Why does a Murakami ending feel finished when nothing has been explained?

Because the book has quietly told you to stop keeping score. Vargas Llosa's term for the fact a novel hides forever is the elliptic fact, and its opposite is the mystery novel's postponed one, held back until the last chapter and then handed over. Murakami works elliptically. The second moon is in the sky at the start of 1Q84 and in the sky at the end. The entrance stone in Kafka on the Shore is opened and closed and gets no footnote. What the closing pages settle is the arrangement between the people and the thing, which means they report who lives where now, who is going to see whom again, what somebody has decided to do from tomorrow. An ending like that lands as a verdict on a life rather than as a solution to a puzzle, and the reason it works at all is that no character in the book was treating the puzzle as one.

Where in a scene should the impossible thing appear?

Off to the side, while the scene is busy with something else. It competes for the frame. The impossible element tends to enter during an activity that already had the character's attention, so it has to share the shot with a kettle or a queue. Frog is standing at a door that was answered for a different reason. The fish come down on a street where people are going about a Tuesday. Aomame is in a taxi she wants to get out of. Put the anomaly at dead centre with the lights on it and you have written a reveal, which obliges you to top it, and then the book becomes an escalation. Keep it off centre and the scene retains its original business, which gives the character something to do that is not reacting. The test is whether the errand your character started the scene with is still running when the scene ends.

Why did he leave the first person after twenty years?

He ran out of things one narrator could be present for. In Novelist as a Vocation he lays out the escape route, and it took him about two decades. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World alternates two first-person narrators who use different Japanese words for I, one of them in a Tokyo of data couriers and one in a walled town where a man reads old dreams out of animal skulls. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was his last novel told wholly in the first person, and it has to be propped up with other people's letters and long spoken accounts to reach past what Toru can see. Kafka on the Shore then put the chapters about the old man into the third person. After Dark went over completely. His stated reason is mechanical rather than aesthetic, and it is the problem Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway created for himself: one voice reports at one temperature, and a long book needs two.

Which English translation should you study, and does the choice matter?

It matters more here than for most writers, because his English was made by several people. Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen have all carried him over. They do not sound alike. So study structure and leave the wording alone. The order in which a paragraph releases its information, the place where the short sentence lands, the choice of which cause goes unstated: all of that was decided in Japanese and survives any translator. Rhythm, comma habits and the exact pitch of politeness are the parts most likely to have been settled in English. Set a Birnbaum page beside a Rubin page and read both aloud. The difference between them will teach you more about your own ear than a style guide can, and it will cure you of copying a cadence whose author is credited in small type.

Does the strange element need a rule the reader can see?

It needs a rule the reader can check, which is a much smaller thing than a rule the reader can understand. Cats talk to Nakata and to Nakata alone, and that condition holds for the length of the book. Toru comes up out of the well with a mark on his right cheek. It behaves like an injury. Nothing about it reads as a sign. Aomame looks up on later nights and both moons are there. None of these has a cause anywhere on the page. Each has a behaviour, and behaviour is what a reader tests against, so consistency ends up doing the work that an explanation would have done and doing it without closing anything down. Break the behaviour once for effect and the anomaly stops being part of the world and becomes an authorial convenience, which a reader feels immediately even when he cannot name what changed.

Why are his impossible characters so polite?

His impossible speakers have the best manners in the room. The manners are load-bearing. Frog addresses Katagiri with full formal respect, apologises for the intrusion, and treats the fight underground as a job that has to be staffed. Cats answer Nakata's questions with the patience of neighbours. Courtesy implies a shared world with rules about how to behave inside it, so a creature that observes the rules is claiming membership instead of announcing an invasion. There is a practical dividend. Manners give you a way to write dialogue about the impossible in which no speeches are needed. Hand the same creature a prophecy or a riddle and you restore the genre frame the level voice spent two hundred pages dismantling.

Fiction

Haruki MurakamiWriting Style

Born 1/12/1949

Let the narrator handle an impossible event the way he handles a phone call, and the alarm he refuses to feel goes to the reader instead.

