The recent award of the Princess of Asturias Prize for Letters to Haruki Murakami adds another award to a long list of accolades, both for specific books and for his general work. He got Franz Kafka, World Fantasy, Jerusalem, Hans Christian Andersen, Gunz and at least a dozen others. Like other qualifications, these recognitions are not a guarantee, but a recommendation. Even the Nobel, the world’s most notorious literary prize, does not in itself make the person who receives it an unquestionable teacher. It seems that this writer, born in 1949 in Kyoto, has time ahead of him to receive this mythical honor, especially if you consider that he is a conscientious athlete, as he explains in his essay What I mean when I talk about runningbut he could be one of those authors who, fully deserved, died waiting for the Nobel!

And if the awards are not a guaranteed ticket to immortality, neither is the popularity and commercial success of the work, which in the case of this Japanese novelist means the millions of copies sold of almost all of his titles. His clear prose, his unusual style and his narrative honesty, not without poetry and depth, made him a literary icon during his lifetime. Its quality was recognized early on, but it became a mass phenomenon in 1987, when it was published Norwegian woodwhich in Spanish would be titled Tokyo blues, with a not entirely convincing editorial pirouette. This novel tells the story of a young man, practically an adolescent, through Japan in the 1960s, dealing with many still-burning problems four decades later. Despite the fact that there are details in the course of the narrative that remind us that we are in a Japanese context, the conflicts and adventures of the characters could take place in any major city in the world today. It is an “urban” work, more in the sense of the European existentialist narrative of the fifties and sixties, than in the sense of the narrative of the new millennium. Excellent reception Tokyo blues did not prevent protests from a section of the public who lacked the magical realism of his previous books, despite the fact that listen to the song of the wind, his first novel, is also not touched by surreal or magical notes. And a quarter of a century after Bluesthey came to us The pilgrim years of the colorless boy which, although it tells an unusual story, does not leave the framework of conventional reality.

Another option in the quest for greatness would be to sneak into Japan’s famous literary tradition, which dates back to the Middle Ages and would become one of the most powerful in the world in the 20th century, with names like Tanizaki, Kawabata, Mishima and Hey. However, Murakami will not say reject, but he deliberately ignores that legacy, in order to reinvent the novel, to the point of writing his initial work, listen to the song of the wind, in English, a language he did not master at the time, to later translate it into his own language. It will be the starting signal for an experiment that takes shape in an accessible, exciting and wonderful style. (OR)