[In the following essay, Matsuoka compares A Wild Sheep Chase to Raymond Carver's “Blackbird Pie,” tracing similarities between motifs, themes, and characters to illustrate the “confluence” of American and Japanese fictional conventions in contemporary world literature.]

In the preface to From Puritanism to Postmodernism, Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland write:

Now, by virtue not only of its quality but its modern resonance, and indeed America's own power of influence and distribution as well as its possession of a world language, American literature more than ever exists for more people than simply the Americans. It is part of, and does much to shape, the writing of literature through much of the contemporary world.¹

Twentieth-century American literature has indeed made a strong impact on Japanese literature. And since the 1980s, Japanese novels and stories have influenced and also exhibited the influence of contemporary American works. Japanese million-seller writers such as Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana are read widely in the United States: Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase (trans. 1989) and Yoshimoto's Kitchen (trans. 1993) were popular among both readers and reviewers, the latter of whom do not fail to point out that the novels are very similar to American stories. In 1992, two of Murakami's short stories, “Sleep” and “Barn Burning,” appeared in The New Yorker, and these and other stories have been published in the first English collection of Murakami's stories, The Elephant Vanishes. It was of course The New Yorker as well that published a number of stories by Raymond Carver, whom Murakami admires, and whose stories Murakami has been translating into Japanese. Thus readers in America can read a Japanese author as a contemporary of an American author in the same magazine. Similarly, in Japan Murakami's short stories and his translations and interpretations of Carver's stories as well as his interview with Carver have been published in literary magazines such as Shincho and Eureka: the former, an established literary magazine circulated among avid readers of literature, and the latter, a more specialized and academic magazine on both domestic and international cultural issues, including current literature. Murakami's readers trust his choice of translations, especially those of Carver's stories. So in this case as well, readers in Japan can read contemporary Japanese and American stories in a similar literary environment.

The reasons for this phenomenon include the growing similarities in lifestyle and literary background between Japan and America. Accordingly, the similarities of Japanese to American fiction should no longer be seen as merely a matter of influence and reception. Here recalling Bradbury and Ruland's remarks on American literature in the broadest sense, that is, as a world literature, we should come to understand Japanese and American works as parts of contemporary modern literature. In this paper I would like to give an example of not only the influence of one writer on another, but also of the confluence of the works of writers in Japan and America in our time by comparing two works of Murakami Haruki and Raymond Carver.

Murakami Haruki has immersed himself in modern American literature from the 1920s to the present, and these works have become his literary foundation, just as they have become the literary foundation of modern American writers like Carver. Japanese authors such as Soseki, Tanizaki, and Kawabata are seldom discussed in relation to Murakami's literature. Murakami had found particular affinity to the literature of the American 1920s, especially to F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, his extensive reading list includes Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, Truman Capote, John Updike, John Cheever, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, John Irving, Raymond Carver, and Tim O'Brien. He is also a serious reader of science fiction. Consequently, we can observe his pastiche of various works of American literature: A Wild Sheep Chase is based in plot and theme on Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye as Murakami himself admits,² and Professor Koshikawa notes that the narrative style and form of American Romance in Murakami's Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando [Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World] (1985) and Noruei no mori [Norwegian Wood] (1987) are similarly related to The Great Gatsby (1925).³ Thus, inside of the modern legacy of American literature, Murakami reads and studies American fiction and applies its different styles and modes: memory, romance, science fiction, detective story, and realism. Murakami's endeavors show one typical characteristic of modern writers: they are so self-conscious about writing a work of literature that they do not allow themselves to indulge in just one form of writing. Murakami also frequently explains and analyzes his own writings: he thinks that he owes his exuberant, fanciful way of storytelling to John Irving and his attempts to depict the subtle but realistic and humanistic depiction of life to Raymond Carver.

Translating some works of American fiction into Japanese is another way in which Murakami has immersed himself in American literature and, at the same time, introduced these works to Japanese readers. Among the authors he has translated are F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, Truman Capote, Tim O'Brien, and most significantly in the opinions of many critics, Carver. In the afterword to Sasayakadakeredo yakuni tatsu koto, Murakami has written on how challenging it is to put Carver's characteristic English into Japanese.⁴ By choosing the works above, he reveals again his inclination to the two main streams of American fiction: extraordinary and exuberant story telling, and the subtle but humanistic depiction of life.

