Memory, Hybridity, and Creative Alliance in Haruki Murakami's Fiction

Author(s): AMY TY LAI

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal , March 2007, Vol. 40, No. 1, a
special issue: THE ANIMAL, PART II (March 2007), pp. 163-179
Published by: University of Manitoba

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030164

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This essay explores the use of animals in Haruki Murakami's fiction, where animals serve as the emblem of self-

hood, where human-animal hybrids manifest the fragmented self, and where becoming-animal inspires a cre-

ative process in which humans can fare better.

Memory, Hybridity,
and Creative Alliance in
Haruki Murakami's Fiction

AMY TY LAI

The couple . . . were able to open a cosy little

establishment in a western suburb of Tokyo in 1974.

They called it " Peter Cat " after an old pet ofHaruki's

- Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami and the Music

of Words.

gap in the criticism on Haruki

This MurakamiMurakami
gap essayby inexploring
the attempts
the criticism by exploring on to Haruki fill the the
use of animals in his major fiction. While it will critique and expand the critical works
on the author, especially those by Matthew Strecher and Jay Rubin, it will also expose
insufficiencies in the established concepts regarding animals in the postmodern arts,
specifically those of Steve Baker. As such, the essay aims to enrich the already abun-
dant criticism on the author, and open new directions in conceptualizing animal
imagery in contemporary literature.

Haruki Murakami's Murakami's

Murakami's characters are characters fiction
often haunted by "aaresense
firstof often appeared
loss," the contenthaunted
of whichin by the "a sense 1970s. of Yoshio loss," the Iwamoto content notes of which that
"is never spelled out" ("Voice" 297); while they avoid confronting other people, whom

Mosaic 40/1 0027-1276-07/163018$02.00©Mosaic

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164 Mosaic 40/1 (March 2007 )

they view as functional objects, they pay "fetishistic attention" to consumer goods and
trivial things, which furnish them with "a grip on a recalcitrant reality" (297-98). As
Celeste Loughman argues, Murakami believes that neither materialism itself, nor the
preference for Western popular culture, is the root of current problems, but "that's all
there is." The confused or lost identity, caused by an absence of "idealism" or any
source of self-fulfilment, is further severed by a loss of connection with the past,
including the nation's cultural past ("No" 90). 1 Such is true not only of Murakami's
many nameless protagonists, but of the named ones in his most conventional novel,
Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no mori): the protagonists aim at being different from
other people, yet are not "truly unique and individualistic" (Okada 65-66). Eager to
do away with social obligations, they are nonetheless very much conditioned by Japanese
group-oriented mentality (72-73).
Steve Baker, in The Postmodern Animal quotes Nina Lykke's "Between Monsters,
Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science," claiming that modernity
was a "repressive process of purification" that worked to ensure that any monster or
hybrid that threatened to transgress the border between human and non-human was
reclassified to either the human or the non-human sphere. In the cyborg world of post-
industrial and postmodern society, however, such creatures or creations are becoming
increasingly common, and their repression, less and less successful ("Leopards" 99).
Citing Margrit Shildrick's "Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body," he argues that the
proliferation of animals and the embrace of impurity, hybridity, even monstrosity in the
postmodern arts could be a positive and creative trend, and that the "humanist politics
of norms and identity" might give way to "a politics of hybrids" (100). In the vein of
Deleuze and Guattari, Baker stresses that "becoming-animal," which provides a creative
escape from a repressive society and other conservative forces, is not equivalent to
"resembling, imitating or identifying with" an animal, nor does it happen in the imagi-
nation, dreams or fantasies, or necessarily entail a bodily metamorphosis (120-21).
While Deleuze and Guattari claim in A Thousand Plauteaus, "becoming-animal produces
nothing other than itself. What is real is the becoming itself" (Baker 121), Baker defines
"becoming-animal" as "human being's creative opportunity to think themselves other-
than-in-identity," hence the precise relationship between the human and the animal as
one of "alliance" (125-26). Therefore, in contrast to recent theoretical works on cyborgs,
hybrids, and monsters, there is no dissolution of bodily identity: "separate bodies enter
into alliances in order to do things," but neither is "undone" by the process (132-33).
Baker's conceptualization naturally brings up the other extreme, envisioned by
science fiction writers from H.G. Wells to Octavia Butler and David Icke, who dram-
atize dystopic threats represented by alien figures of human-animal hybrids and use

