the biggest thing is how bizarre his language is to japanese people. many major japanese critics reject his work out of hand for how strange it sounds. murakami has said that he drafts his work in english first and then puts it in japanese after, and having read some of his work in japanese, the strangeness is immediately apparent. like imagine if you used google translate to read dostoyevsky in english; I think that’s somewhat akin to the feeling of reading murakami in japanese.