In order to examine the relationship of Murakami and Carver, I would like to discuss Part Two of Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase and Raymond Carver's “Blackbird Pie,” one of his later short stories included in the collection Where I'm Calling From. In the afterword to his translation of “Blackbird Pie,” Murakami calls its situation “Carveresque,” meaning “a family drama of collapse,” a situation in which a wife leaves her husband.⁵ Similar is the second part of Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase, where it becomes apparent that not only the situation, but the style, the language, and the theme of these two stories are quite close. Both narratives are delivered in the first person and are self-reflective. Their language is limited to the description of concrete objects, emphasizing the detachment from emotions. Finally, both protagonists realize through self-reflection their alienation from the society and confront the absolute solitude of death.

A Wild Sheep Chase is a fantasy adventure. The protagonist is almost thirty years old, an ordinary man, aimless and mired in the monotony of the quotidian world. He is, however, forced to go to Hokkaido on a quest to find a special sheep. He is guided by his dead friend, helped by a girl with splendid ears, a “sheep man,” and Dr. Sheep. Finally, he confronts death, but manages to return to the present world ready to live his life. As mentioned above, Murakami here takes the framework of a detective story, also applying the techniques of fantasy literature. Part Two of A Wild Sheep Chase marks the beginning of the adventure. When his wife leaves him, the protagonist realizes that he is a total failure in life, a social misfit who leads a dull, unremarkable existence. In spite of the fantastic and mysterious development of the main part, Part Two is written in a most quiet and realistic manner in order to convey the ordinary lifestyle of the protagonist. In this sense, Part Two comes closer to Carver's style of writing than any other works by Murakami.

Part Two of A Wild Sheep Chase is divided into two chapters: juroppo arukukoto ni tsuite [On Walking Sixteen Steps] and kanojo no shometsu, shashin no shometsu, slip no shometsu [Disappearance of Her, Disappearance of Photographs, Disappearance of Slips]. In the first section, the protagonist comes home drunk to find his wife sleeping at the kitchen table. He has returned from the funeral of a woman, a former lover from his college days. One month ago his wife had told him that she wanted a divorce and left him, and now she has returned to the apartment in order to take her belongings. The conversation is spare, but we learn that the wife is no longer able to endure his indifference toward her. After she leaves, in the second chapter, he finds that she has taken everything with her; she even cut out all her pictures from their photo albums. He realizes that he misses her and wishes that she could have left at least one of her slips, so he would have something to cling to for a while. He thinks of a slip because he remembers that in one American story he has read, a husband places his wife's slip over the back of a dining chair for months after she has left him.

Carver's “Blackbird Pie” is not so typical in style as other stories by Carver. Carver quite intentionally tries to write a mystery, perhaps one of his attempts to write a different kind of story toward the end of his life. “Blackbird Pie” is a strange, nightmare-like story in which the narrator-protagonist tells us about one evening when his wife suddenly leaves him. One evening after dinner in late summer, someone pushes under the door of his study a long letter, which explains all the reasons why his wife is leaving him. He resists reading the letter, but just skims through it. Although he admits the charges made against him, he claims strangely that the handwriting is not hers and, therefore, that whatever is said in the letter is not credible. While he hesitates to talk to his wife in the living room, two stray horses come into their yard, shortly followed by a deputy sheriff and a rancher who are called by the wife to take them away. The wife asks them to give her a ride to the town, and thus she leaves the house in the rancher's pickup truck on the foggy night. Sometime later, the narrator comes across her wedding picture, which he throws away with other belongings of hers, and ostensibly loses the letter. The husband is left alone and lost, and realizes that their separation is final.

In both stories the failure of a marriage is caused by the failure of communication between a husband and a wife in otherwise normal settings of daily life: a talk over a kitchen table in an apartment house or near the kitchen sink in a summer house, and so on. In Wild Sheep Chase, the couple has not seen each other for one month and when they meet, they are not in a condition to converse, although it seems that the wife has returned with hopes of reconciliation, only to find that her husband has stayed out all night. Both of them are caught up in their own sorrows and despair: he feels guilty for failing to help his former lover, and the wife, on the other hand, is tormented by love-hate feelings toward him. Neither of them understands the other's sadness and cannot be gentle enough to start a talk. To her request for a divorce one month ago, he answers, “it's up to you,” refusing to take any responsibility in the matter.⁶ He thinks that “her disappearance was due to circumstances beyond [his] control” (20). On the other hand, when he mentions the death of his former lover, the wife dismisses his sorrow and criticizes his noncommittal and indifferent attitude—the most painful criticism to him now. Rejected by his wife, he does not pursue the subject. The wife also gives up trying to talk with him and just leaves fragments of words behind her: a note on his desk to tell where things are and what else to do.

