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Morten Oddvik, Independent Study, Waseda University, Tokyo, Spring 2002
Murakami Haruki & Magical Realism
 A Look at the Psyche of Modern Japan
Morten Oddvik Waseda UniversitySpring 2002
Murakami Haruki is hailed as one of Japan's most successful contemporary authors, but at thesame time his works are criticized as being "consumable nostalgia" (Morris, 1996, 269) and
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Morten Oddvik, Independent Study, Waseda University, Tokyo, Spring 2002
unimportant. Morris dismisses Murakami as part of popular culture, describing his novels as "morememorable for their titles than their contents" (269). In this essay I will examine how Murakami`sworks explore Japanese society. Murakami portrays contemporary Japanese society through protagonists living in, or between, two states of reality and in search of their real self, or coreidentity. Through techniques of magical realism and symbolism, Murakami focuses on the flawsand ills of a highly developed capitalist culture and shows how the individual ends up facing aninevitable identity crisis, which the protagonist is forced to deal with in order to be able tocontinue to live and cope with this society.
Reality Vanishes
I felt the woman's tongue entering my mouth. Warm and soft, it probed every crevice and itwound around my own tongue. The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of mylungs. Down in my loins, I felt a dull need to come. Clamping my eyes closed, I fought it. Amoment later, I felt a kind of intense heat on my right cheek. It was an odd sensation. I feltno pain, only the awareness of heat. I couldn't tell whether the heat was coming from theoutside or boiling up inside me. Soon everything was gone: the woman's tongue, the smell of flowers, the need to come, the heat on my cheek. And I passed through the wall. When Iopened my eyes I was on the other side of the wall - at the bottom of a deep well.
(The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Book Two, 247)
In this crucial part of the three-volume
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
, the protagonist ToruOkada has returned from another world of reality, a dreamscape reality of a labyrinth-like hotel,where he tries to find his missing wife Kumiko. At this point in the novel he can successfully enter into this reality, or world, by climbing down a dry well on a neighboring abandoned property.Sitting in the darkness he feels he comes closer to himself, his memories and his thoughts, in hisown mind. "Here in this darkness, with its strange sense of significance, my memories began totake on a power they had never had before. The fragmentary images they called up inside me weremysteriously vivid in every detail, to the point where I felt I could grasp them in my hands" (222).This symbolism is an essential pillar of Murakami`s work. As he himself writes in the non-fiction work 
Underground 
, "Subterranean worlds - wells, underpasses, caves, underground springsand rivers, dark alleys, subways - have always fascinated me and are an important motif [sic] in mynovels" (239). The subconscious is very important in his books and the darkness of theunderground environment is an easily identifiable symbol of this. There exists a coded division between this darkness and the world of light. Furthermore, there is a fine line between theserealities, or worlds. Toru Okada in
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
does not realize how little heknows his wife Kumiko until she disappears, and thus also how little he knows himself.Murakami`s protagonists are often ordinary men in their late twenties or early thirties, who arecaught in a life that seems mediocre, everyday and boring. They are stuck in mundane jobs,working as advertising copywriters and such, "people who have lost their sixties idealism andaccommodated themselves to the Establishment" (Jay Rubin, 1999, 8).Set in the summer of 1984,
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
starts out with Toru Okada andKumiko Wataya who are married and live in a peaceful neighborhood in suburban Tokyo. He has been unemployed since he quit his job as a lawyer, and she works busily for a magazine. One daytheir cat disappears and this causes Kumiko great concern. This is the first of many disturbances of their peaceful world. Kumiko disappears partway through the novel, and the search for her involves Toru in a search for his own identity.
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Morten Oddvik, Independent Study, Waseda University, Tokyo, Spring 2002
Murakami`s novels and short stories usually revolve around the question of how the first- person protagonist can forge connections with an other, conscious or unconscious, and thenidentity in dentify himself, to prove his existence. As the critic Matthew Strecher suggests in hisessay "Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki," thisquestion is the red thread that links Murakami`s earliest work to the most recent.One can also see Toru’s search for his wife more as a search inside himself; as Rubinsuggests, he looks "for the meaning of his marriage to her and the meaning of his life as a productof Japan's modern history" (Rubin, 2001, 239). For exactly these reasons Toru has to embark on asearch in and between the realities of the dark, dreamy world and real life.The key element of these different worlds is the fundament for Murakami`s well developedsymbolism, seen in strange disappearances, darkness, narrow passageways or deep wells. The bottom line is that people have lost each other and this is represented by the world of darkness.In
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
darkness is where Toru has to look to find his wife and tofind his own identity. In this darkness, memory, the past, and nostalgia are entwinedindistinguishably. In the quoted passage above Toru has entered the darkness through the walls of the well and may be closer to finding his wife.After being out of work for nearly two months Toru finds himself out of touch with the"outside world". Prior to her disappearance Kumiko had given Toru an opportunity to stay homeand figure things out by letting him quit his job. In a passage shortly before Kumiko disappears hestands in front of the mirror and realizes that he and the world he is living in is standing still.It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and themore it consisted of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflowwith things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while; itseemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. (126)From the very beginning of the novel Kumiko is calling him and in fact desperately pleading for help. The telephonic distance shows how far apart modern beings can slide from eachother. Stillness and darkness are symbols of this. As Strecher writes, "... she calls Toru on thetelephone from his internal mind and insists that if he can give her just ten minutes, "we canunderstand each other" Her talk then turns seductive, finally overtly sexual, and Toru hangs up onher without giving her the ten minutes she so earnestly desires" (288). In the modern world directcontact is disrupted by means of communication such as cellular phones and computers. The latter turns out to be the only way Toru can communicate with Kumiko after several months. Directhuman communication is no longer easily obtained.In a scene where Kumiko arrives home late after a tough day at work, Toru and his wifestart fighting. Toru has bought blue tissue paper and patterned toilet paper, which upsets Kumiko.Moreover, he is preparing a meal of stir-fried beef and green peppers, which Kumiko absolutelydetests. She hates blue tissue paper and patterned toilet paper, too. She is very upset that her husband has never realized these simple facts throughout the six years of their married life.When they go to bed, Toru thinks the evening over. "That night, in our darkened bedroom, I lay beside Kumiko, staring at the ceiling and asking myself just how much I really knew about thiswoman" (30). He ponders the triviality of these things, but is caught by a growing sense of crisis."Maybe - just maybe - it was more crucial than it had seemed. Maybe this was it: the fatal blow"(30). Rightly, Toru is on mark with his suspicions and the darkness of the bedroom and histhoughts makes him question how well he really knows the companion next to him in bed.
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