The Institute for Japanese Studies presents:
"Market Literacy: Reading Aesthetics and Economics in the 1980s Fiction of Murakami Haruki"
Brian Hurley
The University of Texas at Austin
Abstract: Every prominent novelist in twentieth-century Japan made money by selling their writings in the market. But one of them has been criticized more than any other for profiting from his craft: Murakami Haruki. His rise to stardom beginning in the 1980s enchanted millions of readers at the same time that it generated a pervasive disquiet among some scholars and critics, who feared that his stunning commercial success indicated the dawn of a market-dominated age at “the end of history” that spelled the end of serious literature, too. Drawing on recent scholarship that has illuminated the imbrications of aesthetics and economics in contexts ranging from art and literature to philosophy and beyond, this lecture argues that reports of literature’s death in the market have been greatly exaggerated. In so doing, it poses a challenge to the conventional wisdom surrounding Murakami’s rise by showing that what was most distinctive about his early career was not how the market made his novels into lucrative objects for sale, but how his fiction made market life itself into an intriguing object of literary representation.
Brian Hurley is assistant professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Confluence and Conflict: Reading Transwar Japanese Literature and Thought (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), and is currently working on a study of aesthetics and economics in postwar and contemporary Japanese fiction.