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 Amy Ty Lai 165

their works as allegories for political concerns such as the explosion of biotechnology.
We are also reminded of the hybrid characters in the works of many contemporary
artists, and the rock paintings and carvings from the dawn of time that have been dis-
covered and widely reported all over the world. Interestingly, "Becoming animal" is
the title of a recent exhibition at Mass MoCa, a museum of contemporary art in
Western Massachusetts, showing works by twelve internationally-renowned artists to
demonstrate the boundaries and interactions, hostilities and resonances between
humans and animals. Indeed, "becoming-animal" and human-animal hybrids consti-
tute a key feature and recurrent theme both in primitive and in postmodern art; as
such, to see it as wholly creative or destructive would not be a very productive
approach in literary enquiry.
It is close to impossible not to read Murakami s animals in a meaningful way.
"The Kangaroo Communique" ("Kangarū Tsūshin"), for instance, turns the life of the
kangaroo into an analogy for the protagonist's stranded and monotonous existence.
Nonetheless, Baker's conceptualization has more value in those cases where animals
are more subtle and find a more intertextualized existence in Murakami's works. A

good example is the elephant, which is briefly mentioned in Hear the Wind Sing (Kaze
no uta o kike) (6). It evolves into the "elephants' graveyard" in Pinball, 1973 (1973-nen
no pinbdru ), a parallel for the timeless warehouse of pinball machines and a label for the
depths of the unconscious (155). The "elephant factory" in The Dancing Dwarf (Odoru
kobito) describes the manufacture of genuine elephants (245-46), associating the ele-
phant with "a creative process, the power of the imagination" (Rubin, Haruki 107).
These are followed by the Professor's remark in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End
of the World (Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandãrando)y which compares the inner
mind, or core consciousness, with the "great unexplored 'elephant graveyard,"' which
he quickly corrects to the "elephant factory," stating that it is not only a burial ground
for collected dead memories, but a place where "you sort through countless memo-
ries and bits of knowledge, [...] and finally make up a cognitive system" (256).
The association between the elephant and the core consciousness, memories, and
imagination is not as arbitrary as it might seem, as the animal conjures such positive
qualities as strength, stability, and gracefulness. It would sound reductionist to put too
much emphasis on the elephant's association with Buddhism and Shintoism, yet the
author, by using an animal that has strong religious meaning to symbolize the human
mind, does seem to suggests that the belief in one's selfhood is as important as tradi-
tional religion in the contemporary world, if not taking its place altogether.
Compared with the elephant, the unicorn plays an even more pivotal role in Hard-
boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is made up of dual, interlocking

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166 Mosaic 40/1 (March 2007)

