Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has won phenomenal worldwide popularity. His Norwegian Wood, marketed as ren’ai shōsetsu (a romance novel) when it was first published in Japan in 1987, has become a veritable bible of love among young people in East Asia. English translations of Kafka On the Shore and 1Q84 have become New York Times bestsellers.
With his surreal or magical realist settings and references to western culture – popular music, whisky, anglophone classics such as The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby – Murakami is a most “un-Japanese” Japanese writer. He is often criticised, especially in his home country, for his deviation from Japanese literary tradition and his at times studied detachment from reality.
