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“... You know,’ a teenage girl says to Toru Okada, the narrator of Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, whom she’s found at the bottom of a dried-up well doing some thinking about his missing wife and cat, ‘you’re pretty weird.’ Later she refines the idea: ‘I mean, you’re such a supernormal guy, but you do such unnormal things ...”

“... to Jay McInerney in 1992, the year South of the Border, West of the Sun was published in Japanese, Haruki Murakami said that he wasn’t so much an international writer, as a non-national writer: ‘You might call it the Japanese nature that remains only after you have thrown out, one after another, all those parts that are altogether too ...”

“... and three hundred thousand were made homeless. At least £100 billion of damage was caused. Haruki Murakami, Japan’s most popular living novelist, whose parents’ house was destroyed in the earthquake, wasn’t in the city. He had left the country in the late 1980s, uncomfortable with the fame that accompanied the huge success of Norwegian Wood ...”

“... Haruki Murakami’s translator, Philip Gabriel, describes him as a ‘one-man revolution in Japanese fictional style’. His early novels and short stories of the 1980s – playful, wry, experimental, saturated in references to Western culture – made him the spiritual cheerleader of a new generation of writers ...”

“... Derrida would be at a loss, for nothing remains to deconstruct. Certainly the fiction of Haruki Murakami, Japan’s most popular novelist by far, is awash with offbeat whimsy and state-of-the-art pastiche. A Wild Sheep Chase (published here in 1990) borrows the form of a Chandleresque detective story for the tale of a hunt for a mutant ...”

“... in the crowd. What would make sense if your Tube stop was the subject of a sarin gas attack? Haruki Murakami thinks the events in the Tokyo Underground of 20 March 1995 can teach us something about the Japanese psyche. I am not convinced: any more than I would be if someone told me that the rescue of the man who failed to mind the gap said something ...”

“... Kawakami is a thoughtful feminist voice in contemporary Japanese literature. (She once took Haruki Murakami to task for his ‘female characters who exist solely to fulfil a sexual function’.) But her proper interest, in these two books, is in the reality of the body; there’s no financial redistribution or piece of law that will make Natsu’s ...”

“... Lawrence shows him to be ‘inescapably encased in the Eurocentric frame of mind’; the novelist Haruki Murakami, who is as guilty as Mishima of exhibiting an exotic, export-oriented Japan; and the critic Ian Buruma, whose quick wit and knowledge of Japanese ‘cannot compensate for his glibness and prejudgment, which barely conceal his fundamental ...”

“... never – a further compliment – to the contemporary writers he most resembles, Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami, whose amiable postmodern noirs unfold in urban labyrinths and feature cerebral men searching for their own identities, and enigmatic women with an alarming tendency to vanish. He has produced novels with fantastic industry, and the prizes ...”

“... existed side by side. There are many Chinese and South Koreans who love ramen, manga, Uniqlo and Haruki Murakami, who hop over to Tokyo or Fukuoka to shop and eat, but who see no reason to regard the Japanese of today as fundamentally different from those who murdered, raped and enslaved their forebears in the 1930s and 1940s. The Japanese have failed ...”

“... capitalism, and of a globalised aesthetic that prizes writers who, like Orhan Pamuk, Ma Jian and Haruki Murakami, are thought to have transcended local issues and acquired a ‘universal relevance’.It’s hard not to share the derision, once the victim has been so tendentiously trussed. Who could possibly approve of this ...”

“... is it just coincidence that nestling in her book bag are authors such as W.G. Sebald, César Aira, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Vila-Matas and others, writers who purposively smudge the line between memoir and fiction? M Train, with its dot-dash series of woozy photographs, even looks like a Sebald text, and I got the same queasy feeling from ...”