The Existentialist Vision of Haruki Murakami

This is a comprehensive study of the literary world of Haruki Murakami. It explores the trajectory of Murakami's existentialist fiction, elucidating, both theoretically and biographically, how Murakami came in contact with Western philosophical writing; how his encounters with Sartre, Camus, and Kafka in particular had a decisive impact on his own creative career; and how his existentialist vision underwent different stages as he engaged in a unique, life-long project to respond creatively and critically to the sociocultural environment of his time. This work demonstrates that Murakami's fiction is not a mere product of popular culture intended for light reading-this study explores Murakami's work in its totality, paying attention to recurring themes and motives as well as favored metaphors and brings into relief a vision that penetrates Murakami's kaleidoscopic literary space. This opens up room for new ways of reading Murakami, deciphering the key themes that constitute his fictional world, shedding light on the underpinning problem consciousness that runs through Murakami's entire literary project. This study also contains great explication-de-texte of Murakami's major works. The study navigates readers into the depths of Murakami's literary space through the analysis of metaphors, recurring images, and evolving themes, introducing the relevant texts roughly in the chronological order of publication, and allows readers to get a grasp of the key features of the respective stories/novels. Attention given to the images woven in in a number of Murakami's fiction (e.g., the deep, dark well, white-walled hospitals, the paranormal yokai) helps us understand how Murakami's literary world develops and what constitutes the underlying current of his oeuvre. This book will be an important resource to scholars not only in modern and contemporary Japanese literature but also in literary studies in general because it highlights the question concerning the intertwining relationship between literature and society not simply on the surface level but on a deeper philosophical level and presents a strong argument on the potential power of literature--

• | Author: Michael Ackland
• | Publisher: Cambria Press
• | Publication Date: Mar 08, 2022
• | Number of Pages: 294 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 1621966178
• | ISBN-13: 9781621966173