After reading the work that discusses Murakami and magical realism, I was impressed to see the analysis of what they say as a “realistic narrative setting” being created, and disrupted by something “bizarre or the magical” (267). I think that in some senses, Murakami’s earlier works can be seen as magical realism when we consider the kinds of disruptions that happened in stories like Norwegian Wood or A Wild Sheep Chase. Even though the article focuses on a lot of Murakami’s works, I will only discuss those two and his later works that I don’t really think fit under magical realism. In Norwegian Wood, there is a search for self and here he actually uses names for his characters and ends the novel in a what seems like dazed or perhaps a dead state, showing how fast two consciousnesses (or worlds) come together or go apart. The same is said throughout the plot of A Wild Sheep Chase, and both of these works have some events that just can’t be explained with logical means.
However, I feel like as Murakami evolved as a writer, he moved away from this specific genre of realism, and I think a lot of his other works have a more logical (or can be logical, or at least not magical) explanation for certain events. With the exception of Samsa in Love, where we can’t really explain how the main character became a human, stories like Tony Takitani, Sydney Green Street and The Bakery Attack (and the second one) to me seem to be short stories where more logical things happen. Not that the events make sense to the average person, but they’re not so absurd where the only explanation is magic. The explanation could be, “Wow, these people are just weird” or “I guess some people do that.” Perhaps the article more so argues that his long stories are works of magical realism, but Murakami has written so much I think labeling him there would be inaccurate. His novels that we have read seem to be there though for sure.
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