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I don't think there's a particular genre or group name, no. To be honest, I'm actually thinking of a fairly disparate group of authors, who would probably be either angry or just confused about being compared to each other. It's just that a lot of the things that seem most unusual when you first read Murakami - the qualities that he's often lauded as unique for, at least in the West - seem to crop up in a variety of other Japanese authors. It's the mood, I suppose. The matter-of-fact, simplistic style, the frequent use of a deadpan sort of first-person narration, and above all the way that the interior and exterior get confused, or blended. The way that you can't quite tell where the narrator's emotional state ends, and the outside world starts, or vice-versa. And these authors often seem to write about somewhat similar topics. Magical, or supernatural, or simply incongruous elements cropping up in the everyday world, or liminal characters or areas who seem to belong to more than one world.
Anyway, here's a couple of authors that you might enjoy if you like Murakami.
Banana Yoshimoto is probably just as famous as Murakami - perhaps more so domestically. She has a bit of a softer edge, with emotions taking a more prominent role, but seems to deal with similar themes. She mostly writes shorter fiction, apart from one very long and extremely meandering novel, Amrita. Lizard is a collection of short stories that would probably be worth trying if you enjoy Murakami's shorter pieces. Harboiled & Hard Luck is my favourite, though - two novellas, the first about a woman hiking through the mountains on the anniversary of her girlfriend's death who has a run-in with a deeply creepy little roadside shrine, and the second about a woman whose sister is in a coma.
Yoko Tawada is less well-known, although she won the Akugawa Prize in 1996. I've only read The Bridgroom Was a Dog, which is made up of three deeply strange stories. Here's the blurb for the title story:
...an offbeat cram school teacher tells her pupils a story about a little princess whose hand in marriage is promised to a dog as a reward for licking her bottom clean; only to have her own life turned upside down by the sudden appearance of a dog-like man with a predilection for the same part of her anatomy
Kobo Abe is from the generation of writers before Murakami's. He's most famous for The Woman in the Dunes, which I've never read. I have read The Box Man and Secret Rendezvous. Both of them definitely made an impression on me, but I'm not sure I could really claim to have enjoyed either. The narrator of the The Box Man is homeless and wears a large cardboard box over his head at all times. He spends the novel being stalked by various people who want to either shoot, seduce or become him. Secret Rendezvous is about a man whose wife is taken away by an ambulance in the middle of the night, although there's nothing wrong with her and neither of them called for an ambulance. He goes to the hospital, which is maze-like and mostly underground. He can't find his wife, but a man who always dresses in a horse costume appoints him to be the hospital's chief of security. I don't think I ever actually finished it; I remember finding it quite upsetting.
Out of the three of them, Banana Yoshimoto is probably the least odd, and also the closest to Murakami. I was going to mention a few other writers, including a couple from China who might be of interest, but I think that can wait for another time. |
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