\n\u8449\u3000\u8559\/ Ye Hui<\/strong><\/h2>\n
1. Murakami, My 100% Perfect Author <\/strong><\/p>\n My engagement with Haruki Murakami began around 1990. I was living in Hong Kong at the time, and the people at the former Boyi Publishing Group (which closed its doors in2008) asked if I would be interested in translating one of his works. Most recently, I published an anthology of Murakami-related pieces called Taking a Walk with Peter Cat: A Map of Haruki Murakami\u2019s Literary World<\/em>. It is split into four parts: essays, interviews, translations, and there are also photographs of important Murakami-related things, including a tour of locations that have served as settings for his stories. It is a book that details the journey my heart has been on as I have translated and researched Murakami\u2019s writing for the past thirty years. I wrote it as an homage to a world-class literary figure, of course, but also to a writer who, for me personally, is my 100% Perfect Author. 2. On the Murakami Boom in Malaysia<\/strong><\/p>\n I am originally from Malaysia, which after a period of British colonization transformed into the multiethnic nation that it is today, giving it a broadminded receptivity to influences from foreign cultures. Further, Malaysia\u2019s Chinese community has always been deeply influenced by the traditional cultures passed along through various Sinophone societies, including those of mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and so on. There is a popular literary blog in Malaysia called \u201c\u6709\u4eba\u90e8\u843d\u201d that has become a gathering place for young Chinese writers. It is a forum for club members to share writings they like and to have literary discussions. Naturally, Murakami also became atopic of conversation. In January of 2007, I collaborated with them and published an online quiz called Who Knows the Most About Haruki Murakami?<\/em>, as well as a \u201cHaruki Murakami Survey.\u201d These events led to my meeting many Murakami fans, and the discovery that almost all Malaysian-Chinese writers and literature-lovers were faithful readers of Murakami\u2019s work, or at least paid attention to his work. 3. Bewitched by Murakami\u2019s Literature<\/strong><\/p>\n The allure of Murakami\u2019s literature lies in its narrative language and metaphoric expressions. His words are suffused with a therapeutic quality, able to penetrate readers\u2019 subconscious and heal them. October 10, 2021<\/p>\n Ye Hui is a Malaysian-born translator. Approximately three hundred of her translations have been released through publishers in Hong Kong. Starting in the early 1990s, one of these Hong Kong publishers asked her to translate works by Haruki Murakami, which led to her translating Norwegian Wood, A Wild Sheep Chase<\/em>, and Dance, Dance, Dance<\/em>.These days, she continues her translation work while also working as a professor of Japanese. She is the author of Taking a Walk with Peter Cat: A Map of Haruki Murakami\u2019s Literary World<\/em> (2020).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \uff0aThis article was made possible through the support of the Waseda International House of Literature and Top Global University Project in collaboration with Waseda University’s Global Japanese Studies.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In conjunction with the opening of The Haruki Murakami Library at Waseda University, a series of essays was commissioned entitled Encountering Haruki Murakami. These essays will allow people involved in various ways with Murakami to talk about their encounters and connections with his works and his world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":938,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays-en","ja"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1016"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1220,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions\/1220"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u3000\u3000Murakami\u2019s so-called \u201cpostmodern\u201d writing emerged in the Chinese-language literary market as \u201curban\u201d literature during the Japanese \u201cbubble economy\u201d of the 1980s. The first novel of his to be translated into Chinese was Pinball, 1973<\/em> (1986, in Taiwan), but it did not receive much attention at the time. Subsequently, though, a team of five Taiwanese translators published their joint translation of Norwegian Wood<\/em> in 1989 and touched off an unprecedented Murakami boom. Starting in the beginning of the 1990s, translations of Murakami\u2019s works were put out by publishers in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing, signifying the true beginning of the \u201cHaruki Murakami Phenomenon.\u201d
\nMurakami\u2019s stories, from the choice of words and sentence construction to the choice of props and cultural mores they portray, display tendencies that differentiate it from traditional Japanese literature. Jazz and classical music, Western art and literature, various kinds of Western alcohol and food\u2014these are the types of things found in the various scenes that make up his narratives, and the lifestyle enjoyed by his characters became a major source of attraction for Chinese-language readers. The most distinctive of these elements is the music<\/em> that provides his language with its rhythm, a quality that was rare to find in Japanese literature up till that point. I, too, found myself progressively more taken with his distinctive style as I began to translate his work in the 1990s, until I became fully in its thrall.