In “Blackbird Pie,” the communication between husband and wife is more unnatural. Although the couple have lived together in a rented house for the whole summer, it seems that they have not talked to each other, not even routine conversations over meals:

On the evening in question, we ate dinner rather silently but not unpleasantly, as was our custom. From time to time I looked up and smiled across the table as a way of showing my gratitude for the delicious meal—poached salmon, fresh asparagus, rice pilaf with almonds.⁷

Also, the protagonist wants to go back to his room as soon as possible although he blames his wife in a twisted turn of thought:

“I think I'll go to my room now.”

She took her hands out of the water and rested them against the counter. I thought she might proffer a word or two of encouragement for the work I was engaged in, but she didn't. Not a peep. It was as if she were waiting for me to leave the kitchen so she could enjoy her privacy.

(498)

Despite the professed doubts of the narrator, it seems that the wife pushes her letter under the door of his study instead of talking to him in person, even making sure beforehand that he is in the room. Although the narrator keeps telling his readers that there was nothing peculiar on that day, or in the conversations between them, there are many hints that he rejects communication with his wife by shutting himself up in his study. The letter starts as follows:

Dear,

Things are not good. Things, in fact, are bad. Things have gone from bad to worse. And you know what I'm talking about. We've come to the end of the line. It's over with us. Still, I find myself wishing we could have talked about it. It's been such a long time now since we've talked.

(493)

While the wife is desperate to talk, the husband is not. He refuses to talk or to read the letter, insisting that it is not her handwriting. Curious about what is happening, however, he reluctantly reads the beginning of the letter and skims the rest although he gets most of the meaning out of it as if he knew what she would write from the beginning. Even so he still refuses to talk with her about the contents of the letter.

At the end of “Blackbird Pie” the protagonist says, “to take a wife is to take a history. And if that's so, then I understand that I'm outside history now” (510). The break-up of a marriage is one of the most common scenes in modern life, but with its commonness the authors present the alienation of an individual from the society, because marriage is a social convention which relates the individual to society.

Murakami's Noruei no mori [Norwegian Wood] depicts a similar situation. Midori, one of the protagonist's girlfriends, writes him a letter of accusation while sitting on a park bench next to him, then tells him to read it only after he gets home. She is very angry at him because he is indifferent to her and impossible to talk to; thus she decides to write a letter right in front of him in order to communicate with him. Although the situation is more comical here than in “Blackbird,” the letter writing is the final and desperate means of communication between frustrated women and their indifferent men. Including Midori's letter, the letters are very often the desperate or final means of communications in Murakami's novels: in A Wild Sheep Chase, for example, the protagonist receives letters from his friend who is going to kill himself, letters which urge him to make a move, and in Noruei no mori, for another girlfriend, Naoko, letter writing is the last line to keep her in touch with reality even though eventually she becomes unable even to write letters. As literary devices, the letters in Murakami's works develop the plot, reveal the protagonists' alter ego, and enable the characters to express internal dialogues as first-person narratives which finally make the text self-referential and self-conscious.

Carver uses letters to suggest the situation, for example, of waiting, of hoping, or of having to make a decision as in “What Do You Do in San Francisco?” “Collectors,” and “Elephant.” A letter is important as something which happens in everyday life, but in “Blackbird” the content or the text of the letter itself is important: the story is actually about writing. After his close analysis of the text of “Blackbird,” Randolph Paul Runyon suggests that the letter may have been written by the husband himself rather than by his wife.⁸ This is another resemblance between Part Two of A Wild Sheep Chase and “Blackbird.”

