In his reminiscence of Carver, Haruki Murakami – a modern-day international literary phenomenon – inextricably ties his fiction to Carver, and claims him as his ‘greatest literary comrade’. Murakami's claim to Carver's legacy might seem conceited for those who are unfamiliar with the close connection between the two writers. In 1982, early on in his writing career, Murakami first encountered Carver's fiction when he read the story ‘So Much Water So Close To Home’ in the anthology West Coast Fiction. Writing after Carver's death he described the experience in this way:

For English language readers who are familiar with Murakami’s fiction, his admiration of Carver's writing might come as a surprise. His lengthy and complex novels embody a kind of postmodern surrealism – one that blends the ubiquitousness of life in late capitalism with the distinctly American styles and modes of detective writing and science fiction. Carver's style on the other hand, as I have already highlighted, is distinctly minimal and distinctly realist – a form that still has its proponents but which has also come under increasing critical scrutiny in recent decades. Murakami himself offers a rebuff to those critics when he claims that Carver’s fiction goes ‘beyond simple realism’ – and by that, surely he means, beyond its supposed minimalist limitations – that beneath the surface of Carver's fiction are important, communicable and relevant truths, even for the postmodern, neoliberal age. For Carver this conservative view of literature finds its root, as I suggested in the previous chapter, in Gardner's ideological pedagogy (that ‘true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not debase it’), and this idea finds an analogous outlet in Murakami's own writing, through which he feels he has a ‘vested duty’ as a popular Japanese author to improve Japanese society.