Table of Contents

1.Yes, Murakami Haruki is a challenge, Gitte Marianne Hansen and Michael Tsang Part 1: Temporal and spatial dimensions 2. From hara-hara to doki-doki: Murakami Haruki’s use of humour and his predicament since 1Q84 3. History and metaphysical narrative space 4. Murakami Haruki’s Tokyo: Spatial transformation and sociocultural displacement, disconnection, and disorientation 5. Food culture, consumerism and Murakami Haruki: The kitchen in ‘Zō no shōmetsu' Part 2: Narrative and genders 6. Murakami’s first-person narrators and female character construction 7. Voyeuristic gaze, narratological construction, and the gender problem in Murakami Haruki’s After Dark 8. Man without Woman: Sexual relationship in the postmodern era 9. Escape from stereotype? Male–male sexuality in the fiction of Murakami Haruki Part 3: Literary dialogues 10. Ask the horse: Murakami’s views on literary creation and the nature of inspiration 11. Modern Japanese and European genre history in Murakami’s and Sōseki’s coming-of-age novels 12. Trumping 1Q84/Nineteen Eighty-Four? Reading Murakami and Orwell in a dystopian era 13. Manifestations of creativity: Murakami Haruki as translator Part 4: Personal stories from the industry 14. Chasing wild sheep: The breakthrough of Murakami Haruki in the West 15. Two old translators recall the Murakami phenomenon 16. To build a pile of sleeping kittens, trying not to wake them: Rebecca Suter interviews Murakami Haruki

About the Author

Gitte Marianne Hansen is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Newcastle University, UK. An AHRC Leadership Fellow, she is PI for the project ‘Gendering Murakami Haruki: Characters, Transmedial Productions and Contemporary Japan’ and the author of Femininity, Self-harm and Eating Disorders in Japan: Navigating Contradiction in Narrative and Visual Culture (2016).

Michael Tsang is due to take up lectureship in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow at Newcastle University, UK. His research interests lie in world/postcolonial literatures and media with an East Asian focus. He has published in Japan Forum, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Wasafiri, and others, and is the founding editor of Hong Kong Studies.