Write like Haruki Murakami

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Haruki Murakami: voice, themes, and technique.

Aomame sits in a taxi stalled on an elevated Tokyo expressway, and the radio is playing Janáček's Sinfonietta, which she names from the opening bars. The driver mentions an emergency stairway. She takes off her heels and climbs down. Nothing in the sentences reports that a woman has changed worlds, and when she later counts two moons above a playground, one yellow and one green and smaller, the voice describing them holds the temperature it used for the traffic. Vargas Llosa built a theory of the fantastic on a single adverb, the "still" in Monterroso's one-line story about a man who wakes to find the dinosaur has not left, because that word puts the teller on solid ground, staring. Murakami withholds it.

What takes the place of an inquiry is an errand. Toru Okada, who has quit his job at a law firm, is asked to go and look for the cat. Nakata, in Kafka on the Shore, takes a small fee for finding other people's cats, which he does by asking cats where they went, and when sardines and mackerel drop out of the sky over a Tokyo street the ward office sends someone to clear the road. In after the quake, a frog the size of a man rings the bell of a loan collector named Katagiri and asks for help against a worm under the city, before a date he names. Katagiri asks practical questions. Then he goes in to work.

Vargas Llosa separates the fact a story hides forever from the fact it only postpones. Detective fiction postpones, and Murakami erases. The well, the second moon, the entrance stone in Kafka on the Shore, none of them gets accounted for, and a reader waiting for the accounting is waiting for a book he did not write. That he spent years translating Chandler into Japanese makes the refusal look like a decision rather than a shrug, since he kept the missing person, the strange client and the long walk across the city, and threw the solution away.

Almost everything on the surface is borrowed from somewhere else. Jazz records, American novels, European orchestras, whisky, a sandwich, a brand of car. The furniture is borrowed. His narrators move through Tokyo on it, and the small distance that opens between a man and his own street is there before anything impossible has happened. In García Márquez the miracle is public property and a whole town turns out to watch. Murakami's arrives in private, unwitnessed, wedged between two chores, and the reader ends up the only person holding it.

How to Write Like Haruki Murakami

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Haruki Murakami.

1
Cut every word that admits you were surprised
Search the draft for the vocabulary of astonishment and take it out. Suddenly. Somehow. Impossibly. I could not believe what I was looking at. I stood frozen. Then report the event. What happened, in what order, at what distance, in whose hearing. Then repay the reader inside the same paragraph with one exact perception, a temperature or an interval or the wrongness of a sound, so that the calm reads as attention and not as indifference. The pair is the whole move. A narrator who declines to be shocked and still notices the small wrong thing has told you he is holding something back, and a held-back thing is the only reason anybody leans closer to a page.
2
Hand the impossible thing a job and a deadline
Give the anomaly something it wants from your character, in one sentence, with a time attached to it. A frog asks for help before a date he names. A stranger on the telephone wants ten minutes. A woman names a hotel lobby. She will be wearing a red vinyl hat, so that he can pick her out of the crowd. The request is what turns a mood into a scene, because a character with a task walks across a city, keeps appointments, misses others, and gets to spend the chapter doing rather than wondering. Write the terms as flat business. Hours, payment, an address, a phone number, what happens if the meeting falls through.
3
Let one character decline the obvious question
Find the moment your reader is silently asking what on earth is going on. Put a second person in the room who could ask it out loud and has the standing to. Then let that person talk about the weather or the price of the ticket, and move the scene along. That single exchange is what tells a reader no answer is coming and the book is not embarrassed about it, which converts the gap from a debt you owe into a rule of the house. Do it once, plainly, early enough to matter. Four times is a tic. The reader then watches you avoid the subject instead of watching the characters live beside it.
4
Name one record, one dish and one street
Pick three coordinates per scene. A piece of music, a thing eaten, a route somebody walks, and get all three exactly right. Name them once each, in short sentences, with no paragraph of appreciation around them. Later, bring one of the three back with its job changed, the same record playing in a room where the wrong person is sitting. Leave the rest of the room unfurnished. Three named things put a reader in a place at an hour, which is the whole point, since you cannot register that a fourth thing is wrong until you know what time it is and what the room already contains.
5
Type the first page in a language you barely have
In Novelist as a Vocation, Murakami describes putting away the manuscript paper and the fountain pen because what he wrote with them sounded to him like literature, pulling out an old Olivetti, typing the opening of his first novel in English, a language he had only a little of, and then carrying that English back into Japanese. The poverty was the instrument. A vocabulary of a few hundred words will not let you decorate, so the sentences come out short and the interest has to move into word order and pace. Run two pages of your own through a language you barely have. Whatever survives the trip home is your material, and whatever you found you could not say in the smaller language was probably furniture.

