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This book is a timely and expansive volume on Murakami Haruki, arguably Japan's most high-profile contemporary writer.
With contributions from prominent Murakami scholars, this book approaches the works of Murakami Haruki through interdisciplinary perspectives, discussing their significance and value through the lenses of history; geography; politics; gender and sexuality; translation; and literary influence and circulation. Together the chapters provide a multifaceted assessment on Murakami's literary oeuvre in the last four decades, vouching for its continuous importance in understanding the world and Japan in contemporary times. The book also features exclusive material that includes the cultural critic Kat Norihiro's final work on Murakami - his chapter here is one of the few works ever translated into English - to interviews with Murakami and discussions from his translators and editors, shedding light not only on Murakami's works as literature but as products of cross-cultural exchanges.
Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage will prove a valuable resource for students and scholars of Japanese studies, comparative and world literature, cultural studies, and beyond.
List of contents
1.Yes, Murakami Haruki is a challenge, Gitte Marianne Hansen and Michael Tsang Part 1: Temporal and spatial dimensions 2. From hara-hara to doki-doki: Murakami Haruki's use of humour and his predicament since 1Q84 3. History and metaphysical narrative space 4. Murakami Haruki's Tokyo: Spatial transformation and sociocultural displacement, disconnection, and disorientation 5. Food culture, consumerism and Murakami Haruki: The kitchen in 'Z no sh metsu' Part 2: Narrative and genders 6. Murakami's first-person narrators and female character construction 7. Voyeuristic gaze, narratological construction, and the gender problem in Murakami Haruki's After Dark 8. Man without Woman: Sexual relationship in the postmodern era 9. Escape from stereotype? Male-male sexuality in the fiction of Murakami Haruki Part 3: Literary dialogues 10. Ask the horse: Murakami's views on literary creation and the nature of inspiration 11. Modern Japanese and European genre history in Murakami's and S seki's coming-of-age novels 12. Trumping 1Q84/Nineteen Eighty-Four? Reading Murakami and Orwell in a dystopian era 13. Manifestations of creativity: Murakami Haruki as translator Part 4: Personal stories from the industry 14. Chasing wild sheep: The breakthrough of Murakami Haruki in the West 15. Two old translators recall the Murakami phenomenon 16. To build a pile of sleeping kittens, trying not to wake them: Rebecca Suter interviews Murakami Haruki
About the author
Gitte Marianne Hansen is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Newcastle University, UK. An AHRC Leadership Fellow, she is PI for the project 'Gendering Murakami Haruki: Characters, Transmedial Productions and Contemporary Japan' and the author of
Femininity, Self-harm and Eating Disorders in Japan: Navigating Contradiction in Narrative and Visual Culture (2016).
Michael Tsang is due to take up lectureship in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow at Newcastle University, UK. His research interests lie in world/postcolonial literatures and media with an East Asian focus. He has published in
Japan Forum,
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Wasafiri, and
others, and is the founding editor of
Hong Kong Studies.
Summary
This book is a timely and expansive volume on Murakami Haruki, arguably Japan's most high profile contemporary writer.