Both works are written in a detached style. Their protagonists do not talk much to explain, support, or to excuse themselves, and yet they are eloquent in their depiction of things and of their reflections. Murakami's protagonist describes the things around him tersely and makes them speak more eloquently than human words: the elevator in the hall, the red shoes in the entrance, the strap of a slip seen from the wife's dress, the toilet articles, the photographs, and the slip. The title of the second chapter also demonstrates this equal treatment of people and objects: “Disappearance of Her, Disappearance of Photographs, Disappearance of the Slip.” They tell us about the helpless situation of the drunken husband: the sadness, loneliness, isolation, fear, and humiliation. Carver's protagonist tells us about two different things: what is happening now, (his wife is leaving) and history. He is worried about his wife, but he tries to maintain a light and playful tone by talking about history as presented by the title, “Blackbird Pie”: he says “Ask me anything about the Tartans. … Tannenberg? Simple as blackbird pie. The famous four and twenty that were set before the king” (492). He attempts to convince us that he is confident and capable of mastering the facts. In doing so, He tries to gain our trust but, ironically, loses it. This playful tone in the face of adversity can be observed when Murakami's protagonist calls himself “the Most Courteous Drunk” and “The Earliest to Rise, the Last Boxcar over the Bridge.” Here too, the pose taken by the narrator tends to make him seem somewhat unreliable.

In regard to moral judgment, the two husbands are also similar. They both realize that they have hurt others, but it seems too late for them to seek reconciliation. They both know that they have been making mistakes in their lives. In Murakami's novel it is only after his wife leaves the place and after he discovers that she has taken everything, even photographs of hers from their album, that he realizes that he misses her, just as he suffered from the sense of guilt and loss only after the death of his former lover. In “Blackbird Pie,” while the protagonist reads over the letter, it occurs to him several times that he should go to talk to his wife, but every time, he hesitates and never leaves his room. Finally when he sees her, she is standing on the porch, all ready to leave him, completely dressed up and carrying her suitcase with all of her belongings in it. In both cases, the hesitation and inaction of the husbands are considered confirmation of the charges against them, not only by the wives but also by the readers.

Furthermore, in both stories the protagonists are unable to take any action or to make any decision or judgment. Instead they indulge themselves in drinking or hiding in a room. Murakami's protagonist, instead of trying to persuade his wife not to leave, encourages her to do so because he understands that she has realized that he, not she, is socially unfit (37). Carver's protagonist stays in his room as though he were paralyzed and incapable of stopping her. When the Sheriff and the rancher come and force him to face the situation, he is intimidated. Meeting them he regrets that he does not have a hat on because these two men are dressed in their outfits for action with their hats, boots, raincoats—even a pistol. The sheriff and the rancher talk about the wife and the break-up of his marriage openly in front of him, and the sheriff even warns him neither to argue nor to make any trouble. One of the men takes her away from the house. The visitors seem to be intruding in the husband's personal life, but he just stands there unable to make any defensive or offensive move.

The wives, on the other hand, are more practical and realistic: they make decisions, judgments, choices, and take actions to change their situations. They have endured living with their husbands, but now they ponder their marriages, decide to end them officially in a letter or by filing a paper for divorce. They also clean out their belongings and refuse or do not expect any help from their husbands for leaving. The reason why they leave is also the same: the deterioration of their husbands. Even their final words are practically identical. In A Wild Sheep Chase, the wife says, answering her husband's request for her not to go, “But I'm going nowhere staying with you” (21). In “Blackbird Pie” the wife says, “Well, I don't know what I can say now except the truth: I can't go it another step” (499). The wives make a move, while the husbands become more and more introverted and inactive.

The attachment of both husbands to the objects their wives wear, to the debris they leave behind or to their images after they have gone makes them look more trivial and helpless. Murakami's protagonist finds his wife's red pumps in the entrance and understands right away that something is wrong. Then, after she leaves, he counts the things his wife took with her one by one, and every time he confirms to himself the fact that she left him: “Her cosmetics, toiletries, and curlers, her tooth brush, hair dryer, assortment of pills, boots, sandals, slippers, hat boxes, accessories, handbags, shoulder bags, suitcases, purses, her ever-tidy stock of underwear, stockings, and socks, letters, everything with least womanly scent was gone” (20). But most of all, he wishes that his wife had left one of her slips, so that he could act out the plot of an American story. In “Blackbird,” in the scenes on the porch and in the yard, the husband keeps thinking about the hat and high-heel shoes the wife is wearing. He remembers that she wore the same hat with a veil at her mother's funeral, and he watches her walk in the shoes on the grass in the yard: for him they are entirely out of place just as Murakami's protagonist feels about his wife's red pumps. Then at the moment his wife leaves, the protagonist thinks of a particular wedding picture of his wife, remembering how happy she was when they married. A few days later while he looks through the belongings of his wife, he throws the picture away, telling himself he does not care.