Haruki Murakami's Writing Style

Breakdown of Haruki Murakami's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Main clauses in sequence, one load each, with the joining work done by full stops rather than by subordination. Read one of his paragraphs and count the commas. There are fewer than the length of the sentences would predict, because the parts are laid end to end instead of nested inside each other, and that is what keeps a long sentence from sounding literary. The short sentence carries the weight. It lands after the strange thing rather than on top of it. A cat spoke. Then four words about the weather. The pattern is easy to describe and hard to hold for three hundred pages, since the instinct at the moment of impact is to reach for the biggest sentence in the chapter.

Vocabulary Complexity

Concrete nouns, and most of them are things you could buy. Foods, records, clothes, appliances, station names, drinks. Abstraction gets routed through an object almost wherever it appears, so a feeling reaches the page as a temperature or a weight instead of as the word for the feeling. The strangeness is carried by nouns as well. A bird that winds the world, a sheep man, a bell under a heap of stones, an entrance stone: the impossible material comes in as plain names for things, with no adjective raising its voice behind them. The difficulty is elsewhere. It sits in what goes unexplained rather than in the diction, which is one reason the prose survives being carried between languages.

Tone

Mild, courteous, faintly out of place. The narrator apologises more often than he complains, and the loneliness in these books reaches you through good manners rather than through a confession, which is the reverse of the Japanese first-person tradition Dazai wrote in, where a voice indicts itself on the page and asks to be looked at. Humour arrives as plain statement. A frog the size of a man is described as a frog the size of a man. No comment follows. What a reader is left with feels like company rather than intimacy, the sense of being kept informed by somebody who has decided, under conditions that do not warrant it, to go on being reasonable.

Pacing

The clock runs on errands. Trains, shopping, meals, a walk down the alley behind the house, a meeting fixed for a stated hour. The strange event accelerates nothing. While Toru is down the well, time is counted in water and in the light at the top of the shaft, which is slow going and not idle, because a physical need is being managed in front of you on the page. Momentum comes from appointments rather than from revelations. He also lets long stretches pass in which the large question makes no progress whatsoever, and a reader stays put because there is a small thing to find out before the chapter ends.

Dialogue Style

Conversations are polite and slightly out of alignment. Somebody answers a question more literally than it was asked, or answers a neighbouring question instead, or replies with a detail so precise that the original point gets dropped without comment. The misfit does two jobs at once. It builds subtext without anybody having to be enigmatic, and it lets a scene admit a piece of backstory through a side door and then shut the door before an explanation can form around it. Watch how often the strangest information is delivered in the register of an appointment being confirmed. A woman rings a stranger and asks for ten minutes of his time. He asks her to wait, because the pasta is nearly done.

Descriptive Approach

Rooms come in objects a character can operate. A frying pan, the angle of light on a wall, a neighbour's shower running, the distance from the table to the door. Then he stops, which leaves the page uncluttered enough that one more object can arrive later without ceremony. The load-bearing half of the method is that the impossible thing gets the same lens and roughly the same word count as the refrigerator. Two moons are given by colour and relative size. The well is given by touch, dry earth and iron rungs and cold, and by how small the circle of sky looks from the bottom of it. Nothing about the camera changes when the subject becomes impossible, and readers take that constancy as evidence.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Haruki Murakami uses across their work.

