Thematic Focus and Literary Techniques in Haruki Murakami’s Essays—A Close Reading of Five Essays from Murakami Asahido Hiho!

Abstract

This paper closely reads five representative essays from Murakami Asahido Hiho!, and systematically summarizes the thematic focus and literary techniques in Haruki Murakami’s essays. The article points out that Murakami, with his unique sense of humor and self-deprecating spirit, focuses on themes such as changes of the times, social warmth, the passing of youth, and individual alienation, and is good at extracting universal meaning from daily trivialities. He skillfully uses metaphor, symbolism, detailed description, first-person narration, and multiple quotations to endow the essays with a sense of reality and literariness, flexibly switching between the perspectives of “bystander” and “participant”. Murakami fuses fiction and non-fiction within the essay genre, and under a light and lively tone offers profound reflections, presenting the spiritual outlook and way of thinking of the modern Japanese intellectual. On the whole, Murakami’s essays not only record the complexity and loneliness of the spiritual world of modern people, but also endow contemporary Japanese essays with new vitality and value.