The Urban Seasons that gave birth to Haruki Murakami's light literary style - a time of transparency and homogenization (1970s-1980s)

The Urban Seasons that gave birth to Haruki Murakami's light literary style - a time of transparency and homogenization (1970s-1980s)
Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, when Haruki Murakami's writing style was formed, was in the final stages of its rapid economic growth, a period of rapid urbanization and homogenization of lifestyle and culture. Television and advertising permeated throughout Japan, the cultural distance between rural and urban areas narrowed, and the rhythm of consumer life became common throughout the country. The heat of political struggles and student movements was lost, and people began to place more value on personal sensibilities and everyday happiness than on heavy social consciousness. This shift in mood gave rise to a major trend toward light, transparent, personal narratives.
Haruki Murakami's works embody this new urban sensibility. Characterized by short, flat sentences, dry humor, and an air of the city of nowhere, with little locality, readers could relate their own sense of loneliness and floating to the light rhythms of his work. At a time when modernization was fading away the contours of human relationships and communities, Murakami's narratives vividly reflected the reality of anonymous urban life. In addition, his worldview, which blended elements of jazz, coffee, and Western literature, demonstrated a new sensibility that transcended borders and lands, and had the power to renew the existing framework of Japanese literature.
In contrast to Kenji Nakagami's narratives that sink deep into the land, Murakami's writing style is a narrative that glides across the surface of the city, and he is a visualization of the very changes in Japanese culture since the 1970s. His emergence marked a turning point that brought lightness and transparency to literature and defined the sensibilities of a new generation of readers.