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If Haruki Murakami's fictions are symptomatic of what has happened to the (Jamesian) notion of a "central intelligence" as necessary to the novel, they present a new level of postmodernist "blank pastiche" and require new reading habits. While Jorge Luis Borges's characters often offer literary/philosophical explanations of post-modernity's break with the traditional reader's narrative expectations, Murakami succeeds in cyber-spacing and de-centralizing human consciousness. Readers are learning to surf.
Several decades separate the fictions of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) from Japanese-born Haruki Murakami (b. 1947), yet each has been described as signifying postmodernist breaks from traditional narratives. Murakami's self-professed identity as a rebel and "outcast" against Japanese literary traditions suggests the importance of his reception for English-language readers and commentators. In our deregulated literary economy, Borges appears (so David Foster Wallace notes) as "the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature," whereas Murakami's fiction appears as a postmodern paradigm for a twenty-first-century obsession with hypertextuality and undecidability.
In a 2005 interview, Murakami states that "I don't deal with the Japanese literary circle or society at all. I live totally separate from them and still rebel against that world" (qtd. in Onishi). Murakami's literary braggadocio indicates how weak traditional authorization, in this case Japanese literary culture, has become to a writer aspiring to global recognition. In one example of this recognition, the Amazon webpage advertises the author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as "Japan's most highly regarded novelist" who "now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II." Debates about what the novel has become and what consciousness it represents are more than subtexts in Murakami critique. English-language readers of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or the fantastical 1Q84, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Sputnik Sweetheart, and Kafka on the Shore have the pleasure of recognizing the way pop (and particularly American) references are invading foreign fictions. Murakami's narratives provide encounters with transformations in our increasingly technological experience of words that require rethinking the term postmodernity. In 1966, when Michel Foucault prefaced The Order of Things with a description of how Borges shattered Foucault's ordered...