Here are five tips for writing in Haruki Murakami’s Style
(Muh. Syahrul Padli — Tips Series)
These tips will not make you have work at Murakami’s level. These tips will actually make you realize that you are not as special as Murakami and that’s okay. Therefore, with all your shortcomings, you don’t need to expect to be able to write like him, but hope that you can write to your capacity. Here are the tips.
1. Create details that you know from personal experience or from others.
Haruki Murakami is a type of writer who processes his personal experiences into a fictional form. That’s because personal experience is the best material to be processed in such a way.
Murakami has a lot of experiences related to cats. That’s why his writing about cats is so alive and can make you dive to the story because you didn’t expect such a simple thing to be so interesting in the right hands.
Murakami remembers the unique details of these experiences. He experiences them and gives them meaning.
Murakami was once massaged on his arms and thighs when he first started training in preparation for a marathon. This experience shaped his female protagonist named Aomame who works as a masseuse (physiotherapist) in the novel 1Q84.
In essence, transform your personal experiences or the experiences of others you have heard into an authentic fictional form of your own. Because your experiences are different from others, then by itself, the experiences you process, that you patch, that you embroider with your imagination will give a kick that only you can do.
Because only Murakami can write about cats with a strange impression that stays in the head and only Murakami can write about muscle massage as a meaning of the body itself like Aomame, you don’t need to write about those two things if you don’t master them. Find and process things or topics or experiences where if you write it, the result will not be achieved by others.
2. Practice choosing words so that the narrative flows.
Murakami’s work doesn’t like to play with beautiful narratives, convoluted sentences, melodious or with philosophical language of the gods. Murakami’s work always uses simple, flowing language, everyday language.
Murakami doesn’t play much on word choice, but Murakami plays on the tempo and rhythm of the story, like a jazz musician who is very skillfully improvising freely.
3. The female character’s background is revealed.
There is no conventional Murakami female character like a soap opera where the female character comes from a poor family and then meets a handsome, grumpy but kind-hearted young man who is the CEO of a famous company.
Murakami’s female characters are interesting, unique and unconventional not because they come from a world that is not inhabited by humans. But Murakami just designed his female characters from the women around us, whom we meet in the real world but whose characters are equipped with certain details.
In addition, we are slowly invited to explore the inner side of the female character so that we can sympathize with what she does and how she responds to events. We are offered the glasses that the character wears to view the world and experience events.
4. Include conversations as naturally as possible but with philosophical elements in some parts.
The conversations between Murakami’s fictional characters are like most conversations. Sometimes too long sometimes short. Sometimes directly to the point sometimes go around and around towards abstract things. But what we can always expect from the dialogues of his characters is the philosophical values contained in everyday conversations between friends, between the character and a stranger, even between the characters and theirself.
5. Create specific magical markers (wells, colors, etc.)
Almost every Murakami’s work is connected to a particular object or event. In the novella The Strange Library, the main character is connected to the sheep-clad man and the underground library. The main characters of 1Q84 are connected to two moons hanging in the air. The characters of Kafka on the Shore are connected to the traditional library and the fall of mackerel from the sky. The Snail Shell and the Cuckoo’s Egg make the well and the wife who suddenly disappears as elements that are metaphysically intertwined. Tsukuru Tazaki Without Color and His Years of Pilgrimage place names and colors as a form of other personality of some of his characters.
With specific markers like that, which make readers served with things that they rarely read in other works, your work will have its own unique flavor.
Can knowing these tips make you write like Haruki Murakami? No. You will never be able to write like Murakami because it is not possible. You don’t think in the same native language framework as Murakami. You don’t experience the events that shape Murakami’s writing style and so on. That’s why you’d better replace questions like that with questions like, “How can I not look down on myself? How can I get out of the trap of idolizing a figure who narrows my mind? Why am I asking such questions?”
I, who observed Murakami’s work and collected his characteristics to make tips, never managed to become Haruki Murakami wannabe level two. One Haruki Murakami is enough. The tips above can be used not to become the next Murakami, but as a reference to add ornaments to our own work.
The most important thing I learned from Murakami is to find a writing style that makes us happy. Murakami’s writing style is like a jazz musician playing an instrument. There are no new notes in a piano key, but there is always new imagination from the combination of piano keys. There are no additional notes in the saxophone, but there is always new improvisation of tempo and new meaning in a song. That’s how Murakami’s writing style was formed from his love of jazz music.
We may also find a unique writing style from our love of something. Like Murakami, who took dozens of years to achieve his own unique writing style, time is not the main thing, but the process. The process of continuing to process.
