Email: mstrecher[at]sophia.ac.jp
Tell: 03-3238-4037
Office: 10-642

Faculty of Liberal Arts

Graduate Program in Global Studies

My research focuses on “other worlds” in contemporary Japanese writing, chiefly (but not exclusively) in the fantastic, magical realist, or quasi-mythic setting.  The bulk of my writing has been on Murakami Haruki, but I have spent the past decade identifying, describing, and interpreting the “other worlds” in the works of Ogawa Yōko, Kawakami Hiromi, Ōe Kenzaburō, Shinkai Makoto, Abe Kōbō, Tsutsui Yasutaka, Shimizu Yoshinori, and Yoshimoto Banana as well as in Murakami.

Books

・Challenging Authors: Haruki Murakami.  With Paul Thomas.  Amsterdam: Sense Publishers, 2016.

・The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

・The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Reader’s Guide.  New York and London: Continuum, 2002.

・Dances With Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Book Chapters

・“A Very Philosophical Murakami.” In Haruki Murakami and Philosophical Concepts, Joseph Milburn, ed., Palgrave MacMillan, 2025, pp. 11-15.

・“Murakami Haruki: The Power of the Story.”  In Angela Yiu, ed., Literature in Heisei Japan.  Sophia University Press, 2024, pp. 68-85.

・“A False Peace: Literature in the Heisei Era.”  In T. Burrett, J. Kingston, and N. Murai, eds., Japan in the Heisei Era (1989-2019).  London: Routledge, 2022, pp. 261-271.

・With Mina Qiao. “The Enchanted Void: Minding the Gap in Kawakami Hiromi.”  In Mina Qiao, ed., Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature.  Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022, pp. 163-190.

・“History and Metaphysical Narrative Space.”  In G. Hansen and M. Tseng, eds., Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage.  London: Routledge, 2021, pp. 23-50.