A post from Leyla Tonak

Haruki Murakami borrows heavily from the annals of the hard-boiled detective genre. His introspective and methodical everyman protagonist, often known only as “Boku,” the Japanese pronoun for “I,” encounters reinvented hard-boiled tropes in the new landscape of magical realism. A vague air of mystery winds through the endless hours spent in bars and movie theaters or on long journeys, the countless cups of coffee brewed and drunk, the reliable entrance and exit of quirky quasi-femmes fatales, interspersed with episodes of death or violence, dream sequences and matter-of-fact rumination on life’s idiosyncrasies. As often as Murakami borrows, he alters, so that the climax of his stories are not the whodunit reveal to which detective-genre fans are accustomed but quite the opposite, seeming to fade out or hang suspended in time, drawing vague and unformulated conclusions. The plots, of course, are also largely constituted by Murakami additions of bizarre and surreal encounters and experiences which certainly would not appear in the street-sense harsh pseudo-realism worlds of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.

This intertextuality between Murakami and hard-boiled giants like Hammett and Chandler has been a recent discovery for me. It was not so long ago that I first discovered the film noir genre, and with it the gritty P.I.’s of hard-boiled detective fiction. When I entered the class, I had already read and loved several of Murakami’s books, totally unaware of their connection with the genre. So for me, my journey with Murakami has been rather like a surgery (or a skinning); first examining the body at face-value, seeing its skin and the functioning whole, and then looking beneath to explore the organs which operate unseen and make up the system. I have been journeying into Murakami, learning his influences, his critiques, his personal history and the effect of translation on his prose, only after discovering him with no prior knowledge of these things and being sucked into his world by the sheer force of his singular style. I understood some of his references of course, but this class has illuminated many more parallels. It’s an immensely rewarding way to experience an author, and I look forward to continuing the process of exploring Murakami’s biology.