A Study On Haruki Murakami’s Outlook Of Novel In The Post-modern Context

Since 1979, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (1949-) has created lots of works, including 13 novels and 10 collections of short stories. Owing to his unique artistic skills of writing, these works has attracted millions of readers from all over the world and also received a number of literary awards, during the same period, Haruki Murakami has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is his unique outlook that highlighted his work despite of the artistic skills. Since Haruki Murakami is influenced by the post-modern social conditions of Japan, postmodern factors can be found easily in his work. This paper attempts to summarize his outlook of novel in the post-modern context.This thesis is divided into three parts, introduction, main body, and conclusion, in which the main body contains three chapters.The introduction of this article introduces the creation and acceptation of Haruki Murakami’s works, and both domestic and foreign researches that discussed this topic. We found out that there are lots of researches focus on the art of Haruki Murakami’s novel, but no one mentioned Haruki Murakami’s outlook of novel. This thesis try to use methods of novel poetics, narratology, close reading criticism, postmodern criticism and many other ways to explore Haruki Murakami’s outlook of novel, which includes the nature, function, content, and forms of novel, in order to deepen our understanding of Haruki Murakami’s novel arts and discover the value of his outlook in the postmodern context.The first chapter explores the core of Haruki Murakami’s outlook of novel. Haruki Murakami believes that novel is Monogatari (story), which illustrates his understanding of the nature of novel. Although this concept seems ordinary, however, novelists pay more attention to the way telling a story instead of the story itself since the 20th century. This is the reason why Haruki Murakami’s understanding is unique. This opinion shows Haruki Murakami’s return to Japanese monogatari-literary tradition, which pay more attention to story. In addition, Haruki Murakami emphasizes that novels should be open and spontaneous, because only in this way can story be able to break up the spirit cage, and bring healing effects to both the authors and the readers; and only the spontaneous stories can get into the deep psychological areas, generating a common commitment.The second chapter discusses Haruki Murakami’s "comprehensive novels". This opinion focuses on enhancing the charm and expressiveness of the story, which is developed on the basis of the opinion that "novel is monogatari (story)". The comprehensive features can be seen in three aspects. Firstly, the content of a novel is comprehensive, Haruki Murakami combines a variety of subjects to reflect the broader social reality and deep social consciousness. Secondly, the writing techniques of a novel is comprehensive, including narrative skills, and intertextuality. Finally, the genres are comprehensive, Haruki Murakami draws the experience on how to tell a story from various genres include popular literature and pure literature.The third chapter analyzes the relationship between real and unreal contents in Haruki Murakami’s novels, and also explores the unique novel shape Haruki Murakami pursued, which he called the "new realism". Haruki Murakami introduced a large number of unreal factors into the story, thereby reflecting the virtual factors involved in the real world. "New realism" is considered to be a concept that different from traditional realism and surrealism, which belongs to modernism. Moreover, it is also different from magical realism, which belongs to post-modernism. The reasons why Haruki Murakami pursue the "new realism" could be explored by chasing back to the historical background in 21st century, investigated by analyzing the evolution of literary trends, and studied by the author’s emphasizes on the importance of story.The conclusion compares the different outlooks of the novel in early stages and later periods, shows the development of Haruki Murakami’s opinions, deepens the understanding of his artistic pursuit and finally discusses the value of Haruki Murakami’s outlook of novel in the context of postmodern theory.