narratives. In "Hard-boiled Wonderland," the unnamed male inhabitant is enmeshed

in a deadly information war between the "System," a government-business hybrid,
and the "Factory," a shadowy organization seeking to undermine the System's power,
in a slightly futuristic but recognizable Tokyo. In "The End of the World," the protag-
onist, who has lost his own "Shadow," struggles to remember how he came to live in
the "Town," surrounded by an impenetrable wall and homing herds of sad-looking
unicorns. Whereas the former's job is to "launder" and "shuffle" information, with the
mechanism built in his mind by the "Professor," the latter engages in "dreamreading,"
assigned to him by the "Gatekeeper," by placing his fingertips on the temples of uni-
corns' skulls so as to draw out their warmth and images.
Indeed, "The End of the World" is not the first time that unicorns have appeared
in Murakami's fiction. The protagonist in "A Poor- Aunt Story" ("Binbõ na obsan no
hanashi") looks across the water at a pair of bronze unicorns outside the Meiji
Memorial Picture Gallery, the front hooves of which "thrust out in angry protest
against the flow of time for abandoning them in its wake." Rubin labels the unicorns
"representations of the timeless core of the unconscious mind" ("Murikami" 186). The
unicorns in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World evoke "primordial mem-
ories" (13), and, as they hear the horn that summons them, there seems to be "an
indelible intimacy of memories long departed from their eyes" (14). Later, the protag-
onist in "Hard-boiled Wonderland" learns that the unicorn is "a product of fantasy"
(95) and "an imaginary animal" (97) in Western and Eastern imaginations, and
despite obscure records of their existence, their single-horned nature makes them
something of an "evolutionary anomaly" (98), which could only have managed to sur-
vive in "a lost world" (103). Such rarity, even mythological in origin, turns the animal
into an apt symbol for precious memories that form part of the self or mind, even if
such memories do not really exist and have to be invented. It is not a surprise when
the "Librarian" informs the protagonist that the minds of the Town's inhabitants are
in fact absorbed by the unicorns, which ferry them across the wall to the outside
world; their skulls are scraped and buried for a full year to leech away the minds' ener-
gies, taken to the library stacks, and kept there until the dreamreader's hands "release
the last glimmers of mind into the air" (335-36).
Strecher reads the "System" as a metaphor for the late-capitalist consumerist state
("Beyond" 362). As the plot unfolds, the two narratives gradually merge: the protago-
nist in "Hard-boiled Wonderland," through an error on the part of the Professor, is
destined to carry on his life in a state of complete oblivion until the End of the World,
signifying that he is completely overtaken by the state. Memory is the weapon for
resistance. While Murakami acknowledges the destructive aspect of memory, in

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 Amy Ty Lai 167

particular the fixation on one's past, Stephen Snyder contends that the obscure mention
of Marcel Proust at the beginning of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
invites the reader to treat the text as "a meditation on memory or the possibility of the
reinvention of memory" (70-71). Susan Napier, nonetheless, sees the novels ending as
highly uncertain, and the overall picture of Tokyo that of "a bleak and alienating city, a
world based on mindless consumption of products that range from Italian food to data
information" (211-12). It is true that the protagonist refuses to leave the Town, for
which he believes he is fully responsible as its true creator, yet, as Strecher argues, much
of the landscape is in fact not the protagonists own perception, but a fabrication by the
Professor who draws on his experience as a film editor ("Beyond" 363-65).
As the protagonist can do nothing but dreamread the unicorns' skulls, instead of
forming any kind of alliance with the unicorns, he is complicit with the System. How,
then, is Baker's "becoming-animal" useful to the understanding of the novel? Jay
Rubin notices the birds flitting back and forth over the wall surrounding the Town,
which "separates the inner core of self from the part of the mind that is most in touch
with the world of reality" ("Other" 497). Indeed, the protagonist's Shadow claims
repeatedly to have been inspired by them (Murakami, Hard-boiled 247, 249). When it
is time for Shadow to escape the Town, he once again makes an allusion to the birds:
"Nothing can keep us in this Town any longer. We are free as the birds" (399). Whether
Shadow can truly escape from the Town after plunging into the Pool is not clear, but
the novel ends with a scene of complete desolation, where the protagonist contrasts
himself with the birds, indicating that he is likely to remain trapped in a state of
mindlessness: "Through the driving snow, I see a single white bird take flight. The bird
wings over the Wall and into the flurried clouds of the southern sky. All that is left to
me is the sound of the snow underfoot" (400).

"Thecreative
The "The Elephant Vanishes"
Elephant ("Zõ no
alliances shõmetsu")
Vanishes" withillustrates
animals ("Zõthenosuccess of such annot always illustrates end in obscurity the success and failure, of such and an
do shõmetsu")
endeavour by describing the mysterious disappearance of an old and feeble elephant
from a Tokyo suburb with his human zookeeper. The alliance between them is first
suggested by the striking similarities in their physical appearances, and later through
the protagonist's eyes, in which the animal seems to undergo some kind of metamor-
phosis not long before the two of them disappear: it is uncertain whether the animal
is becoming-man, or the man is becoming-animal, or both - though by getting smaller
and smaller the animal could indeed have freed itself much more easily: "It was a mys-
terious sight. Looking through the vent, I had the feeling that a different, chilling kind
of time was flowing through the elephant house - but nowhere else. And it seemed to

