While Haruki Murakami, author of such revered work as The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, is regarded as the more “literary” of the pair, placing him on equal footing with the best of contemporary fiction around the world, Ryu Murakami’s more lurid, graphic work, including Almost Transparent Blue, Coin Locker Babies, and 69, has placed him in the company of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. In their hands, the Japanese experience seems to revolve around a perpetual anxiety about identity.īut there are undeniable differences between the two writers, and to give them a combined identity to wear under the banner of shared name does a disservice to both.
Both contain trace elements of the quasi-futuristic postmodernism often attributed to Japanese urban life, and both invest some portion of their explorations to puzzling out just what this means for Japanese culture. Both are award-winning writers in their home country, with sizable bodies of work published in Japan that have been reaching foreign eyes more frequently in the last decade or so.
Whether it is the coolly poetic fantasia of Haruki Murakami, or the sharp, disturbing character studies of Ryu Murakami, both have developed an international reputation for being among the best in contemporary Japanese fiction.ĭespite some clear stylistic differences, there are certainly some parallels between the two. While Japan offers the global culture a number of stylish and critically celebrated creatives - from animators to artists to architects - in the world of authors there’s little doubt that the name Murakami has in recent years developed its own cache.
0 kommentar(er)
