The three reasons why Haruki Murakami hasn’t won the Nobel Prize －なぜ村上春樹はノーベル賞をもらっていないの？その３つの理由－

A student asked me recently why I thought that Haruki Murakami hadn’t won the Nobel Prize.  It was of course another writer with a Japanese heritage, Kazuo Ishiguro, who won it this year.

By the way, I love both Ishiguro and Murakami’s work.  Either of them would be a worthy winner.  But Murakami’s hardcore fans gather together each year to await the announcement of the winner.  And each year they are disappointed.  So it is interesting to consider why he never wins.

First, I think we must look at the whiskey, jazz and sex.  Every Murakami novel has a lot of whiskey, jazz and sex.  I really like two of these things!

But are these the kind of topics which win a writer the Nobel Prize?

When Yasunari Kawabata won the prize, the committee said it was “for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind.”

[In other words, he writes good stories and we haven’t had a Japanese winner yet.]

When Kenzaburo Oe won the prize, the committee said he “with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today.”

[In other words, he writes dark stories very well.]

And when Murakami wins the award, will the committee say it is because “he writes about whiskey and jazz and sex, and all members of the committee like at least two of these things.”

These just don’t seem like the kind of topics the committee would pick.  But then I’m sure they could find a way of wording it that sounded more worthy of a Nobel Prize.  “With poetic mastery of metaphor and narrative, he blends whiskey, jazz and sex into a dark picture of the distressed state of men struggling to find themselves in Japanese society today.”

Or something like that.

But are Murakami’s stories really so dominated by whiskey, jazz and sex?  Doesn’t he tackle great themes like fate, the darkness always threatening to break into our lives, etc.?  Here’s an extract of his latest novel so that you can judge for yourself:

[I was sitting alone and drinking whiskey and listening to jazz.  Then I met a kind of weird magic woman.  So I *** and she ***, and there was a lot of ***.

Then I drank some more whiskey and listened to jazz.]

I had to edit out some of the sex, but you get the idea.

Okay, I’m only joking.  I really do hope that Murakami wins the Nobel Prize someday.  I’m going now, to drink whiskey and listen to folk music.

Vocabulary:

a heritage – a background or tradition

a hardcore fan – a super fan; one of the most dedicated in a group of fans

the essence of something – the heart of something; the most important part of something, which makes it what it is

(a) myth – (a) legend; a traditional story, often involving the supernatural

to condense – to become more dense (smaller but containing a lot of material)

disconcerting – worrying; unsettling

a predicament – a difficult or unpleasant situation

(a) metaphor – a description of one thing as another thing, which is not literally true

distressed – experiencing difficulty

to dominate (passive, to be dominated) - to take the most important place, pushing other things aside

to tackle something – to attempt to deal with something or beat something