10 Authors Who Inspired Haruki Murakami
A list of writers who helped shape Murakami's prose
Haruki Murakami is one of the most famous living authors, with his novels selling millions of copies around the world. This year, his fifteenth novel was released in Japan and countless fans await the release of the various translations that are scheduled for publication in 2024.
Murakami’s style of writing is famously bizarre. His work is similar to magical realism due to its realistic depictions of contemporary Japan, punctuated by ghosts, talking cats, supernatural events, and clairvoyant characters.
Despite being wildly popular in his motherland, Murakami is often criticised by the literary establishment for his prose, which is considered too foreign-sounding. That is likely due to his diverse literary influences, most of which come from Europe or North America.
This article will look at 10 writers who inspired Murakami and helped him to shape his iconic prose style.
Kurt Vonnegut
Murakami’s first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, owe a massive debt to American satirist, Kurt Vonnegut. Literary critic and translator Motoyuki Shibata notes that these two books even look like Vonnegut’s.[1] This is partly due to the little doodles Murakami included. Hear the Wind Sing also includes a character called Derek Hartfield, who is very clearly derived from Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout.
Update: In 2025, I wrote a whole post on the connections between Murakami and Vonnegut:
Richard Brautigan
Those first two novels were not only heavily influenced by Vonnegut but also by another American author, the comic writer Richard Brautigan. His darkly comic style and oddly short chapters were borrowed, as well as his idiosyncratic use of names. Murakami later admitted: “I had created these two books by borrowing from American authors like Vonnegut and Brautigan that I had admired as a student. There’s a part of me that finds that a little embarrassing now.”[2] From his third novel on, his writing became far more original.
Read more here:
Raymond Chandler
Murakami is a big fan of detective fiction and in particular the work of Raymond Chandler. For his third book, A Wild Sheep Chase, he borrowed the structure, and he took heavily from Chandler for his fourth novel, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.[3] One of the book’s two narratives is written in a hard-boiled style that draws upon Chandler’s work, which Murakami has also translated into Japanese.
Raymond Carver
Chandler is not the only Raymond who influenced Murakami. Perhaps of even greater significance is Raymond Carver, whose fiction Murakami greatly admired. Murakami has called him a “major presence” in his life and the two men became friends.[4] Murakami has translated Carver’s work into Japanese and named his memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, after Carver’s collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Murakami has noted that Carver had a short story about someone falling into a well and this is quite possibly why wells appear in almost all of Murakami’s novels.[5]
Franz Kafka
Another of Murakami’s favourite writers is Franz Kafka. Murakami has taken many ideas from him and has even named several protagonists for Kafka. In the novel Sputnik Sweetheart, the narrator K is based upon Kafka’s character, K, from The Castle, but of course the most famous example is Kafka on the Shore, whose teenage protagonist is the titular Kafka Tamura. There are countless references to and stories about the Czech author in that book. “It goes without saying that Kafka is one of my very favorite writers,” Murakami has said.[6]
J.D. Salinger
Although Kafka on the Shore was named for Kafka and contains many references to him, perhaps a more direct influence was J.D. Salinger. Murakami wrote this novel immediately after translating Catcher in the Rye into Japanese. Salinger’s book made him interested in the perspective of a teenage boy. Murakami’s style also meshed nicely with Salinger’s in the Japanese translation, with some critics noting that the book seemed almost like one of Murakami’s own.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
As we have seen, Murakami is a prolific translator and especially enjoys bringing his favourite novels from the English language to his Japanese readers. Among these is F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Murakami read as a boy and quoted in his first novel. Murakami, who is reluctant to admit the influence of his literary heroes, has acknowledged that many of his novels use a narrator modelled upon Nick Carraway, and readers could hardly fail to spot similarities between his most recent English-language novel, Killing Commendatore, and The Great Gatsby. Murakami even keeps a copy of this novel on his kamidana, a small home shrine reserved for sacred objects.[7]
Marcel Proust
Murakami’s translator, Jay Rubin, has noted the similarities between Proust and the Japanese author and highlighted several of the many references to Proust in Murakami’s novels.[8] He notes that the novel known in English as A Wild Sheep Chase is in Japanese called “Searching for Lost Time,” a rather obvious allusion to Proust.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Dostoyevsky is my ideal writer,” Murakami has claimed, and indeed one can easily find references to the Russian novelist throughout Murakami’s work.[9] Elsewhere, he has claimed, “My idol is Dostoyevsky […] Most writers get weaker and weaker as they age. But Dostoyevsky didn’t. He kept getting bigger and greater. He wrote The Brothers Karamazov in his late 50s. That’s a great novel.”[10]
Ueda Akinari
This list has been conspicuously free of Japanese authors and that’s because Murakami grew up reading Western literature. He was an established author by the time he began digging into Japanese fiction, but one of his favourites is Ueda Akinari, whose works have influenced Murakami’s in various ways. His name is often snuck into Murakami’s books and Murakami has admitted that Akinari’s concept of a “living spirit” explains the mysterious plot of his own South of the Border, West of the Sun.[11]
Others
Murakami is extremely well-read and, although he likes to downplay the influence of those writers whose work he enjoys, he has in various interviews and even in his own work made clear his admiration. Writers who did not make this list include Truman Capote, Dag Solstad, Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His work also makes frequent reference to the Beat writers, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The influence of these writers on his prose, however, is less obvious than the ten listed above.
[1] What We Talk About When We Talk About Haruki Murakami -- Presented by Monkey Business [YouTube Video]
[2] Karashima, David, Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, p.25
[3] Rubin, Jay, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, p.80
[4] Who We’re Reading, p.162
[5] “The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami” in The New Yorker
[6] Originally published on HarukiMurakami.com and reprinted here: https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/1103/haruki-murakami
[7] Allen, Ether and Bernofsky, Susan, In Translation: Translators on their Work and What it Means, p.169
[8] Murakami and the Music of Words, p.89
[9] “ Haruki Murakami: 'I'm an outcast of the Japanese literary world' in The Guardian
[10] “Haruki Murakami Interviewed,” in 3am Magazine
[11] Dil, Jonathon, Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-Therapy, unpaginated