The magic of Murakami strikes young people

Bengalureans tell Metrolife why they love the Japanese author and the worlds his characters inhabit

It’s not every day that you hear of an author launching a cool and hip T-shirt line but then Haruki Murakami is in a different league. The Japanese novelist may be in his 70s but his work speaks to the youngsters. Hear it from his 22-year-old fan Pavithra Prabhu, “His books take you beyond the reality and they are enticing, provided you have the appetite for it.”

For the uninitiated, Murakami is the man behind best-selling novels like Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood and 1Q84 and his works have been translated in over 50 languages.

Book store owners in the city attest to the growing Murakami craze among the youth. The world he constructs in his books may be fictional but the struggles going on in them are real and it’s this complexity that youngsters relate to, says Priya Suresh, director of Justbooks, an online book rental service. His books provide an escape to an alternative reality, one that gamers and loners especially find comfort in, she feels.

Media student Arakkal Shada Amina would agree. The 22-year-old was shocked when she first read Murakami’s Sputnik sweetheart because “bizarre things were happening in the book but it was perfectly normal for the characters”. Or take the case of Kafka in the Shore where an old man can talk to cats, she points out.

That’s magic realism for short — a genre of literature where fantastical things play out in the real world seamlessly, a genre Murakami is known for. But Amina also admits that sometimes she keeps leafing through his books for no reason at all, as if under a spell.

It’s not just the peculiar world his characters inhabit that is charming but also the stories Murakami chooses to tell and the way he tells them.

“Unlike his contemporaries who write about the upper class, he writes about the outcasts in the Japanese society. Plus, his endings are almost always open and it nudges the readers to use their imagination to go, figure. He does not even tell us why he wrote what he wrote,” says Prabhu, who’s a student of journalism and mass communication.

Megha Mohan, who works with a charitable organisation in Bengaluru, likens his novels to poetry in long format. “He writes in a way that makes mundane things look profound. He weaves in the simplicity of the prose along with stunning allusions and elements of magical realism and that sets him apart from other authors,” says the 22-year-old, who discovered Murakami a few years ago.

And so, Murakami books are always in demand. “We stock around 50-100 copies of his books in our store and sell 200 to 300 of them every month,” informs Mayi Gowda, who runs the popular Blossom bookstore in the city.

There seems to be a pattern among Murakami readers. “The people who love Murakami are the same set who love the likes of Franz Kafka, Salman Rushdie and Czech writer Milan Kundera,” Suresh comments on the draw of magic realism that is common to these literary greats.

The best of Murakami

Kafka on the Shore: The New York Times’s top 10 books of 2005, this novel explores the themes of nature, music and the connection between the mind and soul. It chronicles the journey of a 15-year-old, who is searching for his family, and a 60-year-old man with an unlikely part-time job – he finds the cats who have lost their way.

Norwegian wood: Written in 1987 and told from a first-person perspective, it was this novel that catapulted Murakami to feverish fame. Set in the backdrop of student protest, it explores the protagonist’s relationship with two women – one is emotionally-troubled, the other is carefree. The book was adapted into a Japanese film in 2010.

1Q84: Published in three volumes between 2009 and 2010, 1Q84 is about a woman who slips into an alternative world, criss-crossing a religious cult and her childhood love. In the rest of the book, we see her making sense of these parallel worlds.