An insightful analysis of Haruki Murakami’s early works, Mori's slim yet substantive volume delves deep into the heart of Murakami’s unique standing in the canons of both Asian and Asian American literature. Never has Murakami been so thoroughly analyzed by a compatriot whose authority and command of the Japanese sensibility confer authority on the close readings. Eschewing the raw commercialism of Japan’s economic rise in the 1970s and 1980s, Murakami—from his school days onward—espoused Western culture, especially American writing. His fastidious devotion to translating works by such Western writers as Raymond Carver and J. D. Salinger afforded him the tools to create what some critics have called his postmodern style, a designation Mori challenges. Mori argues that Murakami’s works exemplify an Asian “premodern” world view in which the living and the dead intermingle. This prominent Edo period belief, Mori argues, sets Murakami apart from postmodern writers, rendering Western critics’ discussion of his books from the postmodern perspective inaccurate and imprecise. Murakami refuses to be pigeonholed into any identity as a writer. Brief and to the point, Mori’s volume makes a valuable contribution to Western literary analysis of living Asian writers. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
— Choice Reviews
In this outstanding series of essays, Masaki Mori probes in insightful and illuminating ways the origins, motivations, and implications as well as both Western and Japanese influences on the early writings of Murakami Haruki, the renowned contemporary Japanese author admired for the sense of loneliness that pervades his art. Mori draws out supranational and magical realist aspects of Murakami as keys to understanding the continuing worldwide popularity of his diverse publications. The book’s Appendix provides a useful bibliography of Murakami’s works and their translations.
— Steven Heine, Florida International University
In this fine, cross-cultural study, Masaki Mori draws an intriguing portrait of Haruki Murakami--one of those controversial contemporary writers who do not belong to one national culture or literary cannon, but to the global literary community as a whole. Through his perceptive, close analyses of Murakami’s early short stories, Professor Mori reveals this enigmatic, cosmopolitan writer’s essential humanism that runs through his forty-year long artistic career. He shows in careful detail how underneath Murakami’s occasionally flippant and absurdist fiction, or his problematization of contemporary life through a uniquely humorous artistic vision, lies this writer’s profound humanistic concern about the precarious existential condition in which we moderns have placed ourselves, as well as his deep distrust of the bureaucratic power structures that we have allowed to control our lives. Masaki Mori’s study, written in an accessible and elegant style, is not only a valuable contribution to a better, in-depth understanding of one of the most popular contemporary Japanese writers, but also an exemplary critical addition to the burgeoning field of intercultural studies within a global reference frame.
— Mihai Spariosu