Murakami's Books

When I held a newspaper last autumn with the news about this year's Literature Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah in my hands, I also found a short article on the back of that very newspaper about the author and perennial Nobel Prize candidate Haruki Murakami. The headline of this article was something like "Murakami and the eternal wait for the Literature Nobel Prize". Since then, I too have been wondering: Why has the now 73-year-old Murakami still not won a Literature Nobel Prize and what actually makes his books so good?

Haruki Murakami has been writing books since he was in his late twenties. He studied theatre studies and ran his own jazz bar in Tokyo. I have the impression that as soon as you read something by Murakami, you feel as though you have just witnessed a very special situation. By "special situation" I mean something quite everyday, but which somehow appears absolutely magical to you in that moment. For example, when sunlight shines through my window at different angles and dances across the walls.
Murakami's books are published in Germany by DuMont Verlag. For some time now, the publisher has been reissuing them in a different design. The books are typically white with a pale, black-and-white photograph as the cover. Over this sits a transparent dust jacket, on which the same or a similar photograph is depicted in a particular colour gradient. However, the black-and-white photograph still shimmers through, creating an interesting effect that I often cannot get enough of. Even though this design changes its colours from book to book, sometimes implemented darker, sometimes lighter, it is mostly about this particular effect. The fact that something else lies hidden behind the cover, something through which the eye-catching gains depth and becomes complete, is a good choice as a design for Murakami's books. Because one could describe his writing style in much the same way: something obvious that gains beauty through its hidden layers.
Murakami describes the lives of people like us, sometimes students, sometimes artists and sometimes businesspeople. In doing so, he usually also weaves in current pop culture. For him, pop culture often means references to well-known songs, which can certainly be explained by his time as owner of the jazz bar "Peter Cat". In the majority of his books, a kind of surrealism gradually emerges. Surrealism means something like "beyond realism", something that appears unreal or dreamlike. The art in Murakami's writing style is the interweaving of these surrealist elements with the descriptive narratives of quite ordinary situations and worries of people. None of his books reads like a fantasy story; rather, in the context of the respective story, it often appears quite logical and like the next step in the characters' experience. Allowing a realistic story not to be interrupted by individually considered, often unrealistic elements is the most extraordinary thing about his books. Just as no story is like another, the proportion of surrealism also varies from book to book. Sometimes it feels barely present and yet something inexplicable still hovers between the pages. For example, one sometimes wonders what was so fascinating about the short story about a student who wrote an article about a record that never existed in his world.
Murakami's stories are for me like really delicious homemade sweets, which you eat extra slowly in order to savour them. I have the feeling that the stories do not become any less gripping after you have read them once. The way they are structured invites you rather to read them multiple times, or at least to return again and again to certain passages. "Killing Commendatore" is, for example, one of the first books by Murakami that I have read so far in which all characters possess similarly complex backstories and motives. As a result, the story, divided into two volumes in total, reminds me of a kind of "Where's Wally?" picture, through which you are guided, but where there is still much more to discover through independent exploration. The kind of book where I was already looking forward to reading it again when I closed the second volume at the end. This kind of narrative is often found in Murakami. Therefore, books by Haruki Murakami are also perfect if you do not know what kind of book or genre you feel like reading right now or simply want to be surprised. Through the various protagonists and their motivations, each book naturally also has a different undertone or a different colour, so that every reader can find their personal favourite among Murakami's books or keep discovering new ones. Books by Murakami that served as inspiration for this article: Sputnik Sweetheart, Dangerous Liaisons, 1Q84, Killing Commendatore, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and First Person Singular.