I used to think the hard part of magical realism was inventing the magic. It's not. The hard part is keeping the rest of the sentence boring enough that the magic has somewhere to land.
These are five magical realism techniques I keep coming back to. They came from studying writers who figured out how to make the impossible feel inevitable on the page.
Magical Realism Works Best When the Protagonist Doesn't Notice the Magic
In Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami has a character named Nakata who talks to cats. The cats talk back. And the strange thing is that nobody in the novel treats this as particularly strange. Nakata mentions it the way you'd mention being good with crossword puzzles. It's just something he can do. There's no dramatic reveal, no scene where someone gasps and says, "You can understand them?" The ability exists inside the story the same way gravity does.
This is maybe the most counterintuitive of all magical realism techniques, and it's the one that separates the genre from fantasy. In fantasy, the magic is a system. Characters learn it, study it, argue about its rules. In magical realism, the magic is weather. It's just there. If a character in a Murakami novel stopped to marvel at a talking cat, the whole tonal architecture would collapse. The moment a character treats the impossible as impossible, you've written a different kind of book.
Think about how this works in music. When a jazz musician plays a note that doesn't belong to the chord, the move only works if the rest of the band keeps playing like nothing happened. The dissonance becomes texture instead of mistake. Same principle. If the prose flinches at its own strangeness, the reader flinches too.
The Surreal and the Mundane Have to Share the Same Sentence
Murakami understood something about sentence-level craft that took me a long time to articulate. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the protagonist Toru Okada spends his days cooking spaghetti, listening to jazz records, and occasionally descending into a dry well where he enters what might be a parallel dimension. The novel moves between these activities without shifting register. The prose that describes boiling pasta is the same prose that describes crossing into another reality. Same rhythm. Same flat, precise attention to physical detail.
This is how magical realism techniques work at the sentence level. You don't write the magic in italics. You don't save your best metaphors for the surreal moments and write plainly everywhere else. The moment your language gets more ornate for the impossible parts, you've drawn a border between what's real and what isn't, and the whole genre depends on that border not existing.
Sofia Samatar does something similar in A Stranger in Olondria, though her register is higher throughout. Jevick, her protagonist, is haunted by a ghost. But the ghost sits inside prose that's equally attentive to the smell of pepper and the weight of a leather book binding and the particular quality of coastal light. The haunting and the spice market occupy the same texture of attention. Neither gets priority.
Magic in Postcolonial Fiction Carries the Weight of History
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is, on one level, a novel about a boy with telepathic powers. Saleem Sinai can hear the thoughts of the other 1,001 children born during the first hour of India's independence. But Rushdie isn't writing about telepathy the way a science fiction writer would. The telepathy is India. All those voices crowding into one consciousness, the impossibility of holding an entire nation's worth of identity inside a single person. The magic is a metaphor, but it's also not a metaphor. It's both at the same time, and the novel refuses to let you settle on one reading.
I wonder sometimes whether magical realism techniques developed in Latin America and South Asia specifically because colonial histories produce a kind of reality that realism alone can't hold. When your country's story involves the erasure and collision of entire worlds, maybe the only honest way to tell it is with a form that insists on multiple realities coexisting in the same sentence.