Thus the wives represent social values and moral judgments on their husbands, and become, in a sense, their executioners. The wife-executioner seems to be a self-reflective, self-penalizing device in these works. Both husbands are charged, sentenced, and punished by their wives. The husbands accept their charges, understand their responsibility, and are punished.⁹ Death is repeatedly suggested in both stories (by the description or mention of funerals, a funeral hat, a foggy night, and a sound sleep) in order to prepare the reader for the endings in which both protagonists face terminal loss and isolation, that is, their own death. Part Two of Wild Sheep Chase is “rounded with a sleep”:

To her, I was already lost. Even if she still loved me, it didn't matter. We'd gotten too used to each other's role. She understood it instinctively; I knew it from experience. There was no hope.

So it was that she and her slip vanished forever. Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. But all in all, this was hardly what you could call a tragedy.

July 24, 8:25 A. M.

I checked the numerals of the digital clock, closed my eyes, and fell asleep.

(21–22)

At the conclusion of Carver's “Blackbird Pie,” the narrator discusses the end of the affair and the end of his marriage as though it were the end of his life:

She's gone for good. She is. I can feel it. Gone and never coming back.

Period. Not ever. …

It could be said, for instance, that to take a wife is to take a history. And if that's so, then I understand that I'm outside history now—like horses and fog. Or you could say that my history has left me. Or that I'm having to go on without history. Or that history will now have to do without me—. … That's when it dawns on me that autobiography is the poor man's history. And that I am saying good-by to history. Good-bye, my darling.

(510–11)

In both works, we see the depiction of a humiliated man. Murakami discussed the subject with Carver in a 1984 interview. Asked by Carver what aspect of his stories are accepted in Japan, Murakami answered, “there is something common between your stories and traditional Japanese short stories. … there is some subtle change in a rather domestic situation, and the situation is altered although there is no change in the essential level and the story is cut off at that point.”¹⁰ Tess Gallagher later remembered the day and wrote in the foreword for the Japanese translation of Ultra Marine that they—Murakami, Carver, and Gallagher herself—concluded that “Japanese readers, just like the American middle class, have broken down and agonized, that probably there is something like humiliation among the life of the labor class which is common in both Japan and America.”¹¹ Raymond Carver himself refers to this discussion in his poem, “The Projectile,” a poem he dedicated to Murakami, in the collection Ultramarine:

We sipped tea. Politely musing
on possible reasons for the success
of my books in your country. Slipped
into talk of pain and humiliation
you find occurring, and reoccurring,
in my stories. And that element
of sheer chance. How all this translates
in terms of sales.

(11)

The last ironic turn of thought, which deflates the seriousness of the point being made, could easily have been made by Murakami. Both writers deflate the narrators in the works we have considered here.

The humiliation of a man in a rather quiet ordinary life is repeatedly depicted in Japanese literature in modern times. Murakami is not an exception—Oe Kenzaburo has said recently that Murakami belongs to the school of Maruya Saiichi, who wrote “shimin shosetsu” [stories of (average) citizens]. While Japanese writers come to resemble their American counterparts in writing styles and in situations, American writers of the 1980s, sometimes called minimalists, have thoroughly explored the theme of the humiliation of common people in everyday life. In a passage from “The Art of Fiction,” which serves as epigraph to a recent collection of his writings, Carver quoted Chekhov: “Friend, you don't have to write about extraordinary people who accomplish extraordinary and memorable deeds.”¹² In No Heroics, Please, he says that reading Chekhov changed him.¹³ Murakami is attracted by this aspect of Carver's short stories, as his selection for his first translation of Carver shows: Yoru ni naruto sake wa [At Night the Salmon Move]¹⁴ includes “Feathers,” “The Pheasant,” Vitamins,” “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” “Jerry and Molly and Sam,” and “My Father's Life.”

