Author: Douglas McLennan

“We writers have often spent time—much of it in the late twentieth century—questioning the ability of words to reflect facts, and the existence of objective facts themselves. There are those who have, whether with glee or with shame, observed a sort of relationship between those postmodern exercises and Trump’s post-truth, post-language ways. I think this reflects a basic misunderstanding, or perhaps a willing conflation of intentions. When writers and academics question the limits of language, it is invariably an exercise that grows from a desire to bring more light into the public sphere, to arrive at a shared reality that is more nuanced than it was yesterday. To focus ever more tightly on the shape, weight, and function of any thing that can be named, or to find names for things that have not, in the past, been observed. Our ability to do this depends on a shared language.”

“At this late stage — Murakami is 68 — critical reception has ceased to matter to Murakami’s international audience. In Japan his books are greeted with Harry Potter–like rabidity, and in the U.S. initial print runs are in the hundreds of thousands. Cribbing a remark John Irving once made to him in an interview, Murakami has compared his readers to heroin addicts, and that may be one reason why he’s consistently delivered an ever-purer-grade product. A Nobel Prize has long been thought to be looming, especially by British bookies. Few of his skeptics would deny that his early work, his self-declared project of importing Western tropes and styles to treat life in Japan and his reckoning with Japan’s history, put him in that hazily defined league. A cynic might say: After Dylan, all is permitted.”