The Hard Boiled Style of Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami's writing is often noted for the hard boiled style that goes back to Raymond Chandler and Raymond Carver - an author whom Murakami has translated into Japanese. This style is one that Murakami himself notes.

Here is an excerpt from an excellent interview with Murakami:

It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got that Swing: An Interview with Haruki Murakami

Sinda Gregory, Toshifumi Miyawaki, and Larry McCaffery

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/review/02 _2_inter/interview_Murakami.html

SG: You adopt an interesting version of the hard-boiled style in your novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland. What about the hard-boiled style appeals to you?

HM: Its authenticity. But I wasn't really interested in writing a hard-boiled mystery; I just wanted to use the hard-boiled mystery structure. I'm very interested in structure. I've been using other pop structures in my writing as well--science fiction structures, for example. I'm also using love story or romance structures. But as far as my thinking about the hard-boiled style, I'm interested in the fact that they are very individualist in orientation. The figure of the loner. I'm very interested in that because it isn't easy to live in Japan as an individualist or as a loner. I'm always thinking about this. I'm a novelist and I'm a loner, an individualist. I think that's why I came to this country. It's my dream to write hard-boiled mysteries.

SG: One of the conventions of the hard-boiled style is having the individualist/loner who at some point had a very bad pain; you typically get the feeling that this guy is trying to deal with this pain somehow, but he doesn't talk about that pain. You can see this in the work of somebody like Raymond Chandler: you don't know exactly what happened to Philip Marlowe to make him be what he is in the present--you only have this general sense that something bad happened to him that he is trying to live with. And I thought that might be part of why it's a good structure for you because so many of your characters are suffering from a similar sense of angst. So you can create characters whose lives in the present are very much a response to that pain without going into all the messy details of all the specifics of the pain. The pain is still there, but you're not wallowing in it.

HM: I think you're right. When I was younger I was very attracted to the hard-boiled fiction of writers like Chandler and Ross Macdonald, maybe because their detectives seemed to be so individual. No matter what happened to them, they were always able to live their own way, working in a way they like and never complaining about their misfortunes. I love that. I myself don't write directly about those kinds of pains and sufferings and everything. Of course, I have those pains and sufferings, but I don't talk so much about myself, generally. And I don't write about this because I have read so many books that care about those pains and pains and pains--I'm tired of it! So I don't write about it.

See also:

Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami and his Music

The Hard Boiled Style of Haruki Murakami

The Translation Work of Haruki Murakami

A chronological reading Listmania! titled: Read Haruki Murakami

Link to his latest book: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman 

See also Japanese author: Taichi Yamada