For both authors, the everyday life of ordinary people in modern times is the basis of their writings. The stories concern common events such as marriage or divorce, having a job or losing one, drinking and eating, love and making love. Naturally, their characters are families, mainly husband and wife, and their friends and colleagues. Common images are letters, telephones, TV sets, and cars. Their characters often talk over a kitchen table with a cup of coffee, a can of beer, and so on. Telephones, letters, and unexpected visitors such as salesmen are intruders into an ordinary life, and they reveal the inner life of their characters or their most essential concerns.

In the 1950s and '60s Oe's so-called “translation Japanese,” that is, Japanese which sounds like a translation from a foreign language, was more stiff and rigid like a literal translation of English syntax, and this difference from the traditional Japanese prose added a new tone to Japanese literature. In contrast, Murakami's Japanese is more idiomatic and yet carries the flow of the American English. While Oe tries to clarify the ideas and processes of thinking with his translation-like Japanese, Murakami concentrates on creating tones and feelings in his writings: hard-boiled, detached, casual, humorous, and self-conscious. Some of the typical phrases by his protagonists are “sore wa warukunai” [Not bad!] and “yareyare” [Just great!]. As a matter of fact, when we read Murakami's Japanese, we can sense the English expressions behind it at the same time. Readers with some knowledge of English (actually most Japanese people nowadays) enjoy these kinds of narratives, those which seem to be written in both Japanese and English at the same time. In one example cited above, the wife says, “Demo, anata to issho ni itemo mo dokonimo ikenainoyo” (37). In Japanese this sounds unnatural and even contradictory. Literally it means, “I'm not able to go any other place as long as I stay with you.” Actually this phrase contains Murakami's literal translation of the American idiom “going somewhere” in the sense of progressing or achieving, something which is not idiomatic in Japanese.

In a recent study on translations into Japanese, Inoue Ken says that by translating Western literature we have acquired something which might be called, “translation Japanese,” which is neither natural nor idiomatic because it is restricted by the syntax of the original language.¹⁵ And this difference from common Japanese has been renewing Japanese literature like Oe Kenzaburo's writings in the late 1950s and '60s. Thirty years after Oe, Inoue continues, Murakami Haruki has appeared in a similar context, but our everyday life has become filled with so much of translation that his Japanese, which bears traces of American English, does not seem so very foreign anymore for Japanese readers (5–6). The American English-like Japanese of such writers as Murakami is also authentic Japanese at the present time. In his case, especially, he translates contemporary American fiction into Japanese, and his readers read both his fiction and his translations of American fiction interchangeably. The readers do not distinguish his original works from the American works because of a difference in Japanese language alone. Here are some examples from the two works discussed above:

Doa o san'bun no ichi bakari akete sokoni karada o suberikomase, doa o shimeru. Genkan wa shin to shiteita. Hitsuyo ijo ni shin to shiteita. Sorekara boku wa ashimoto no akai panpusu no sonzai ni kizuita. Minareta akai panpusu datta. Sorewa dorodarake no tennis shoes to yasumono no beach sandal ni hasamarete, kisetsu hazure no Christmas present mitai ni mieta. Sono ue ni komakai chiri no yona chinmoku ga ukande ita.

(Hitsuji o megaru bōken, 26)

The door maybe one-third open, I slid my body in, shutting the door behind me. The entryway was dead silent. More silent than it ought to be.

That's when I noticed the red pumps at my feet. Red pumps I've seen before. Parked in between my mud-caked tennis shoes and a pair of cheap beach sandals, like some out-of-season Christmas present. A silence hovered about them, fine as dust.

(Wild Sheep, trans. Birnbaum 14)

Next is an example of a passage from Murakami's translation of Carver's “Blackbird Pie,” with the original following it:

Aru yo, heya ni iru tokini, roka no ho ni monooto ga kikoeta. Shigoto no te o yasumete sochira ni me o yaruto, doa no shita kara huto ga sashikomareru noga mieta. Futo wa kanari atsukattaga, demo doa no shita o kugurinukerarenaihodo atsukuwa nakatta. Futo niwa watasi no namae ga kaite ari, sono naka niwa watashi no tsuma karano tegami ni misekaketa mono ga haitte ita.

