In “De-Exoticizing Haruki Murakami’s Reception,” Matthew Richard Chozick explores how Japanese critics and literary scholars can see Haruki Murakami’s work as foreign or at least more aligned with foreign style and sensibilities, while American critics consistently emphasize the exoticness of Murakami’s work for an American readership, often emphasizing Murakami’s Japanese cultural heritage in appraisals of his work. Even though Murakami spent the first half of his life in Japan, Chozick admits that “American brands, song lyrics, and political references were in Haruki Murakami’s writings before he ever set foot outside of Japan,” while his “works rarely mention contemporary Japanese culture, corporations, composers, or artists” (63). Recognizing the contradiction between Murakami’s consistent references to American culture and the continued perception of his exoticism for Americans, Chozick essentially posits that Murakami’s fiction is “almost universally ‘foreign,’” but also “universally accessible” for readers across the world. First, while Murakami often alludes to western culture – especially American popular culture – his references are not wholly unfamiliar in his native Japan. Contrary to how American critics tend to portray his fiction as exotic, Murakami mentions in an interview with the British musician John Wesley Harding that “Americans are strange because they don’t believe that we have Dunkin Donuts or McDonald’s or Levi’s or Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen in Japan” (42). Even though Americans think of Murakami as a product of Japanese culture, being born in 1949, he would have been inundated with American brands, music, and political references since childhood. In Kafka on the Shore, when Murakami names characters after “Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders as well as the Scottish whiskey icon Johnnie Walker” (67), these are not only explicit references to Western brands, but they represent a concept of Western capitalism and perhaps even late imperialism for readers across the world.
Chozick couples these universally understandable references with an acknowledgement that Murakami tends not to describe skin color or ethnically-specific physical features, instead describing characters through metaphor and abstract imagery or specific clothing. Thus, readers in the United States “are not pushed to imagine Japanese individuals” (69). However, Chozick concedes that “the nuance of Murakami’s English cannot be rendered back into English” because English translations cannot preserve “[t]he visual exoticism of the katakana phonetic script used to type non-Japanese words” (66). The “Americanness” of Murakami’s books are often lost on Americans because they do not perceive the strangeness of typically-American cultural norms and cannot understand the uniquely Japanese comments Murakami makes: Though they are undoubtedly “familiar with the process of how sports fans bond through team talk” (71), non-Japanese readers likely would not understand the cultural significance of Colonel Sanders “inappropriately refer[ring] to Hoshino with the informal ‘chan,’” which Chozick terms “the nuanced transgression of formality” (71). Thus, through his cultural references, Murakami can remain both accessibly familiar to readers in both Japan and the United States, while also appearing just exotic enough to support the often-fantastic, surreal worlds of his fiction.
Reading this article, one can recognize how Murakami remains “exotic” to both Japanese and American readers, yet Chozick does not really explain how the inherent American and Japanese influences appear to escape the perception of their respective source cultures. For example, despite the constant references to Greek tragedy, classical music, and American brands, an American may still perceive the book as very Japanese. From both Chozick’s article and Murakami’s interview with John Wesley Harding, one has the impression that Americans often cannot comprehend how those in other countries can understand what they see as endemically American. It is especially interesting that Alan Cheuse, reviewing Kafka on the Shore for NPR, would suggest that Franz Kafka is in any way unique to American culture. To compare Kafka to Lady Murasaki or Genji overestimates the “Americanness” of a man who never even traveled to America. To me, Cheuse does not seem like the best arbiter between what is American and what is not, yet one must specifically dissect his assignment of American cultural identity to Franz Kafka. Perhaps if he were discussing German culture, Czech culture, or even pre-World War II Jewish culture, Kafka would be representative. But Cheuse “allege[s] that Kafka’s name would be unknown or “mysterious” to Japanese,” or more specifically, “Kafka’s German-language literature being foreign or unknown to Japanese readers, but not to Americans” (Chozick 64). In addition, he compares Kafka to Genji, a fictional character. Though Kafka is often associated with the surreal nature of his literary worlds and Steven Soderbergh even made a film called Kafka that combined the author with aspects of his fictional world, Kafka actually existed and likely inhabits quite a different position in Western culture than Genji does in Japanese culture.
It may seem illogical to claim Franz Kafka but reject Haruki Murakami, though the east-west divide could explain part of the difference. However, Haruki Murakami seems to embrace American culture and even lives in the United States currently, while Kafka only seemed to dream of the United States in a similar manner to many early twentieth century Central Europeans, even writing an unfinished novel called Amerika. In regard to Murakami’s exoticness and his own understanding of his work, it is utterly fascinating that he states, “Usually I don’t read my own books. I read the translations. Because when I read the translation I can enjoy my books very much. But I don’t read my books in Japanese” (Harding 41). Murakami writes his books in Japanese – “Everybody asks me when I’m to write my books in English. That’s impossible” (43). Thus, Murakami enjoys his novels in the same form as an American (or any English-speaking reader). It seems that Murakami will always been Japanese, but since Norwegian Wood, he has stayed physically distant from Japan. Murakami says that “[t]here is a very strong tradition of Japanese literature. They claim that the beauty of Japanese language and Japanese literature is special and only Japanese can understand it” (42). Even though his books are not always clear, their understanding is not limited to a Japanese audience. Therefore, though he identifies as a Japanese novelist, Murakami’s Japanese cultural heritage coupled with the perceived universality of his fiction places him in the realm of a truly “world literature,” like Franz Kafka before him – unquestionably tied to his origins, time, and place, yet seeming to transcend them in his ability to appeal to a diverse readership from various cultural backgrounds.