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| Dances With Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies) by Matthew Carl Strecher |
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Hardcover: 234 pages buy from amazon.co.uk
| In Dances with Sheep Matthew Strecher examines Murakami's fiction--and, to a lesser extent, his nonfiction--for its most prevalent structures and themes. Strecher also delves into the paradoxes in Murakami's writings that confront critics and casual readers alike. Murakami writes of 'serious' themes yet expresses them in a relatively uncomplicated style that appeals to high school students as well as scholars; and his fictional work appears to celebrate the pastiche of postmodern expression, yet he rejects the effects of the postmodern on contemporary culture as dangerous. Strecher's methodology is both historical and cultural as he utilizes four distinct yet interwoven approaches to analyze Murakami's major works: the writer's 'formulaic' structure with serious themes; his play with magical realism; the intense psychological underpinnings of his literary landscape; and his critique of language and its capacity to represent realities, past and present. Dances with Sheep links each of these approaches with Murakami's critical focus on the fate of individual identity in contemporary Japan. The result is that the simplicity of the Murakami hero, marked by lethargy and nostalgia, emerges as emblematic of contemporary humankind, bereft of identity, direction, and meaning. Murakami's fiction is reconstructed in Dances with Sheep as a warning against the dehumanizing effects of late-model capitalism, the homogenization of the marketplace, and the elimination of effective counterculture in Japan. (from Uni of Michigen's Centre for Japanese Studies) reviews Interesting amazon.com review by "Crazy Fox" The Journal of Asian Studies review by Patricia Welch
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