Dances with Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murukami Haruki (Michigan Monographs in Japanese) [Hardcover]

This book is excellent. By reading it you will learn a lot about Haruki Murakami and get a deeper view of his work. Also, you will get to learn about his first two novels, "Hear the Wind Sing" and "Pinball, 1973," which I think are only published in Japan.

Murakami Haruki is without doubt one of the more important and inventive Japanese novelists of today, one whose works are widely read on both sides of the Pacific. However, this very popularity tends to make him something of an anathema in academia, which shows of course in the relatively conspicuous dearth of critical studies focused on him and his fiction (in English, that is). For that reason alone, then, a good book-length monograph on Murakami like Matthew Strecher's "Dances with Sheep" is welcome indeed, if for nothing else than to start the critical discussion on Murakami off and running.

And it is a good start in many ways. Strecher has a knack for picking out the common themes and significant motifs in Murakami's fiction and elucidating them in meaningful ways, all while clarifying his contextual place in the cultural milieu of late twentieth-century Japan. He has read widely in Japanese critical studies of Murakami and shares their insights, opinions, and approaches with the reader. And he's willing to take a stand for Murakami's serious relevance over and against some (like Oe Kenzaburo, no less) who'd dismiss Murakami's novels as so much mindless, consumerist fluff--in fact, Strecher counterintuitively and convincingly argues that Murakami's fiction contains an implicit critique of Japan's overly consumerist society and its impact.

That said, the book has issues. The author's own insights are usually quite on target, but then he seems compelled to bring in the jargon-ridden obscurities of French critical theory. Annoying but understandable given the popularity of this methodology nowadays, I suppose, but here it's managed in the clumsiest of ways--that is, Strecher will go on and on for pages expounding on some French thinker's postmodern notions, and then start a new paragraph with something like "that goes for Murakami too" or "Murakami thinks the same thing" and then kind of plug and chug these extraneous ideas into Murakami's novels as-is. And as with most postmodern hot air, too, inane aberrations inevitably result, the funniest being when Strecher claims at length that there's no difference between history and fiction since it's all just subjective narrative linguistic construction--and then takes the Japanese government to task for denying or whitewashing past Japanese atrocities, implying that there is such a thing as objective historical fact after all.

This ties in loosely with a greater problem, the author's utter failure to live up to one of his chief stated aims at the beginning of the book. The preface, in fact, where Strecher tells us that, given both the complexity of Murakami's fiction AND its popularity, he intends this book to be useful to both the scholar of Japanese literature and the casual, general reader who reads Murakami only in translation. He totally blows it for the latter. First off, just logistically, this is a rare and commonly unavailable book, and so unlikely to fall into the hands of the general reader in the first place. Second of all, Strecher decides to limit himself to works already translated into English and then consistently breaks this rule (though most of these have been translated since, so the passage of time has helped him out here)--he also relies extensively on two early short stories of key importance by Murakami that, okay, have been translated but that are all but impossible to get a hold of in America, and so ultimately just as unavailable to the general reader as something untranslated.

Finally, the inclusion of the French postmodernist stuff (including the obscurantist psychobabble of Lacan) is bound to strike any casual reader as inexplicable nonsense, and Strecher's attempt to make Murakami seem "political" by trying to compare his wonderfully subtle fictional worlds with the crackpot Marxist rantings of Louis Althusser seems very ill-advised--for some strange reason Marxism still has some respectability in the ivory tower, but out in the real world it's dismissed as a dead ideology and good riddance, when people even think about it at all, that is. And its inclusion here just doesn't ring true. Murakami's quest for individual identity is every bit as inimical to Marxism and class warfare as it is to hyper-capitalist consumerism and the powers-that-be. It's a sublimely humanist quest, in fact, making Murakami a strangely reluctant postmodernist indeed.

Still, this latter insight would never have occurred to me so clearly without this thought-provoking book. So even if the book has problems, even if you disagree with huge chunks of it, it's still a very useful and helpful way to ponder the fine novels of this popular and complex novelist. Certainly this must have been Strecher's core intention at the start of it all, and in this he succeeds admirably.

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