The Unraised Voice

One register covers the traffic report and the second moon. The tool answers a problem specific to fiction that breaks its own rules, which is that an excited narrator makes a reader suspicious, because a voice that oversells has something it needs you to accept. Holding the pitch down costs him the easy thrill of a reveal and buys a reader who supplies his own reaction and therefore believes it. What makes it hard is the single strong verb at the moment of impact, the one that feels earned after two hundred level pages and undoes them in a line. It pairs with the assignment below. A character who has somewhere to be by four o'clock has a practical reason to stay level.

The Assignment

The impossible thing shows up asking for something, on terms. Frog wants Katagiri's help against a worm under the city and names the date. Malta Kano wants a meeting in a hotel lobby and says she will be wearing a red vinyl hat. A cat has to be looked for in the alley behind the house. This answers the plotting problem that kills most surreal drafts, where an anomaly appears and the characters have nothing they can do about it, so the writer supplies a second anomaly. A request generates movement, refusals, travel and missed connections. The difficulty is keeping the terms mundane, because the moment the request sounds like a prophecy the scene turns into an announcement and the character stops being a person with a schedule.

The Chore in the Next Paragraph

Right after the metaphysical beat comes something small and physical. A sandwich made and eaten. Ironing. A walk to the station for a train that leaves at a stated time. The drop keeps a reader inside a body and stops the prose from congratulating itself, and it has a second effect that matters more, since a scene that goes back to work has decided the event was not a climax. That decision is what lets the same strangeness recur later without any inflation. There is one way to get it wrong, which is to let the chore carry a knowing tone: as soon as the sandwich is a joke about the frog, the mildness is gone and the reader is being nudged.

The Withdrawn Ladder

Bakhtin describes the threshold as a chronotope of the instant, the point where a life turns and time barely passes at all. Murakami gives the threshold duration and a floor. Toru climbs down a rope ladder into a dry well behind an empty house on the alley, sits in the dark, rations his water, and May Kasahara pulls the ladder up after him. In Killing Commendatore a bell sounds at night from under a heap of stones, and the neighbour pays for the machine and the crew that shift them. A symbol can be interpreted and then it is finished with. A place with a ladder, a temperature and an exit somebody else controls has to be negotiated over, which is why his crossings move the plot instead of illustrating it.

The Late Discovery

The crossing goes unannounced, and the character works out afterwards that it happened. Aomame comes off the emergency stairway and back into an ordinary day, and what tips her off in the following weeks is small administrative evidence: the police are dressed and armed differently than she remembers, and there is a recent news event she has no memory of. The order of operations is the tool. A signposted transition asks a reader to brace, and a reader who braces is watching a genre. Discovery after the fact keeps him at the character's shoulder doing the same arithmetic she is, and it gives you a chapter of ordinary scenes to write that are quietly full of tension without a single strange image in them.

The Second Language Draft

Murakami's account of how he found his style, in Novelist as a Vocation, is an exercise anybody can run. Manuscript paper and a fountain pen made his Japanese sound like literature to him, so he pulled out an old Olivetti, typed the opening of his first novel in English, a language he had a little of, and carried the result back into Japanese. What came out the other side was a deliberately neutral surface, and he compares the writing of it to playing music, rhythm first and the chords after. The tool is the constraint and not the particular language. A small vocabulary refuses ornament, which pushes the interest into word order and pace. Nothing has to be published.

Literary Devices Haruki Murakami Uses

Literary devices that define Haruki Murakami's style.

The Deleted Astonishment Marker

Vargas Llosa reads Monterroso's one-sentence story about a man who wakes and finds the dinosaur has not left, and locates the entire effect in one word, the adverb "still", which he says arrives flanked by invisible exclamation points because it puts the teller on the realist plane, staring at something that cannot be there. Murakami takes that word out of his own reports. When Aomame looks up and there are two moons, she registers the colours and the size difference and comes back on later nights to check, and the prose grants her no adverb of shock at all. The device moves the reaction across the gap: what the narrator declines, the reader picks up, and an alarm a reader generated himself is more persuasive than any the text could describe for him. Cortázar runs the same operation in the story where a house is occupied room by room and the tenants respond by packing.