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168 Mosaic 40/1 (March 2007 )

me, too, that the elephant and the keeper were gladly giving themselves over to this
new order that was trying to envelop them - or that had already partially succeeded
in enveloping them" (326). The harmonious human-animal relationship in "this new
order" would indeed be possible in the religious worldview of Shintoism that, as the
Japanese state religion, dominated the thinking of its people until the end of the
World War II. In Shintoism, all human and non-human objects participate in what is
known as "kami"2 (Kitagawa 12; cited in Loughman, "Japan" 434). The magic in the
story would only be credible with a reversion of time, which, quite ironically, also
indicates that humans and animals cannot find their peace in the here and now. Given
the metaphorical meaning of the elephant in Murakami's fiction, the animal's disap-
pearance also indicates the obliteration of memory and core consciousness in the pro-
tagonist in "The Elephant Vanishes." Accordingly, he enjoys even greater success in his
advertising career in a fast-paced society that has little regard for the animal - and,
hence what it represents - and is soon oblivious to the whole incident.
Rat, a close friend of the protagonist, has been left out in my brief mention of
Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 , and in such subsequent works as A Wild Sheep
Chase (Hitsuji o meguru bõken) and Dance Dance Dance (Dansu dansu dansu). In A
Wild Sheep Chase, the protagonist, having used a landscape photograph from Rat in
the bulletin of a life insurance company, is approached by the secretary of the "Boss,"
head of a mysterious powerful syndicate, who forces him to reveal the origin of the
photograph. Unwilling to betray his friend, he is coerced into hunting for the sheep
with the brownish star on his back pictured in the photograph in Hokkaido, with the
help of his unnamed girlfriend. He meets up with strange people, including the
"Sheep Professor" and the "Sheep Man," before seeing Rat again, who has by then
committed suicide. The Sheep Professor says that the sheep initially entered his body
while he was sleeping at the Mongolia-Siberia border, and used him as its first host to
make its way into Japan, before entering the Boss to build up a huge, obscure compa-
ny. Strecher contends that this company, which is neither government, business,
industry, nor media, but holds all of these powers at its disposal, is a metaphor for the
postmodern state, "hidden, elusive, and unaccountable" all at once ( Dances 35).
Accordingly, the sheep becomes an image of "dominant social ideology of control, of
materialism, of desire and easy gratification" in the postmodern, affluent societies of
"easy, yet meaningless pleasures, operated by obscure organs of state power" (61).
Rather than providing escape for humans, it tempts them to succumb to a dominant
power and become more enslaved than they ever have been.
Rat reveals that he was one of the sheep's victims, and he has long recognized the
danger of losing himself to the state: "Give your body over to it and everything goes.

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 Amy Ty Lai 169

Consciousness, values, emotions, pain, everything. Gone" (283). As an individual who