\n\u3000\u3000Murakami enjoys Western music of all sorts, including pop, rock, blues, classical, and so on, but he is most known as a passionate fan of jazz. His novels are littered with descriptions and references to jazz, and the aesthetic sense that emerges in essay collections like the two volumes of Portrait in Jazz<\/em> and If It Ain\u2019t Got That Swing, It Don\u2019t Mean a Thing<\/em> captured the hearts of his fans; many of the songs referenced in his novels ended up becoming bestsellers because of it. For example, Aomame, the heroine of 1Q84<\/em>, listens to Leo\u0161 Jan\u00e1\u010dek\u2019s Sinfonietta<\/em> in the taxi at the beginning of the novel, which lead his compositions to explode in popularity from the Murakami effect. One distinction that may be drawn between Murakami\u2019s writing and traditional Japanese literature is how his language embodies musicality in a way that seems to transcend linguistic expression.
\n\u3000\u3000Against the backdrop of the postmodern age, Murakami captured the ardent support of younger readers with his fresh figurative language, his descriptions of his characters\u2019 freewheeling lifestyle, and his inclusion of various signifiers of consumer culture. Within the Chinese-language literary establishment, he became an attractive model to follow, especially among the newest generation of writers. There was much to learn from Murakami\u2019s novels for literature lovers. So many readers found themselves taken by the harmony they found between their literary sensibilities and these novels\u2019 artistic conceptualization and atmosphere.<\/p>\n
\nStarting in the 1980s, Malaysians, especially young people in the Chinese community, began to be very interested in Japanese pop culture, and a version of the \u201cHarizu\u201d phenomenon \u2014that is, a craze for all things Japanese among Chinese young people\u2014 swept the nation. All sorts of Japanese cultural products, including manga, anime, television dramas, J-Pop music, etc., began to arrive one after another. I myself was an international student in Japan during the 1980s, and I found myself solicited by Chinese-language newspapers and magazines to talk about my experience; I ended up writing many articles about Japanese cultural trends, including movies, music, food, and fashion. Thinking back on it now, I was clearly engaged in what Murakami, in one of his novels, famously termed \u201ccultural snow shoveling.\u201d
\n\u3000\u3000While the established Chinese media in Malaysia had no particular interest in covering Japanese literature, there were many Murakami fans among them who were drawn to his fresh style and rhetoric. Especially among writers and other cultural figures, there were many avid Murakami readers who developed a newfound interest in Japanese literature more broadly. The Malaysian Chinese-language newspaper Nanyang Business Daily<\/em> conducted a survey in 1999 to select the \u201cTop 100 Books Loved by the Malaysian Chinese Community,\u201d and among them was Murakami\u2019s Norwegian Wood<\/em>. It is said that Murakami\u2019s literature becomes a hit first through the marketing effects of mass media. In Malaysia, the Chinese-language newspapers and literary journals certainly play an important role in driving his books to become such hits.
\n\u3000\u3000In 2005, Professor Sh\u014dz\u014d Fujii, a scholar of Chinese literature teaching at Tokyo University at the time, began a four-year joint research project called \u201cHaruki Murakami and East Asia,\u201d which resulted in a collected volume of articles on the topic. I was one of the members of this research project, and I reported on the reception of Murakami in Malaysia, detailing how the Murakami boom had been touched off in the 1990s with local literary journals like \u201c\u6930\u5b50\u5c4b, \u201d\u201c\u5411\u65e5\u8475,\u201d and \u201c\u9752\u68b3\u201d publishing special issues on him one after the other, thus creating a new population of dedicated Murakami readers. Unfortunately, all of those journals are now either on hiatus or out of business entirely. Malaysia\u2019s multilingual environment makes its literary markets rather unstable, and Chinese-language publishing is a particularly harsh world to try to survive in, which means that without considerable economic resources, it is unlikely for a publishing project to last very long.
\nMalaysia differs, of course, both politically and socially from other places in East Asia like China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and so its version of the \u201cMurakami phenomenon\u201d was also distinctive.