The Cleared Calendar

His narrators tend to have empty calendars, and that is a structural choice rather than a character trait. Toru Okada quits the law firm in the first chapter. Kafka Tamura has walked out of school. The result is a diary with nothing in it, which the errand can then fill without anybody having to be released from a job or lied to about a deadline. It also solves a pacing problem specific to this kind of story, since a man with a schedule cannot spend three days at the bottom of a well and a man with no schedule can. The cost is a real one. An empty calendar with no request from outside produces a drifter. That is the difference. His narrators get asked for something almost at once, and the request is what keeps the cleared week from turning into aimlessness.

Compartments at One Temperature

He splits a book into containers and holds the voice level across the seam. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World alternates two first-person narrators who use different Japanese words for I, and Kafka on the Shore sets a first-person boy against third-person chapters following an old man who talks to cats. The device lets the impossible material live in a compartment of its own while the reporting register stays constant, so a reader crosses between worlds without the prose signalling a change of genre, which is the thing that would break the spell. One narrator would have to witness both halves. That ceiling is what the structure is built to get around, and it is also why the chapters can be shuffled into a rhythm the reader learns to trust.

The Timestamp

Music, food and brands arrive named. Their job is closer to a clock than to set decoration, and the dating is exact enough to look up. Rossini's overture on the FM band while the spaghetti boils. Janáček in a stalled taxi. A Beatles track over the cabin speakers as a plane touches down at Hamburg. Each one fixes an hour and a room, which gives a later departure something measurable to depart from. The cost is one line. The alternative most writers reach for is a paragraph of atmosphere, which fills the same space and fixes nothing, because a reader cannot date a mood. Strip the proper nouns out of these openings and the scenes go generic, which is one reason the specificity survives translation better than the sentence rhythm does.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Haruki Murakami.

A level voice with nothing pressing on it

Imitators copy the calm. Back comes a narrator with no reaction at all, because he has no stake in the room he is standing in. Murakami's flatness is a decision made under pressure, and the text keeps proving the pressure by what the narrator bothers to notice. A man who reports the temperature of a hole he has been shut inside for a day is not indifferent. He is rationing himself. Take the pressure away and the identical sentences read as a shrug. Emotion is not the repair. Give the character one specific thing he wants during the scene, small enough that saying it out loud would embarrass him, and the same paragraph turns from bored into governed.

Postponing the answer instead of removing it

A draft that hints at a solution has promised one, and readers keep a ledger whether you asked them to or not. Imitations tend to drop clues, plant a wise stranger, hint at a hidden order, and finish on ambiguity, which reads as a cheat. The problem there is a broken promise rather than an open ending. Murakami removes the answer early and then has his characters behave like people who stopped asking months ago, and that behaviour is the signal that releases the reader from bookkeeping. Decide before the second chapter which of the two books you are writing. Both of them work. The mixture does not.

Buying the inventory and skipping the assignment

Jazz on the turntable. A cat, whisky, an apartment with one occupant, a woman who says something cryptic and leaves. The furniture is cheap to acquire and it carries nothing by itself. What moves one of his chapters is somebody asking the narrator for something specific by a stated time, so the plot advances through errands and appointments and journeys that would still make sense with the impossible element deleted. A page of props with no request in it stalls, and the writer's instinct at that point is to add a stranger element, which stalls it further. Check the scene for a task. If your character has nowhere he needs to be, atmosphere is carrying the page by itself. It will not hold.

Copying a cadence that belongs to a translator

The sentence you are modelling was made in English by Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel or Ted Goossen. Those four write differently. Comma habits, the length of a clause, the exact pitch of politeness in a line of dialogue: those are the parts most likely to have been settled during translation rather than in the original. So an imitation pitched at the level of the phrase is an imitation of somebody whose name appears on the copyright page in smaller type. Structure travels intact. Where the short sentence lands after the long one, which cause is left unstated, how many paragraphs pass before the strange thing is mentioned again, all of that was decided in Japanese.