refuses to lose his selfhood, Rat hangs himself when the sheep inside him is asleep,
indicating his preference for death to a life of mindless and painless consumerism.
Althought the novel was published in the 1980s and is set against the Japan of the
1970s, Rat is regarded as a nostalgic figure belonging to the 1960s, before the end of
Zenkyõtõ, which led to the downfall of selfhood in post- 1970s ( Dances 154, 169-1 74). 3
Rubin suggests that the nickname "Rat" identifies him with "a dark, unnerving crea-
ture that burrows into shadowy hidden spaces," and his appearance in Murakami s
first piece of work implies that the author was already "rooting around in his psychic
past among half-forgotten memories and half-understood images that would surface
unpredictably from the other world'" in his later works ( Haruki 33). A Wild Sheep
Chase nonetheless suggests more meaning to the animal than Rubin suggests. Rats are
treated as household pests, not unlike the true individual who is out of place among
Generation X in a post-industrialized society. Ironically, while the household pest
might still manage to carry out its marginal existence in the household, Rat appar-
ently cannot defend himself against the rapidly-expanding capitalist society.
Though Rat commits suicide, he was nonetheless invaded by the sheep, which
had already eliminated part of his mind in order to replace it with itself, and this
explains the strange, broken language uttered by Sheep Man. Sheep Man is also found
in Dance , Dance , Dancey which begins with the protagonists quest for his ex-girlfriend
in Hokkaido. On this quest, he encounters a number of characters: Gotanda, a famous
film star and classmate from his junior high school days; Yuki the teenager, who leads
him to her father Kiraku Makimura, a famous media personality; prostitutes, not only
Kiki (the ex-girlfriend), but other members of an international call girl club; and
Yumiyoshi, a simple-minded hotelier. Critics believe that Sheep Man, who stays in a
dark, abandoned room that sometimes appears on the sixteenth floor of the hotel,
may be whatever the author allows the reader to think he is: "phantom, conscience, elder
wise man, sci-fi figment, symbol of goodness in a rotten world, maybe all of these"
(Mitgang). Strecher believes that "from his grotesque appearance to his confused and
diffuse personality," the character illustrates the "peculiar reality of combining main-
stream and counterculture in a single body" ( Dances 146). Owing to its darkness, one
can read the abandoned room on the sixteenth floor as the realm of the unconscious,
where the ultimate source of the self is rooted and which still lays hidden in the new
Dolphin hotel. Sheep Mans advice to the protagonist suggests that as long as he keeps
dancing to the music, to exercise his mind and willpower, he will not be swallowed by
the system, words that strongly echo Shadow's advice in Hard-boiled Wonderland and
the End of the World. Indeed, while many characters die in Dance , Dance , Dance -

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170 Mosaic 40/1 (March 2007)

including Gotanda, who is closer to a commercial product than a person, as well as the
prostitutes who are traded as mere sex machines - indicating that they are engulfed by
the state, Yuki and Yumiyoshi not only stay alive, but are aware of the existence of
Sheep Man, meaning they still retain their selfhood. Yumiyoshi, in particular, manages
to restore an atmosphere of pastoral simplicity in the rapidly urbanizing Hokkaido -
that the protagonist finally makes his way back to Yumiyoshi indicates that he can now
"initiate an authentic relationship in the 'real' world" (Iwamoto, "Japan" 889).
The use of human-animal hybrids as metaphor for the postmodern self contin-
ues in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Nejimakidori kuronikuru), which is made up of
three major narratives interconnected by the mysterious "wind-up bird." The main
narrative, set in 1984-85, describes Toru Okada's quest for his cat, and later, his wife
Kumiko, both having disappeared from his house, his conflict with Kumiko's brother
Noboru Wataya, and his encounters with the Kano sisters. A minor narrative depicts
the Nomonhan battle back in 1939 and the friendship between Honda, who later
became a fortune-teller and Toru's friend, and Mamiya, who describes their story to
Toru. These two narratives roughly make up Book One and Book Two; in Book Three,
Toru encounters Nutmeg Akasaka and her son Cinnamon, who help him to become
a "healer" of women suffering from unconscious imbalances and, later, to solve the
mystery of Kumiko's disappearance.
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle exposes underlying violent events in Japan's recent
history, indicating that despite the end of imperialism, there could be a return of bar-
barism (Fisher 166). As in his analyses of A Wild Sheep Chase , Dance, Dance, Dance,
and in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Strecher treats Noboru, an
academic who later turns into the leading politician of Japan, as an symbol of the state,
both imperial and postmodern, and Toru's struggle with him, a tension between the
individual's will and state power ( Dances 36, 41). The strongest support for Strecher's
thesis is how Noboru strips Creto Kano and Kimiko of their core identities, leaving
their conscious and unconscious selves divided and lost (46). Strecher even suggests
that Noboru is actually Toru's "other" self, or the dark aspects in his unconscious,
which he explores after his descent into the well (50-51). As Toru later becomes a heal-
er, his own equilibrium is restored by the flow of sexual and psychic energies among
he and his patients when they rub against and penetrate each other during the thera-
pies, and symbolized by the water that fills and rejuvenates the dry well (53-60).
The slaughter of the zoo animals in the Hsin-Ching Zoo in Manchukuo (Book
3, Ch. 9), one of the most graphically violent scenes in the author's works, as has been
noted by several critics. Through Nutmeg's father, the veterinarian in charge of the
zoo, we see how Japanese soldiers execute, or "liquidate," the animals that could not

