ABSTRACT
Murakami Haruki is probably the best-known Japanese author of his generation. The novel was one of the most complex and profound texts by Murakami; yet the literary value of the work itself does not seem enough to account for the cult status that the text and its author have reached among Japanese and international readers. Like the avant-pop literature analyzed by Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi, Murakami's fiction recovers both elements of avant-garde art and a premodern vision of popular culture as a means of reconnecting with the supernatural. In addition, through his multiple positioning as author and translator, and his play with notions of authorship and adaptation, he challenges rigid notions of national literature, proposing a more complex form of transnational fiction. These two seemingly disparate operations have analogous effects, and work in conjunction with each other to produce new cultural forms.
