The Urban Season that Gave Birth to Haruki Murakami's Light Writing Style: An Era of Transparency and Homogenization (1970s to 1980s)

The Urban Season that Gave Birth to Haruki Murakami's Light Writing Style: An Era of Transparency and Homogenization (1970s to 1980s)
When Haruki Murakami first appeared in Japan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japan was in the midst of a period of rapid economic growth and maturing urban society. Whereas in the past there had been clear cultural boundaries between rural and urban areas, during this period popular culture such as television, advertising, and pop music permeated the entire country, accelerating homogenization as people began to share similar rhythms of life and values. At the same time, the fervor of political struggles and student movements rapidly receded, and people became more conscious of their personal sense of life and modest happiness rather than heavy social consciousness. This environment provided the soil for the acceptance of Haruki Murakami's lighter style of writing.
Prior to that time, literature dragged down the ideological tensions of the postwar period and centered on weighty subjects concerning the individual and politics, family wounds, and the history of community. In the late 1970s, however, young readers began to distance themselves from this heaviness, and there was a growing demand for more everyday, transparent narratives. Haruki Murakami's writing embodied exactly this sense of urban culture, characterized by short sentences, flat rhythms, and narratives that did not overly expose emotion. The air of the city of nowhere in his works portrayed a sense of floating individuals living in a consumer society rather than the weight of a particular place, and the details of urban life were told with a lightness that connected them to world literature.
Whereas Kenji Nakagami unearthed the voice of the land, Murakami depicted the everyday life of the city with little sense of place, making visible the very air of the times. His emergence created a new axis of lightness, transparency, and pop-ness in Japanese literature, and was the catalyst for a major trend toward sensuous and personal narratives.