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Books like 1q84
Books like 1q84









Indeed, the criticism leveled at Murakami by the Japanese literary establishment has been remarkably consistent. Yet in 2014, Murakami told an interviewer that he considers himself “a kind of outcast of the Japanese literary world,” an “ugly duckling” who has never been embraced by writers and critics. His work has been translated into 50 languages, and he is often named as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize. Murakami’s celebrity in his native country is almost matched by his popularity abroad. In 2009, when he published 1Q84, a huge novel in three parts, it immediately became one of the best-selling books in Japanese history, selling a million copies in just one month. But when she writes that “Japan’s best and brightest have turned their backs on literature,” there is a pointed and inevitable reflection on Murakami, who is by far the most popular novelist writing in Japan today. The name of Haruki Murakami does not appear in this passage or in Mizumura’s book at all.

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One hundred years from now, readers of those works will have no idea what it was like to live in the current Heisei period (starting in 1989) of Japan.” Like many other critics, Mizumura sees Americanization as a synonym for deracination, commodification, and dumbing-down: “Works of contemporary fiction tend to resemble global cultural goods, which, like Hollywood blockbuster films, do not require language-or translation-in the truest sense of the word.” “Representative works of today’s Japanese literature,” she writes, “often read like rehashes of American literature-ignoring not only the Japanese literary heritage but, more critically, the glaring fact that Japanese society and American society differ. In The Fall of Language in the Age of English, Minae Mizumura offers a harsh judgment on the state of Japanese literature.











Books like 1q84