Haruki Murakami's Facebook Presence

Haruki Murakami's Facebook page is not run by him personally, but by his publishing company, Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage Books. That is what you are told under the "About" section on the main page, instead of anything about the author. If you click on "About" and go to that page, you get a professional mini biography and under "Interests" are a list of all of Mr. Murakami's various works. So from the start we can see that this is not a page in which that author has a personal presence or makes himself available to his audience, but a page run by a publisher to promote their author. I believe part of this may have to do with the fact that Mr. Murakami is a Japanese writer and, although he doesn't have a personal presence on Facebook, he may have a personal presence on Japanese social networking sites.

 If we return to the main page, we see that the last time a post was made to this page was June 4, and this page is updated sporadically. Before the June 4 update, the previous was on May 29. Most of the posts are there to promote his books. They usual include a quote from the book, and the book cover. There are also snippets from reviews of his books, posts on translating his books from Japanese to English, and a very timely post on why Mr. Murakami decided to translate The Great Gatsby into Japanese, which links to a post on his website. There are also clips and quotes from interviews with Mr. Murakami, so the reader can get to know the man behind the book. As evidenced by this blog, we see that Mr. Murakami is a very private man, because as we scroll down, there is a link to an article titled, "Author Murakami makes first Japan public appearance in 18 years" to promote his new book, "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage". I believe the publishing company does a good job at keeping Mr. Murakami's Facebook active and updated with relevant information regarding his newest works. I think they do a decent job at showing us who Mr. Murakami is, despite the fact that he is a private person. This page does exactly what it sets out to do- market an author.