Study On Haruki Murakami's Novels In Post-modern Context

Among contemporary Japanese writers, Haruki Murakami is one of the most well-known writers overseas. The study of Haruki Murakami's works is continuous and in-depth in Japan, while the study has not really begun in China. Hopefully, this dissertation will fill the gap and blaze a trail for other scholars who are interested in the study of Haruki Murakami's works.This dissertation deals exclusively with the novels of Haruki Murakami. The aim is to, by means of studying Haruki Murakami's life experiences and his creations in a post-modern era, reveal the post-modern characteristics of his novels in terms of content and the innovation in the way of writing. His important pieces will be analyzed with all his works taken into consideration. Based on case studies, the dissertation explores how Haruki Murakami kept a sharp eye on the problems in contemporary Japanese society and how he used unique ways of writing to create literary works on some major subjects. This dissertation also discusses the value of Haruki Murakami's novels in a post-modern society and the significance of the study of his works. In the theoretical framework of post-modern poetry and narration, the dissertation scrutinizes Haruki Murakami's works from the perspectives of stylistics, subjects, art and aesthetic.The first chapter deals with the relationship between Haruki Murakami's personal experiences and Japanese post-modern context and summarizes his creations and translations in a global way. Understanding Japanese post-modern context is an important prerequisite of understanding post-modern characteristics of Haruki Murakami's works, while the influence of translation is reflected in the innovation of his way of writing. The second chapter focuses on novels created by Haruki Murakami, giving a bird's-eye view of the post-modern characteristics of Haruki Murakami's novels in terms of content and probing into the narrative features of the works. Based on the theories of post-modern poetry and narration, the dissertation points out that all Haruki Murakami's novels reflect upon modernity, which is an essential characteristic of post-modern literature. And at the same time, the novels inherited subjects on history and self-consciousness from Japanese modern literature. But Haruki Murakami made a change in the narrative tradition of Japanese modern literature, namely discourse and story. The change is as much a breakthrough in art as an end to elitism in modern literature.The third and fourth chapters discuss four novels of Haruki Murakami in detail. They are Hard‐boiled wonderland and the end of the world, Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Kafka On The Shore. The first two novels are about looking for oneself, but the ways of narration differ to a large extent. Hard‐boiled wonderland and the end of the world tries to capture self-consciousness through unrealistic stories so as to visualize one's inner world and realize the understanding of oneself in more than one way. Norwegian Wood, in contrast, projects the protagonist's multi-tiered self image onto other characters and therefore observes oneself through the depiction of others in the real world. The latter two novels both feature history. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the Nomonhan war serves as a clue to invisible violence hidden in dark. And in Kafka On The Shore, history and other related things together function as metaphors through which Haruki Murakami described an outer world with ubiquitous violence and showed the reader different attitudes toward violence. In the latter two novels, history is not only a writing subject, but also a clue and a metaphor.The dissertation argues that the subject of Haruki Murakami's novels has never been divorced from that of Japanese modern literature, or the subject of Haruki Murakami's novels perfectly fits into Japanese modern literature. However, despite the inheritance, Haruki Murakami made an innovation in the way of narration, i.e. discourse and story. The change makes the popularity of Haruki Murakami's novels become possible, while at the same time, his subjects remain serious and profound. Thus, Haruki Murakami's novels show a style which is very different from traditional Japanese literature. Haruki Murakami's novels provide an example for pondering over the significance of literature in post-modern context and the study of it. It is worth reflecting on how to put an end to single value orientation and seek the value and significance of literature. This doctoral dissertation is an attempt on the thinking.