His fiction has polarized literary critics and the reading public. He has sometimes been criticised by Japan's literary establishment as un-Japanese, leading to Murakami's recalling that he was a "black sheep in the Japanese literary world". Meanwhile, Murakami has been described by Gary Fisketjon, the editor of Murakami's collection ''The Elephant Vanishes'' (1993), as a "truly extraordinary writer", while Steven Poole of ''The Guardian'' praised Murakami as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his oeuvre.