Murakami and postmodernism

According to got Klage's article, the characteristics of a postmodernism novel "doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with nonsense.



" and "favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.

" Murakami while has many things that mark his work as postmodernism like pastiche, an artistic work imitating another artistic work, because his novel A Wild Sheep Chase echos Raymond Chandler's Long Goodbye and his short story Barn Burning echos the ending of Raymond Carver's story the Blackbird pie. There is also themes of inner reflection and fragmentation in his novels. However, Murakami is a reluctant postmodernist because he wrote without the intention of being well. He became a writer by coincidence and the nonsensical, mystical elements in his work adds the fragmentation that defines post monderism.However, there is meaning to his work. Even though Murakami is famously known for not giving clarification and saying that it means what you think it means, which implies that it is up the reader to figure out the themes of the story. It is like Boku at the end of A Wild Sheep Chase because Boku may not have found the meaning of life, but he is on the journey to figure it out. We don't know what the result is going to be, but there is something. Which adds a hopeful twist to his postmonderist works which makes him so popular.