Books

Explore Haruki Murakami's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Haruki Murakami's writing style and techniques.

Why does a Murakami ending feel finished when nothing has been explained?: Because the book has quietly told you to stop keeping score. Vargas Llosa's term for the fact a novel hides forever is the elliptic fact, and its opposite is the mystery novel's postponed one, held back until the last chapter and then handed over. Murakami works elliptically. The second moon is in the sky at the start of 1Q84 and in the sky at the end. The entrance stone in Kafka on the Shore is opened and closed and gets no footnote. What the closing pages settle is the arrangement between the people and the thing, which means they report who lives where now, who is going to see whom again, what somebody has decided to do from tomorrow. An ending like that lands as a verdict on a life rather than as a solution to a puzzle, and the reason it works at all is that no character in the book was treating the puzzle as one.
Where in a scene should the impossible thing appear?: Off to the side, while the scene is busy with something else. It competes for the frame. The impossible element tends to enter during an activity that already had the character's attention, so it has to share the shot with a kettle or a queue. Frog is standing at a door that was answered for a different reason. The fish come down on a street where people are going about a Tuesday. Aomame is in a taxi she wants to get out of. Put the anomaly at dead centre with the lights on it and you have written a reveal, which obliges you to top it, and then the book becomes an escalation. Keep it off centre and the scene retains its original business, which gives the character something to do that is not reacting. The test is whether the errand your character started the scene with is still running when the scene ends.
Why did he leave the first person after twenty years?: He ran out of things one narrator could be present for. In Novelist as a Vocation he lays out the escape route, and it took him about two decades. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World alternates two first-person narrators who use different Japanese words for I, one of them in a Tokyo of data couriers and one in a walled town where a man reads old dreams out of animal skulls. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was his last novel told wholly in the first person, and it has to be propped up with other people's letters and long spoken accounts to reach past what Toru can see. Kafka on the Shore then put the chapters about the old man into the third person. After Dark went over completely. His stated reason is mechanical rather than aesthetic, and it is the problem Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway created for himself: one voice reports at one temperature, and a long book needs two.
Which English translation should you study, and does the choice matter?: It matters more here than for most writers, because his English was made by several people. Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen have all carried him over. They do not sound alike. So study structure and leave the wording alone. The order in which a paragraph releases its information, the place where the short sentence lands, the choice of which cause goes unstated: all of that was decided in Japanese and survives any translator. Rhythm, comma habits and the exact pitch of politeness are the parts most likely to have been settled in English. Set a Birnbaum page beside a Rubin page and read both aloud. The difference between them will teach you more about your own ear than a style guide can, and it will cure you of copying a cadence whose author is credited in small type.
Does the strange element need a rule the reader can see?: It needs a rule the reader can check, which is a much smaller thing than a rule the reader can understand. Cats talk to Nakata and to Nakata alone, and that condition holds for the length of the book. Toru comes up out of the well with a mark on his right cheek. It behaves like an injury. Nothing about it reads as a sign. Aomame looks up on later nights and both moons are there. None of these has a cause anywhere on the page. Each has a behaviour, and behaviour is what a reader tests against, so consistency ends up doing the work that an explanation would have done and doing it without closing anything down. Break the behaviour once for effect and the anomaly stops being part of the world and becomes an authorial convenience, which a reader feels immediately even when he cannot name what changed.
Why are his impossible characters so polite?: His impossible speakers have the best manners in the room. The manners are load-bearing. Frog addresses Katagiri with full formal respect, apologises for the intrusion, and treats the fight underground as a job that has to be staffed. Cats answer Nakata's questions with the patience of neighbours. Courtesy implies a shared world with rules about how to behave inside it, so a creature that observes the rules is claiming membership instead of announcing an invasion. There is a practical dividend. Manners give you a way to write dialogue about the impossible in which no speeches are needed. Hand the same creature a prophecy or a riddle and you restore the genre frame the level voice spent two hundred pages dismantling.

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