Beyond the Music of Words: From the “Sound of Loneliness” to the “Resonance of Love” in Haruki Murakami's Literature
Beyond the Music of Words: From the “Sound of Loneliness” to the “Resonance of Love” in Haruki Murakami's Literature

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyzes musical elements in Murakami’s novels as a means to construct a late-modern form of “artistic syncretism”, while taking into account the stress ratio between the popular reception of Murakami’s literature and the critical rejection it faces coming from the literary establishment in Japan, on the one hand, and the subtle tension between the contents and the formal tackling of that very contents, on the other hand. A detailed analysis of the intrinsic entanglements between literature and music in Murakami’s novels reveals a latent progression from the employment of musical elements as a formal decorum in his early works (e.g., Norwegian Wood or South of the Border, West of the Sun) to the gradually organic integration of musical structures in the polyphonic design of his novels (e.g., The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore), with the climactic 1Q84 attaining symphonic dimensions both in the discursive practice and in the architectural construction.

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