(“Blackbird,” trans. by Murakami 429)

I was in my room one night when I heard something in the corridor. I looked up from my work and saw an envelope slide under the door. It was a thick envelope, but not so thick it couldn't be pushed under the door.

(“Blackbird,” 491)

The first passage describes the moment when Murakami's protagonist realizes that his wife has returned to their apartment, and the second is the beginning of “Blackbird.” Both establish the uneasiness of the protagonists, who prepare themselves for defence, and introduce the readers into the stories and to the notion that something different is going to happen. Both passages actually turn out to be common scenes, the breakup of a marriage, but for the protagonists they mean a more fundamental change inside: the beginning of a trip to the world of death, or a blackout of consciousness. Both passages are simple and colloquial, but the omen of tragicomedy is sufficiently presented. The similarities in style and tone suggest that we may consider them contemporary fictions rather than classifying them by countries.

In the 1980s and '90s, however, English and American culture had already penetrated throughout the mass body of the Japanese population not only by books and education but also by movies, music, mass-media, and especially by the rapidly Americanized life style. Nowadays American English and the American way of life are everyday reality to many Japanese, especially in urban areas: in the morning many city dwellers have coffee, eat McDonald's hamburgers for lunch and have pizzas delivered to their home within thirty minutes for supper. They talk about American movies and listen to American music, including the Beatles' songs of the 1960s, which are in a sense Anglicized American rock songs. The middle-class life with a car and a house, which had once been thought the American Dream, is common. Relations between men and women have also changed, and the divorce rate is increasing. These are the contemporary scenes and situations common in Japanese and American literature.

Moreover, the exuberant exposure to American literature is not limited to Murakami; a whole generation of young people is familiar with it. So from the opening page of Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, Japanese readers come across familiar names and phrases from American fiction. When the bar owner's name is “Jay,” and “the rich” are berated, how could we help thinking of The Great Gatsby? It seems that the more Japanese readers are familiar with American language and literature, the more they can understand and appreciate Murakami's works.

Murakami's success in the United States shows the change in attitude of American readers and confirms the idea of confluence. American readers no longer expect mystery and ambiguity from Japanese literature, but they admire Murakami's works because they are similar works of modern American literature. Originally, Murakami was not pleased with the idea of his novels being translated into English. He maintained that his Japanese was a result of his effort to adjust and craft English expressions and styles into Japanese, so that, if his Japanese were put back into to English, the characteristics of his English-like Japanese would be lost. Actually, his Japanese seems to have helped smooth translation into English.

Notes

1. Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (New York: Viking, 1991) xix.

2. Murakami Haruki, “Raymond Carver,” spec. issue of Eureka (June 1990): 242.

3. Yoshiaki Koshikawa, “Noruei no mori: American romansu no kanosei?” Eureka (June 1989).

4. Raymond Carver, Sasayakadakeredo yakuni tatsu koto [A Small Good Thing], trans. into Japanese by Murakami Haruki (Tokyo: Chuokoron, 1989).

5. Raymond Carver, “Blackbird Pie,” trans. into Japanese by Murakami Haruki, Shincho (Jan. 1993) 448.

6. Murakami Haruki, A Wild Sheep Chase, trans. Alfred Birnbaum (Tokyo: Kodan-sha International, 1989) 21. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

7. Raymond Carver, “Blackbird Pie,” Where I'm Calling From (New York: Vintage, 1989) 497. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

8. Randolph Paul Runyon, Reading Raymond Carver (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1992) 195.

9. Carver treats this theme more fully in the story “Intimacy” in Where I'm Calling From.

10. Raymond Carver, Yoru ni naruto sake wa [At Night the Salmon Move] Chuo Koron (1985) 180. My translation.

11. Raymond Carver, Umi no muko kara [Ultramarine], trans. into Japanese by Kuroda Emiko (Tokyo: Ronso-sha, 1990). My translation. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

12. Raymond Carver, “The Art of Fiction,” A New Path to the Waterfall (New York: Atlantic Monthly P, 1989).

13. Raymond Carver, No Heroics, Please (New York: Vintage, 1992) 21.

14. Actually, this is the title to a collection of Carver's poetry, but Murakami used it as the title of his translation of a number of Carver's stories and poems.

15. Ken Inoue, Sakka no yakushita sekai no bungaku (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1992). Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.