Why Only Haruki Murakami Was Valued— How “Not Understanding” Accidentally Passed Through the Literary System

Recently,
I wrote about an experience where I listened to a conversation by a well-known novelist
and felt nothing move inside me.

No admiration.
No resistance.
Just a quiet stillness.

What stayed with me was not a matter of taste,
or judgment,
or personal preference.

It was a discomfort with the structure itself.
With how evaluation works in literature.

In that piece, I said this.

—I had believed that literature was different.

A place where not-knowing,
and depths that cannot be explained,
still had a circuit to be received.

Almost the only place where that felt possible.

Now that I know that expectation was an illusion,
there is someone I have to write about.

Haruki Murakami.

Why was he made visible?
Why did he pass through,
even while being called “hard to understand”?

This is not a story about
how great he is,
or how exceptional his talent might be.

It is the opposite.

Why did unknowability
and depth
manage to pass through society
only in his case?

Unless that structure is put into words,
the discomfort I wrote about before
remains just an impression.

Here, I want to trace
where widely sold, surface-level novels
and Murakami’s novels
split in a decisive way.

And why that difference
was not “the hope of literature,”
but only a single, accidental passage.

How he is usually described

In general,
Haruki Murakami is spoken of as
“a globally acclaimed Japanese writer.”

Translated into many languages.
Read widely overseas.
Classified as literary fiction,
yet written in a simple, accessible style.

“Hard to understand, but literary.”
That phrase has supported his reputation for years.

His recurring motifs and consistent world
are often cited as proof
that his authorship is firmly established.

But this explanation stays on the surface.

Why was unknowability not rejected?
Why did he alone pass through
the circuit of evaluation?

There is a layer
this explanation does not reach.

My own experience

To be honest,
I barely remember his novels.

The last one I read was in my student years.
I think it was Kafka on the Shore.

The plot,
the symbols,
even the names of the characters
are all vague now.

But there is one sensation I remember clearly.

It felt like a dream.

Just that.

And now I think—
that memory alone may have been enough.

Dreams are meaningless as they are

A dream feels real while you are in it.
But the moment you wake up,
it becomes impossible to explain.

Why that place?
Why that person?
Why fear, or sadness?

Try to explain it logically,
and it collapses.

So dreams always require translation.

This is a symbol of anxiety.
That person represents the past.
It reflects my current state.

Meaning is added afterward,
by the waking mind.

What matters is this:

A dream does not move us
because it already has meaning.

It keeps moving us
because meaning remains undecided.

Popular novels are already translated

Novels that sell widely are kind.

They tell you
what happened,
why it happened,
how to feel.

The translation is already finished
inside the story.

Sadness becomes tears.
Anger becomes empathy.
Growth becomes catharsis.

The reader can close the book and say,
“I get it.”
“That was good.”

Emotion is collected.
Meaning is organized.
The experience ends within the work.

This is not bad.

But the unconscious hardly moves.

Murakami’s novels are handed over untranslated

A novel that feels like a dream
has a different structure.

Weak causality.
Symbols left unexplained.
Emotions without names.
No final resolution.

The reader finishes the book
without receiving meaning.

I don’t know.
I can’t explain it.
But it stays.

This is not because it is “difficult.”

It is intentionally left untranslated.

So after leaving the work,
the reader’s unconscious begins to work on its own.

What was that?
Why does it linger?
Where does it overlap with me?

The same process as dreaming.

The unconscious is not moved by “thinking”

Deep literature equals difficult.
Deep literature equals analysis.
Deep literature equals intellectual readers.

A common misunderstanding.

The unconscious is not moved
because we are made to think.

It moves
because meaning is left unprocessed.

Murakami’s novels
do not present answers,
do not assert ideas,
do not label emotions.

Instead,
they quietly place
a state of not knowing
inside the reader.

And that works later.

What happens after reading
is an unconscious act of translation.

Why he passed through as an exception

This kind of work
normally clashes with evaluation systems.

Hard to explain.
Hard to justify.
Hard to authorize.

Yet Murakami passed through because—

The prose is light.
The violence is low.
The ideology feels safe.
The work translates well.

In other words,

It shakes the unconscious
without threatening society.

There is depth,
but it does not stab.

Because it does not assert,
it provokes little resistance.

So it settles into a position that says:

“I don’t really understand it,
but I can’t deny it either.”
“It feels literary.”

This was not because
the literary world was especially perceptive.

It was a single case
where conditions happened to align.

One thing that can be said

Surface-level novels
end with the reader’s understanding.

Murakami’s novels
do not end inside the reader.

They hand over no meaning.
They are left untranslated.

So the unconscious moves.

And this is not a story
about differences in talent.

It is a story about structure—
about how the first case
that preserved depth
managed to circulate by accident.

This note is written for those whose senses move
before answers arrive.

If something stayed with you after reading,
that may be a sign that something inside you responded.

— withchat