"Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami's fiction, Rebecca Suter complicates our understanding of the author's oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific. Suter concentrates on Murakami's short stories - less known in the West but equally worthy of critical attention - as sites of some of the author's bolder experiments in manipulating literary (and everyday) language, honing cross-cultural allusions, and crafting meta-fictional techniques. This study scrutinizes Murakami's fictional worlds and their extra-literary contexts through a range of discursive lenses: modernity and postmodernity, universalism and particularism, imperialism and nationalism, Orientalism and globalization."--BOOK JACKET.