Haruki Murakami and Richard Brautigan

A quick look at some connections between these two extraordinary writers.

Like all great writers, Haruki Murakami took a wide array of literary influences and then borrowed from each of them so carefully that he ended up with a totally original style. These influences include Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Jack Kerouac and the Beat writers, and many more. (I’ve written about them here.)

One of the first and most obvious of his influences, however, was Richard Brautigan. Brautigan was an American writer who has sadly gone out of fashion in recent years. He became popular in the sixties as a so-called “hippie novelist” but fell out of vogue long before his 1984 death. His work was clever, funny, challenging, and above all experimental.

Murakami read a lot of American literature in the 1970s and it was likely then that he first encountered Brautigan’s work. He was reading second-hand English paperbacks but Brautigan’s work was quite popular in the Japanese translation around this time as well, so he could’ve read it in either language.

In 1979, Murakami wrote his first book, Hear the Wind Sing. A year later, he wrote his second, Pinball, 1973. The two books owe a great debt to Richard Brautigan, as various critics have observed and even Murakami himself has admitted. In fact, anyone familiar with the author’s work would struggle to overlook the similarities.

The first thing one would notice when reading Hear the Wind Sing if they have any familiarity with Brautigan’s work is that Murakami has composed his novel of very short sections, just as Brautigan had done. Murakami acknowledges the influence but has claimed that his style grew from necessity more than any attempt at copying Brautigan:

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-packed style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

Then, of course, Murakami’s book was darkly comic. Whilst the story is rather depressing, he squeezes humour from tragedy in a way that very much imitated Brautigan and also Kurt Vonnegut. In Pinball, 1973, this continues with more surrealistic humour. Here, we see a funeral being held for a telephone switchboard. All through Brautigan’s fiction we see comical, surreal depictions of the impossible or highly unlikely and this appears to have been something that influenced Murakami particularly in those early books.

Of course, there are other authors who have fragmented their stories into short sections and mixed humour and pathos, but we also have a notable absence of names. Almost no one in Murakami’s first two books is named and the only ones that we find are silly nicknames. This was something Brautigan explored throughout his work and Murakami has done the same throughout much of his career. Most commonly, Brautigan’s narrators lacked names, and indeed Murakami’s novels frequently feature nameless narrators. In In Watermelon Sugar, for example, the narrator says “I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.” In Murakami’s third book, his nameless protagonist says “I think I just don’t like names. Basically, I can’t see what’s wrong with calling me ‘me’ or you ‘you’ or us ‘us’ or them ‘them.’”

There is a wonderful scene in Pinball, 1973 that features a discussion of the importance of names, held between the nameless narrator and two nameless identical twins. It is comical and reminds us of Brautigan’s witty, philosophical, yet very simple prose style. The twins wear sweaters that have the numbers 208 and 209 on them. This is almost certainly a reference to Trout Fishing in America, which includes a cat called 208.

This could lead us into further discussion, for Brautigan’s narrator explains the significance of his cat’s name. It was the same as the number on the door of a bail office he visited when saving a friend. Brautigan imbues this with mystical significance. The cat, in a sense, is tied to something greater, the implication being that there is a hidden meaning and a secret connection between things. This of course reminds us of the cat (who changes names) in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. In fact, many a Murakami book features this kind of “coincidence” (the implication being that there are no coincidences).

I could go on, but I won’t. I would instead invite the reader to pick up some of Brautigan’s wonderful writings and then go back through Murakami’s books, particularly his early work, to find their own insights. There is certainly plenty to discover, as Murakami himself admits:

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.

This is likely why Murakami did not want his first books translated into English and why he was reluctant to have them republished for a long time. However, I think almost all writers go through a period of being overly influenced by the authors they read in their formative years. Murakami took these influences and went on to create his own original style, so he need not be embarrassed.