SOURCE: “Murakami Haruki and Raymond Carver: The American Scene,” in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4, 1993, pp. 423–38.

In the following essay, Matsuoka compares A Wild Sheep Chase to Raymond Carver's “Blackbird Pie,” tracing similarities between motifs, themes, and characters to illustrate the “confluence” of American and Japanese fictional conventions in contemporary world literature.

In the preface to From Puritanism to Postmodernism, Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland write:

Now, by virtue not only of its quality but its modern resonance, and indeed America's own power of influence and distribution as well as its possession of a world language, American literature more than ever exists for more people than simply the Americans. It is part of, and does much to shape, the writing of literature through much of the contemporary world.¹

Twentieth-century American literature has indeed made a strong impact on Japanese literature. And since the 1980s, Japanese novels and stories...