant overviews. Specialists in Japanese language and literature will wince at a numberof Suters generalizations.

In presenting Murakami, Suter often relies on his own statements, which she adoptsmore or less uncritically. Sometimes she also appears to assign too much symbolicweight to his activities. Her reading of his introduction to the new English-languageedition of works by Akutagawa, in which Murakami styles himself an heir to the clas-

sical modern writer, certainly overinterprets his modifying influence on a Westernreadership. Suter also mentions Murakamis introduction to a new edition of JayRubins translation of Natsume Ssekis Sanshir (p. 182), and it would have beenenlightening had she compared the two.8 Yet as in both cases the translator is Jay

Monumenta Nipponica 64:1 (2009)222

6 It is a pity that Suter does not follow some of the interesting paths suggested by the insiderinformation she supplies. The fact that Murakami retranslated his story Lederhosen intoJapanese on the basis of Alfred Birnbaums English version (p. 216, note 1) would be a truly orig-inal vantage point from which to discuss issues of translation and transformation in this context.The reader would have appreciated bibliographical information for the retranslated text.

7 See Jrgen Stalph, Sprache im Wandel: Eine graphematische und lexikographische Analysevon Murakami Harukis Erfolgsroman Norway-no mori, Japanstudien, vol. 1 (1990), pp. 32162.

8 Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any further information about this new edition ofSanshir.


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Rubin, one of Murakamis main translators, should we not first of all assume that hiscontribution was a service to a friend?

Yet another problem is Suters tacit premise that by dealing with Murakami in Japan

and the United States she has painted a picture of a globalized Murakami. Her effortsserve to remind us, of course, of the fact that to many Japanese, the United States isstill the most important foreign Other, and she also, quite relevantly, quotesMurakamis dislike of Europe, where people are stiff, and we are always foreign-ers (p. 59). To inquire into issues of the Japanization of Modernity in our entan-gled, globalized world, however, would certainly require us to take a look as well atMurakami in regions outside the United States. Judging from the number of trans-lated books alone, English, with its 9 entries in the Index Translationum, is far behindSuters native Italian, which has 15 titles, French (with 20), and German (with 34), tosay nothing of translations of Murakami into other East Asian languages.9

Rebecca Suter deserves credit for opening up a new window on Murakami with her

study. She has whetted our appetite for more, and more systematic, inquiries that willshed light on issues of globalization and cultural translation regarding both MurakamiHaruki and other Japanese writers.

9 Readers are once more referred to the Index Translationum, even if these figures, like the datain the aforementioned Japan Foundation list, are to be treated with caution and must be supple-mented by solid research.

Alles nur Theater? Gender und Ethnizitt bei der japankoreanischen Autorin

Y Miri. By Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt. Munich: Iudicium, 2008. 473pages. Hardcover 39.60.

MATTHEW KNIGSBERGFreie Universitt Berlin

Nothing but playacting? This is one possible English translation of the title ofKristina Iwata-Weickgenannts monograph (based on her doctoral dissertation sub-mitted to Trier University). The subtitle, which could be translated Gender, Ethnicity,and the Japanese-Korean Author Y Miri, underlines two points: First of all, fol-lowing the example of the first German-language study on the subject,1 Iwata-

Weickgenannt uses the term Japanese-Korean (japankoreanisch) and not, forinstance, the designation zainichi adopted in Japanese and some Anglo-Americanresearch. Iwata-Weickgenannt thus situates her study within the German tradition ofresearch on the Korean minority and its literature, scholarship that has received littleattention outside of Germany. Secondly, and more importantly, the book is notaboutgender and ethnicity in the works ofY Miri. Instead, Iwata-Weickgenannt points toa subtle interconnection between literature and life: Not only [Ys] literature, butshe herself is considered, in the final analysis, a work (p. 423; translations fromGerman by the reviewer).

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1 Matthew Knigsberg, Literatur der koreanischen Minderheit in Japan: Assimilation undIdentittsfindung (Hamburg: Gesellschaft fr Natur- und Vlkerkunde Ostasiens, 1995).

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