Murakami didn’t, but a Norwegian would

What we talk about when we talk about Haruki Murakami’s elusive Nobel Prize

Haute couture for “Harukists.”

The novelist Haruki Murakami has been in the running for a Nobel Prize in literature for well over a decade. Whether deserved or not is a wholly subjective topic, but he was again passed over this year. On Thursday, the committee chose in favor of Jon Fosse, a Norwegian whose “innovative plays and prose… give voice to the unsayable.” Gratulerer, as they say up in Norway.

Every year in Japan, anticipation builds over Murakami’s potential induction into the league of Nobel laureates. He wouldn’t be the first writer in the Japanese language to win – that honor goes to Yasunari Kawabata in 1968, followed by Kenzaburō Ōe in 1994. And there have been other close contenders: Yukio Mishima was a favorite in the late Sixties. But the hype, even hunger, for a Murakami win is palpable in Japan. “Harukists,” as Japanese fans are known, have long gathered in pre-Nobel parties, while reporters have “shed actual tears of disappointment” over yet another loss. (This year, Murakami preemptively hosted a reading of ghost stories ahead of the official announcement.)

In Japan, Murakami is best known for the book that he is least known for abroad: Norwegian Wood. The book’s stunning success put him on the map as a novelist and celebrity in his home country, but wasn’t even officially available in English abroad until 2000, thirteen years after its Japanese publication. It wouldn’t get a hardcover edition for another decade after that.

Murakami already had nine books and two major literary awards under his belt when he released Norwegian Wood in 1987, in the midst of Japan’s economic bubble era. Named for the Beatles tune and set largely in a mental hospital, it features none of the metaphysical “magical realism” for which Murakami is celebrated today. The author himself described it as a “100% pure love story.” Its frank exploration of love, mental illness, sex, death, and redemption resonated deeply with Japanese readers, particularly young women, who saw in its characters mirrors of their own modern existential crises. The media dubbed them “The Norway Tribe,” noting how they gravitated to bars and other real-life spots mentioned in the novel with copies of the books in hand – a precursor of the “pilgrimages” that anime fans now make to the locations used in their favorite shows and films.

Norwegian Wood “made me realize that life is going to throw bad things at you for no reason, and you need to soldier through,” explained one female fan. Thanks to word of mouth and the enthusiastic public support of young celebrities like the idol singer Kyoko Koizumi, the book would go on to sell 3.5 million copies by the end of 1988. “The streets filled with people conspicuously carrying the distinctive covers Murakami had commissioned,” wrote the women’s magazine Josei Seven. “By that point it wasn’t culture anymore; it was fashion – another chic accessory.” Pretty ironic stuff for a book whose tagline was “if you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” Still in print today, sales have exceeded ten million copies.

Norwegian Wood made Murakami a celebrity in his home country, spawning a legion of young fans so passionate that the press dubbed them “Harukists.” Even more interesting than this newfound fame and fortune, however, was the creation of what could be called the “Murakami brand.” Over the Eighties and Nineties, the author’s personal origin story began merging with the image of his stoic protagonists: disaffected thirtysomething slackers with a passion for good music and whiskey, thrown into situations beyond their control or understanding. Murakami “dropped out of the student movement, didn’t bother getting a job after college, opened a jazz bar, and started writing… He makes you believe it’s possible to live as an individual, not attached to any group,” says Tadashi Yanai, founder of the Uniqlo retail chain, not incidentally another purveyor of Japanese cool abroad. “I really empathize with how he lives life on his own terms.” This was powerful stuff in a society where traditionally, as an old proverb goes, “the nail that sticks up is hammered down.” 

Unnerved by newfound fame, Murakami abandoned Japan to settle for a time in the United States. But to quote a line from his book 1Q84, “even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?” Reticence only served to burnish his reputation; fans hungered not only for more from Murakami but more about Murakami. A 2005 New York Times profile by Norimitsu Onishi is typical, devoting almost as much attention to the author’s shopping habits, sleep patterns, and exercise regimen as his writing. As translations conveyed his works abroad, “cults of Murakami” began to grow in foreign lands. Then Murakami himself began to feed it, with books like his 2007 memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, an online advice column, and a radio show. A 2022 issue of Brutus magazine dedicated to Murakami is subtitled “Eat, Listen, Watch, Collect, Drink, and Think,” notably excluding the verb “Read.” It includes extensive breakdowns of his bookshelves, CD collection, and even his closet, cataloging the author’s favorite T-shirts. 

Mister Murakami’s neighborhood: the cover from a collection of his advice columns.

Over the years, Murakami’s work sparked fads in Asia, Europe, and America. Taiwan, more open than its mainland neighbor to things Japanese, was one of the first to get translations. Urban Taiwanese readers, no stranger to student protest movements and the travails of living in a consumer metropolis themselves, began reading Murakami in 1985. Now, local fans devour “spin-off books bearing titles like Haruki Murakami’s Recipes, An Illustrated Handbook to Murakami’s Music, A Tour of Murakami’s World… The focus of these books is not so much how to read Murakami as how to inhabit his world and live the Murakami way,” explains Yun Peng, a professor of literary criticism at the University of Hawaii, describing Murakami’s books not as literature but rather as a “habitat” for fans. 

Murakami’s greatest trick is making readers all over the world feel as though he’s addressing them personally. Drifting across borders like his stereotypical protagonists, his books have unique personalities while never really seeming to be rooted anywhere in particular. “Murakami isn’t really a Japanese author,” Alfred Birnbaum, who translated Murakami’s early works into English, told me. “He’s an American author who happens to write in Japanese.” Traditionally, literature has always been one of the hardest cultural products to convey to foreign audiences; only a fraction of the world’s fiction ever gets translated for consumption abroad. Yet something about Murakami’s work sparks intense passions among readers outside of Japan.

Part of this is because he is, or can be, a great writer. But an even larger part is because Murakami’s books give his foreign fans something more than entertainment: another way of looking at the world. “His slacker narrators and magical-realist plots were key to his selection for translation and export as another form of Japanese cultural ‘cool,’” says the professor Stephen Snyder. “Murakami’s fiction, apart from its literary value, became a kind of cultural product representing a certain view of Japan as futuristic pop phenomenon.” Does this make him an author or a brand? An artist or a status symbol? Are his works literature or merchandise? And in the modern multimedia world we live in, does it even make a difference?

Anime and video games transformed the dreams of young people around the globe. Murakami did the same for grown-ups. His success provided a spiritual template for everyone from Japanese lifestyle retailers like Uniqlo and Muji, to magical self-help gurus like Marie Kondo. Once not too long ago, Japan was an enemy to the West; then a heated economic rival. In the Nineties it represented a beacon of cool for young people around the globe, emerging as a pop-cultural superpower in the Aughts. Now, Japan is transforming again, into a sort of teacher and role model for processing the ennui inherent to aging post-industrial hyper-consumer societies. Japan’s fantasies appeal to the world because Japan got to the future a little ahead of the rest of us. And whether a Nobel win acknowledges that or not, Murakami led the way.