SOURCE: “A Voice from Postmodern Japan: Haruki Murakami,” in World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 295–300.

In the following essay, Iwamoto identifies the distinctly postmodern qualities of Murakami's fiction, focusing on A Wild Sheep Chase.

Forget everything you know about Japan and enter the postmodern world of Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase, where people sweat about their careers, drink too much, and drift through broken marriages, all without a kimono in sight.

A postmodern detective novel in which dreams, hallucinations and a wild imagination are more important than actual clues.

As these two quotes—appearing on the back cover and front page of the paperback edition of A Wild Sheep Chase,¹ the English translation of Haruki Murakami's novel Hitsuji o megaru bōken (1982)—might suggest, the author, perhaps the most popular and widely read, if not the most highly respected, among the current crop of the more...