Depois de dar uma olhada em algumas resenhas e entrevistas on-line, como essa , parece que é uma escolha do autor. A esposa de Murakami costumava dirigir um clube de jazz, e ele parece ter uma preferência pessoal pela música e literatura ocidentais, o que lhe causou algum pesar dos críticos japoneses de seu trabalho. Como ele mesmo diz na entrevista vinculada:
Murakami doesn't read many of his Japanese contemporaries. Does he feel detached from his home scene? "It's a touchy topic," he says, chuckling. "I'm a kind of outcast of the Japanese literary world. I have my own readers … But critics, writers, many of them don't like me."
Em este artigo sobre tradução, diz:
In "Firefly," one of the short stories from "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman," Murakami writes, "What the hell do you think you're doing? I asked myself. And what comes next? I hadn't the slightest idea. At school I read Claudel's plays, and Racine's, and Eisenstein. I liked their style, but that was it."
“It is often said that Murakami’s Japanese is ‘honyakucho,’” says producer Kawakami, meaning that it sounds almost as if someone has translated English into Japanese. “Some Japanese find it appealing, but others find that it makes his work difficult to get through. To a certain extent, when compared to more vague Japanese, his words could be simple to translate into English. But in making his images and impressions clear, perhaps something of the original Japanese is not completely expressed.
Eu só li alguns de seus livros, mas seu gosto pela música ocidental parece ser uma constante em seu trabalho.