A new scientific monograph dedicated to the work of Haruki Murakami, one of the prominent representatives of contemporary world literature, has been published at the Nizami Ganjavi Institute of Literature of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences.
The book “Haruki Murakami: The Cult of Postmodern Literature”, authored by Gulnar Ilham gizi Yunusova, PhD in Philology, was published in 2025 by the “Science and Education” publishing house. The author of the foreword is the President of ANAS, academician Isa Habibbeyli, and the scientific editor is Yokota Murakami Takayuki, associate professor of Osaka University, Japan, doctor of philological sciences. The reviewers are Ali Volkan Erdemir, professor of Erciyes University, doctor of philological sciences, and Basira Azizaliyeva, associate professor of the Nizami Ganjavi Institute of Literature of ANAS, doctor of philological sciences. The monograph examines the life and creative path of Haruki Murakami, who, along with Japanese literature, has had a direct impact on the development of postmodern literature in the world with his unique creative direction. The formation and main features of postmodernism in Japan are studied, and the characteristics of the impact on Murakami's artistic heritage are determined. Different aspects are examined in the writer's works, which reflect a large period of Japanese thinking on the eve of globalization. Murakami's novels "Adventure Around the Sheep", "Chronicle of a Mechanical Bird", "After Dark" are studied by analyzing postmodern fiction structurally and determining its characteristics, as well as by examining the trends, directions, and figures that influence postmodern fiction from a historical perspective. At the same time, Murakami's early creative example, "Listen to the Wind Song", is studied in the direction of cosmopolitanism, and "Norwegian Wood", which introduced the writer to the world and is his calling card, is studied in the direction of realism. Based on the novel "Kafka on the Shore", which is considered the best postmodern work of the artist, the surrealist views of the writer's aesthetic attitude to the world are determined.
The book's layout is also noteworthy. The cover of the book, designed by Dalga Yunus, features a labyrinth and a geometric bird image reminiscent of postmodern art, while the first pages feature Murakami in a jazz setting, symbolically reflecting his connection to both music and literature.
The book is a very valuable scientific and aesthetic resource for literary theorists, Japanese scholars, researchers interested in postmodernism, and literature lovers in general. As a result of the author's research, the reader has the opportunity to approach Haruki Murakami's works from a new perspective.
