I worked early today. This morning, on a Discord server about Haruki Murakami, someone said that Japanese artists tend to copy several foreign art achievements (especially, European and American ones), just like Haruki Murakami has been influenced by David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" (you can see how this influence/relationship can be by reading Haruki's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"). It was quite an interesting point of view, therefore, during working time I thought about this.
As a Japanese person, I can tell you this: in this country, there seems to be a very high wall between here (the domestic scene) and there (the outer world) in our consciousness. That can come from the languages we Japanese learn to use and also from the fact that this country is basically an island country that has been separated from the outer world. Therefore, as a cultural tradition, a kind of so-called elite people tried to translate several items/works into Japanese from those European and American countries, and we Japanese started "remaking" or "improving" them as ours.
Actually, I was born in 1975 and did not know about older generations' struggles, even though I heard that some people who had keen senses kept trying to import several modern philosophies such as Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze into this country to weave our original ones. Besides that philosophical field, we can see almost the same mechanism in Japanese modern literature and music, like Haruki has tried to "re-read" several American classical novels to make his "original" novels.
As a literally maniac or heavy listener of pop music, I can remember that at the beginning of the 90s there existed a quite creative trend of music in an independent music field in Japan. Some people who had really sophisticated senses tried to imitate (or "learn") ongoing American and British music movements, especially "Madchester" or "Second Summer of Love" and also to represent theirs with courage. For me, a favorite group Flipper's Guitar had done such truly creative serial work.
However, although Haruki has been influenced by not only American literature masterpieces such as Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler but also several cool pieces of music (especially Jazz), at least there seem for me to be certain vivid essences that can only be described as their original ones or truly "Japanese" ones.
