Studying Haruki Murakami for Author and authority in the 2024 HSC English Extension 2 syllabus

New syllabus (first HSC 2027). This page follows the English Extension 11-12 (2024) syllabus. If you are sitting the 2026 HSC, use the older Major Work and Reflection pages on this subject instead. See what's changed.

Why Murakami suits the focus area

Haruki Murakami was born in 1949 in Kyoto and grew up in the Kobe region of Japan. His first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, appeared in 1979, and he has published novels, short stories and non-fiction since. His work is read around the world, mostly in translation. He has also translated English-language fiction into Japanese. For a study of authority, that matters: here is an author whose standing is made partly by the work of translators, publishers and international readers.

NESA does not prescribe any author-study texts, so the particular works are not fixed by NESA. Titles that readers commonly associate with him include Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994 and 1995), Kafka on the Shore (2002) and 1Q84 (2009 and 2010). We list them only to show his range, and you should anchor to the works your teacher has set. His work is in copyright and we do not quote it.

NESA's areas of critical enquiry for Haruki Murakami

NESA does not prescribe any author-study texts. Instead it sets four general areas of critical enquiry that apply to every author (paraphrased here, and read from NESA's Year 12 page on 7 October 2026), and then three points specific to this author. The works you study within the author's output are not fixed by NESA.

The four general areas:

1. How the author's personal, social, historical and literary context influenced their writing.
2. The author's experiments with, and contribution to, textual form.
3. How the author has influenced later writers and texts.
4. How a wide range of readers and scholars have celebrated, represented, appreciated and criticised the author.

The three author-specific points:

1. How his work has been received by Japanese and western literary establishments.
2. The impact of his distinctive written voice, style and themes.
3. How his writing is expressed across multiple forms, styles and languages.

Use the four general areas and these three points as the lenses for your body-of-work map. A strong study can say something specific about each across the works you have been set.

Questions his work invites

What happens to authority when realism gives way

Many of his narratives start in ordinary, recognisable life and then admit something strange: a disappearance, a dream that behaves like an event, a parallel layer of experience. Ask what the narration does to make the strange feel acceptable, and what that acceptance does to the reader's usual trust in a story.

Whose voice is it

First-person narrators, often plain-spoken and unremarkable, carry much of the work. Ask what authority a quiet, ordinary voice has, and what it conceals.

How do gaps and unanswered questions work

Many plots refuse to resolve the mysteries they raise. Ask what the refusal asks of the reader, and whether it lends the work authority or removes it.

What is the role of popular and global culture

Music, especially jazz and Western popular music, and references to literature from other places recur in his world. Ask how these references position the reader and what they imply about where cultural authority sits.

Authority and translation

Most students read Murakami in English translation. This is not an obstacle to a good argument. It is a topic. A translation is an interpretation, made by a person with their own choices about rhythm, register and emphasis. When you write about method, be careful about claims that depend on exact wording. Prefer claims about structure, narrative situation, imagery and sequence, which survive translation well. If you comment on the language, say you are working from the English edition your class used and name the translator.

This also gives you a question that is truly about authority: who is the author of the English-language book a student reads? The fair answer is that authorship is shared, and a strong response can say so without losing its grip on the original author's patterns.

A worked example: one novel, two readers

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (published in Japanese in the mid 1990s, with an English translation by Jay Rubin) follows Toru Okada, whose cat disappears and then whose wife, Kumiko, leaves, drawing him into a search that includes a dry well. The well is a useful example because it can be read as a place of withdrawal, of memory or of passage, and the novel lets those readings sit together without ruling between them. That is an authority question: the narration does not tell you what the well means, so the reader must supply it. Note also that the narration treats strange events in the same calm voice as everyday ones, which is why a reader's sense of what is believable becomes part of the argument.

A translation point follows from this. Most of your cohort reads Murakami in English, so the prose you analyse is the translator's decision as well as the author's. Use phrases such as "in the English translation" and avoid claims about word choice in Japanese unless you are certain of them. A safer move is to argue from structure, scene and narration, which survive translation. For a second example, Kafka on the Shore (2002) alternates between the teenage runaway Kafka Tamura and the elderly Nakata, who can talk to cats, and the parallel strands ask which story the reader should treat as authoritative. Describe these in your own words; do not quote.

Method: reading across the body of work

Build a table, one row per set work: form and date; narrator and point of view; how the ordinary and the strange meet; how the plot is left open or closed; and one distinctive method. Then look across for:

• Recurring situations. For example, a person who loses something or someone and is drawn into a search. State the pattern only if it is true of the works you have read.
• The pace of revelation. What the narration tells, delays or withholds.
• The handling of time and memory. Do scenes fold back, run in parallel or interrupt one another?
• Tone. Understatement and deadpan can carry great weight. Decide what the tone does to the way the reader judges events.

Context as a driver

Choose context that explains a choice. The postwar Japanese setting of much of his fiction, the influence of Western music and literature, and the global market he writes into are all possible drivers, but only use them where they help you explain a particular method. Avoid broad claims about "Japanese culture". Instead, say what a specific choice in a specific work seems to respond to.

Building an argument

A strong claim connects method to concern: by letting the strange arrive in the same flat voice as the ordinary, the works I have studied make the reader's usual standards of credibility the subject of the story, so authority becomes a question of what the reader is prepared to accept. Test it on two works, and find one that complicates it.

Writing a timed response on screen

The Author study part of the exam is 20 marks and is sat online. For Murakami, the most common timed-response error is retelling a surreal plot. Use your reading time to pick a claim about credibility (what the narration asks you to accept, and what it leaves open), then plan around two works.

Type a four-line plan: your claim, a structural choice from one work (a parallel narrative, an unexplained object, a flat narrating voice), a contrasting choice from another work, and one note on translation, because you are analysing an English text. In each paragraph, state the technique in a clause, describe the scene or structure in a sentence, and spend the rest on what it does to the reader's judgment.

Do not spend time explaining what a symbol "really" means; argue instead that the work withholds a single meaning and say what that does. Keep your expression plain, since an overwrought sentence about dreams and wells will cost you precision. Leave time to check that every paragraph links back to authority.

Practise by typing a response to a prompt about how much a reader should trust a narrator, then cut every sentence that only summarises.

Beyond the critical essay

NESA's published exam materials show that questions on an author can be critical or creative, can be set in two parts, can use stimulus or unseen material, and can ask you to reflect on your own composition. Murakami is a natural author for the creative-plus-reflection shape, because his methods (a plain voice, an unexplained rule, the strange inside the ordinary) can be borrowed and then explained. The practice items above give an opening of your own to compose (8 marks) and a reflection (12 marks) on it. Draft both, then check that every sentence in the reflection points to a choice in the opening.

Questions to ask of any author

• What does this author make me believe, and how?
• Who is given a voice, and who is spoken about?
• What does the work refuse to explain?
• How does this work differ from the others I have studied?
• Who benefits from the way this author is usually read?

Common traps

• Reading every strange event as a symbol with a fixed meaning.
• Making claims about the exact English words without saying you are reading a translation.
• Treating the author's popularity as evidence of quality, or the reverse.
• Retelling the plot instead of analysing method.