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Journalism of Courage
Every October, a familiar literary déjà vu plays out. Haruki Murakami’s name tops Nobel prediction lists and fans brace themselves for celebration. Then, as always, the Swedish Academy looks elsewhere. Murakami, the perennial almost-winner, becomes the world’s favourite ( presumable) runner-up again.
The Japanese author, now in his seventies, has come to embody both the romance and futility of literary yearning, not unlike his own protagonists who drift through dreamscapes in search of meaning, cats, or lost love. So, the question lingers: why hasn’t one of the most read, translated, and loved writers alive ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Perhaps it’s because Murakami’s rebellion is too inward, his women too unreal, or his sadness too seductive. His greatest strengths as an author – the ability to make the ordinary shimmer with strangeness, to romanticise solitude until it glows – may also be what keep him at the Nobel’s margins.
Few writers can make boiling spaghetti or a walk on a sunny morning feel like revelation. Murakami transforms the banal into the mystical, giving loneliness its own vocabulary. His novels capture the modern ache, the quiet sorrow of existing in a detached, emotionally barren world. And yet, the very emotional texture that enchants readers is also what alienates the prize committees.
Murakami’s universe, for all its beauty, is steeped in the male gaze. His women are often vessels for male longing: Ethereal, sexual, sometimes disappearing without explanation. They are dreamed more than lived, existing mainly to haunt, heal or catalyse a protagonist’s journey. Even when they speak, they are filtered through the eyes of men who desire or often misunderstand them. It isn’t malice, but habit; a kind of quiet, unexamined gaze that feels increasingly out of step with how literature now engages with gender and representation.
His novels are sensual, but the sensuality often slips into objectification, turning women’s bodies into metaphors for male emptiness. As the world demands more nuanced portrayals, Murakami’s women can feel like artefacts of an older sensibility – haunting, but hollow.
Then there is the issue of narrative passivity or detachment. His narrators are too emotionally numb to rage, too passive to rebel; they drift, observe and internalise. His absurd settings (Sputnik Sweetheart, Birthday Girl) blur the line between the real and the surreal, ending in silence and ambiguity. Readers linger, re-read, and find comfort in the unresolved. While hypnotic, his works are inward-looking, subjective, and deliberately evasive. His stakes are emotional or metaphysical, rarely moral.
And that’s where the Nobel tension lies. The prize, despite inconsistencies, rewards writers who engage directly with history, power, and collective conscience. Kawabata captured the fragile beauty of Japanese life; Kenzaburō Ōe confronted post-war guilt and moral disquiet. Murakami writes alienation untethered from nation, ideology, or politics. His sadness is universal, but his moral gaze is diffuse. His revolution is inward, not outward, which makes him beloved by readers, but less so by committees seeking moral gravitas.
Even his signature magic realism can work against him. The surreal flourishes, the ambiguous endings, the repeated motifs of parallel worlds risk seeming self-indulgent or repetitive. They enchant readers but don’t offer the kind of intellectual or ethical courage the Nobel tends to reward. Murakami’s work, for all its elegance, is immersive but insulated.
In an age where literature is read as witness, Murakami offers dreams instead of documentation. And dreams, no matter how intricate, rarely command the spotlight. Even when he writes of real events (the 1995 Kobe earthquake in After the Quake, wartime memory in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) they arrive filtered through surrealism and detachment. The catastrophe is always interior.
Japan-born British laureate (2017) Kazuo Ishiguro, perhaps Murakami’s closest contemporary, stands as a useful contrast. Both explore memory and loss, but Ishiguro’s restraint and moral precision align neatly with the Nobel’s temperament. His prose reveals the ache beneath civility while Murakami’s dissolve reality itself.
Perhaps that’s why Murakami’s books feel so intimate. He doesn’t demand belief; he invites reflection. His books aren’t about answers but atmospheres; learning to live with emptiness, finding beauty in repetition, sitting still with longing, and sometimes not looking for answers.
If the Nobel celebrates global conscience, Murakami writes about global solitude. And solitude, as every reader knows, rarely gets a standing ovation.
