ABSTRACT
In Chapter 6, shifting attention from Murakami’s storytelling to his language experiments and his activity as a translator, I discuss how he tries to explore the effects of crossing different cultures and languages. For this purpose, I examine Murakami’s complicity with the act of distancing from both Japan and the cultural Other through three perspectives: the author’s negotiation between “cultural odourlessness” and “Japaneseness”, his language experiments through a defamiliarisation of the Japanese language, and his attempt to explore cross-cultural effects through his translation activity. I also look at British authors David Mitchell and Kazuo Ishiguro, because a similar creative use of cross-cultural effects can be seen in their works, and through comparison with them Murakami’s complicity with a space in-between is better understood.