\n\u3000\u3000Looking back over the various cultural phenomena that have gripped the Malaysian Chinese community, one sees that while the 1970s were obsessed with the romance novels of the Taiwanese writer Chiung Yao, during the 1980s, it was Hong Kong television dramas that reigned supreme. After that, the aforementioned Harizu phenomenon arose, and Japanese manga and English-dubbed anime flooded the country. The Murakami boom also began at the start of the 1990s, but even though the Harizu and Murakami phenomena occurred at roughly the same time, there was not such a deep connection between them. This is because there simply is not that much Japanese cultural material to be found in Murakami\u2019s fiction.<\/p>\n
\n\u3000\u3000In 2003, the young Malaysian-Chinese writers who ran the \u201c\u6709\u4eba\u90e8\u843d\u201d blog set up a publishing house called \u201c\u6709\u4eba\u51fa\u7248\u793e\u201d in Kuala Lumpur. Even now the company valiantly fights to keep running, its main members employed in areas such as advertising, IT, news media, publishing, music, film, finance, and the like while helping to run this publishing house on the side. It has put out 150 titles so far. In the present age, when literature hardly sells at all, this publishing house has nonetheless managed to maintain a considerable amount of popularity.
\nThe postmodern style and descriptions of urban life found in Murakami\u2019s work bring it close to the literary tastes of the new generation of novelists and poets. When one looks at the works published by \u6709\u4eba\u51fa\u7248\u793e, one sees the postmodern expressions found in Taiwanese poetry and the style used in Chinese translations of Murakami\u2019s fiction combined. This style shows up in the works of some of the new Malaysian and Singaporean poets, showing the influence Murakami has had on writers in both countries.
\n\u3000\u3000Murakami\u2019s novels express the everyday psychological state of the modern city dweller through the novelty of the topics he takes up, the meticulousness of his story structures, and the uniqueness of his literary expressions. His characters and choices of metaphor allow the reader to experience \u201cthe reality of living\u201d confronted by people everywhere. Considering this along with the many readers who seem to see Murakami as \u201csomeone who guides me psychologically toward self-realization,\u201d one can see that while his literature is certainly read as \u201cforeign,\u201d his fresh style and use of language has had a certain degree of influence on the creative direction and rhetoric employed by Malaysian writers. The writers and readers of the early run of the literary journal \u201c\u6930\u5b50\u5c4b\u201d are examples of this, including \u8358\u82e5, \u795d\u5feb\u697d, \u5b6b\u5fb7\u4fca, \u6797\u5065\u6587, \u9673\u6587\u8cb4, and \u9673\u5fd7\u9d3b. But it must be remembered that these Malaysian writers were also influenced by writing coming from the Sinophone world as well as the West, and so in this way should be seen as creating their own distinct archive to draw upon in their work. Further, each author\u2019s personal experiences and lifestyle of course impact their writing, making it irreducible to a simple reflection of Murakami\u2019s style.
\n\u3000\u3000Nevertheless, it remains the case that for Malaysian-Chinese writers, especially those born in the 1970s and 80s, Haruki Murakami is a special presence. Especially in terms of the psychological aspects of urban life during a period characterized by a sense of emptiness and loss, the jazz, the literature, the food, the brand-name items, and so on that appear in the urban landscapes of Murakami\u2019s work attracted young people in particular, and there was, for a time, a boom in \u201clife imitating art\u201d-style behavior\u2014we must not forget, however, that these were tastes not necessarily borne directly from each person\u2019s hearts.
\nAs a final note to conclude my analysis, I would like to point out that while Malaysian Murakami readers were influenced at the level of cultural consciousness by his physical descriptions of things and by his musical tastes, this was unrelated to the acceptance of any national or ethnic identity. Further, people who like Japanese literature are interested in different sorts of things than those caught up in the Harizu boom, and because of this, these cannot be discussed as belonging to the same category.<\/p>\n
\nReaders\u2019 tastes are not unitary, but even so, it remains true that Haruki Murakami has left an important mark on the Malaysian literary scene. One could say that there is almost no one among the new generation of popular Malaysian writers who has not read him. Much like the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai constructed a new cinematic language in the realm of filmmaking, Haruki Murakami forged an avant-garde literary language from the postmodern style of his time.
\n\u3000\u3000In the post-COVID era, \u201closs\u201d and \u201cemptiness\u201d have become affective codes for a common, universal feeling among people living today. Speaking broadly, one could say that Malaysia is constantly creating a distinctive culture out of pop culture influences from Japan and the West layered upon a foundation of traditional culture received from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Murakami\u2019s work will surely be read well into the future among young people who are becoming increasingly individualistic amid the rapidly shifting tides of the postmodern age.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/wihl-annex\/assets\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Yo.jpg\")
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