Introduction: the celebrity of Haruki Murakami

If stardom – as argued by Richard Dyer (1979, p. 43) in his seminal work Stars – is marked as an ‘ambiguity/contradiction’ concerning ‘stars-as-ordinary’ and ‘stars-as-special’, then the Japanese author Haruki Murakami certainly qualifies as a literary star. Indeed, Murakami is frequently described as a modest, unassuming, self-effacing character. Jay Rubin (2012, p. 40), the author’s long-time translator and fan of the first hour, observes for instance that ‘the note of “ordinariness”’ often comes through in ‘Murakami’s comments on himself and what others have said about him’. At the same time, it is clear that Murakami’s authorship is far from ordinary: it is synonymous with phenomenal commercial success and global popularity. Additionally, Murakami can be said to be extra-ordinary in the sense that the author’s signature is a brand name that readers associate with the mysterious and the surreal. Murakami’s name immediately evokes a literary universe filled with fantastical events, talking animals, and parallel worlds. Fans, literary critics, and scholars all over the world appear fascinated by what has been dubbed ‘the Murakami Phenomenon’ or, alternatively, ‘the Haruki Effect’.

Murakami’s literary stardom is a recent manifestation of a cultural pattern with deep historical roots. The history of celebrity authorship has been traced back to early modern times (Narain 2009) and scholars have extensively mapped its development through romanticism (Mole 2007, Eisner 2009), modernism (Jaffe 2005, Goldman 2011), and postmodernism (Ommundsen 2007, Glass 2014); as well as its specific inflections in terms of gender (Easley 2011, Weber 2016), class (Glass 2004), ethnicity (Young 2001, Heynders 2016), or national identity (York 2007, Franssen and Honings 2017). The journal Celebrity Studies, too, has contributed in crucial ways to the field of study, often revealing the need to differentiate in the use of the concept of literary celebrity. Braun (2011), for instance, revealed important differences between European and non-European forms of literary fame. Ohlsson et al. (2014) argued for further, sociological, historical, and geographical differentiation in the study of literary celebrity. In the context of Braun and Spiers’ (2016) special issue on this topic, Spiers (2016) drew attention to the perspective of practitioners and Mayer (2017) to the political dimension of celebrity authorship. Both in Celebrity Studies and elsewhere, scholars have repeatedly emphasised the importance of analysing literary fame beyond a western context, as celebrity is bound to vary according to its geographical and cultural context (Boone and Vickers 2011, Ohlsson et al. 2014). However, exceptions aside (for example, Lyons 2014, Gowda and Somwanshi 2016), the field of literary celebrities studies has so far paid little attention to star authors within a non-western context. With this special issue of the journal’s Cultural Report section, we intend to stimulate further research in this direction.

Murakami presents us with a particularly intriguing, paradoxical case of literary celebrity. His fame is, on the one hand, a truly global phenomenon: Murakami’s works have been translated into English, French, Spanish, Catalan, Bengali, Korean, Russian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Arabic – to name just a few of the long list of target languages. All over the world, readers queue up in front of bookstores into the evening in order to purchase their copies of the newest Murakami at midnight launches; there are Murakami fan clubs, Murakami festivals, and even popular Murakami tattoos; and the field of ‘Murakami Studies’ (Strecher 2011) is growing exponentially. Some of his more critical readers even claim that Murakami’s worldwide success is proof that he ‘custom-tailors his goods to his readers abroad’ (cited Rubin 2012, p. 8–9). Yet, on the other hand, there has always been something distinctly ‘Japanese’ about Murakami’s work and authorship. The author continues to write his works in Japanese, for instance, and his novels are always set in the country of his origin. In fact, Murakami has repeatedly insisted that he does not want to write ‘about foreigners in foreign countries’: ‘I want to write about Japan, about our life here’ (Wray 2009, p. 358). Furthermore, his thematic and stylistic choices as well as his position in the literary field cannot be fully understood without taking into account Murakami’s view on Japanese culture and society, his relation to the tradition of junbungaku (Japanese belles-lettres or ‘pure literature’) and the Japanese literary establishment, as well as his activities as a translator and public intellectual.

The global-yet-situated stardom of Murakami, then, foregrounds fundamental questions about literary celebrity beyond the dominant western context. How should we understand the tensions – between ordinary and special, commercial success and critical acclaim, ‘westernised’ and Japanese – that characterise the construction and reception of the ‘Murakami Phenomenon’? What is it in his works that appeals to readers all over the world, despite their differences in cultural background and frames of reference? What is the role of translation in Murakami’s success as an author? How does the author relate to his audiences – through his interviews, his fictional work, and his translations? For this special issue, we invited four authors with a particular interest in Murakami to address these questions.

Although the contributing authors each touch upon multiple factors that play into Murakami’s literary celebrity, the four contributions can be said to present four different perspectives on the author. Tomoki Wakatsuki presents a sociologically inspired approach and analyses Murakami’s position in the global literary market, arguing that the author’s work is characterised by an ‘every cosmopolitanism’ – that is, a sense of belonging in the ordinary, everyday world of the cosmopolitan exile – that lends his novels a truly trans-national familiarity and accessibility. Matthew C. Strecher focuses predominantly on the narrative qualities of Murakami’s work: in his contribution, Strecher argues that Murakami deliberately rejects the cultural specificities and authored-centred approach of the junbungaku tradition and replaces these with an ‘empty narrative’, one that allows the reader to fill in the narrative space with his or her own internal contents – and one that translates well into other linguistic and cultural systems. Murakami’s relation to junbungaku is also addressed in Gaston Franssen’s contribution, but Franssen shifts the attention to the meta-fictional construction of Murakami’s authorship. Presenting a reading of Murakami’s 1Q84, Franssen demonstrates that the novel can be understood as a sustained reflection on literary fame and celebrity authorship. In the final contribution, Motoko Akashi approaches Murakami from the perspective of translation studies: she points out that Murakami is not only a celebrity author, but also a celebrity translator. Moreover, Akashi demonstrates that there is an intriguing interrelation between Murakami’s authorial and translation practices, resulting in a critical interference between the presentation and evaluation of Murakami’s own ‘brand’ of literature and the work of the authors he has translated into Japanese. Together, the four contributions present a multi-faceted portrait of a celebrity author who may appear ‘ordinary’ at first, but reveals himself to be quite exceptional on closer inspection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.