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 Amy Ty Lai 171

be fed during the coming battle. The animals become "sacrificial victims," "emblematic
of the uncountable, unnamed human casualties of the war" (Fisher 164). More subtle,
however, is this scene's association with Torus early reference to how horses' behaviour
is affected by the phases of the moon, which he compares to Kumiko's pre-menstrual
syndrome (29-30). The first slaughter is soon followed by the second one (Book 3, Ch.
26), in which a Chinese prisoner-of-war is executed with a baseball bat, another graph-
ically violent scene that strengthens the parallel between animals and humans.
In Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the Librarian sadly informs
the protagonist that their minds - or the postmodern self - "are not taken in whole,"
but are "scattered, in different pieces among different beasts, all mixed with pieces
from others" (351). In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle , after Miyami witnesses how an
intelligence officer is skinned alive by the Soviet intelligence officer, "Boris the
Manskinner," he feels "like an empty shell" (171), and after the vet witnesses how the
zoo animals and the Chinese soldier were executed, he suffers similar feelings. Parallels
of how the state violates individuals are found in the stories of the 1980s: Neither

Kumiko nor Creta Kano, after being "defiled" by Noboru, ever feel the same again,
despite the fact that Creta Kato manages to become a better person with Malta's sup-
port. Such irrevocable mutilations done to the self are not merely hinted at by graphic
violence, but vividly manifested in the form of the mutilations of animals and human-
animal hybrids. Toru's pet cat is a good example. Being a beloved, intimate member of
the childless couple, it is symbolically appropriate that he disappears at a time when the
lives of the young couple start to fall apart; he returns when Toru becomes a psychic
healer and feels that things are going better in his life. Nonetheless, in his dream, Toru
admits to Malta that the cat's tail does not seem to have that big of a bend after his
return (536), which means that Malta's earlier prediction, that the cat would not return
without some major change, has been right ("Barring some major change, the cat will
never come back" [178]). Most surprising, however, is that the tail is all of a sudden
found on Malta's body (536), which turns her into a cat-human hybrid.
Such a metamorphosis is not too far-fetched, considering Malta's role as a clair-
voyant, whose supernatural power resembles those of a witch, and given the affinity
between witches and cats. However, an even more striking and gruesome metamor-
phosis in the dream is Noboru's fawning secretary, Ushikawa, who appears with a
dog's body, reminding us that he is not a full human, but, as a servant of Noboru, his
self is split and dehumanized (534-35). In this way, animals not only serve as
metaphors for human qualities, but by turning into human-animal hybrids, in a man-
ner that is both dreamy and haunting, they capture the essence of the postmodern
identity. Yet the cat's significance can only be appreciated in relation to the wind-up

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1 72 Mosaic 40/1 (March 2007)

bird. The bird is clearly symbolic of the State, under which people are no more than
"dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight" (526). As such, it
resembles the stone statue of a bird that looks as if it is trying to escape from the vacant
house in the neighborhood (14), and serves as a stark contrast to the birds flying freely
across the wall in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Strecher prefers to
read it as "a metaphor for time and history," its task being "to keep time flowing for-
ward, creating temporal distance between past and present." Toru gives himself the
nickname "Mr. Wind-up Bird," because he ultimately restores the equilibrium in others
and himself (Haruki 61-62). This interpretation, nonetheless, is somehow discredited
by the way Toru brings a stop to his fantasy of being a wind-up bird after he has got
down to the well, thinking he "couldn't go on having fun forever" (256-57).
Why is such a fantasy no good to him? The answer points to one of the riddles
left unsolved in the novel: why would the couple name their beloved cat after the
much-hated Noboru Wataya? Because their so-called resemblance is unconvincing.
The naming, I argue, implies that Toru, who contains a destructive "other" inside him,
sometimes exerts his power upon a less powerful animal through the act of naming.
If this is the case, the cat's disappearance takes on a more ironic significance, as it
dramatizes its resistance to such power. That Toru renames him "Mackerel" is
ambiguous (378). It indicates that Toru tries to respect the new self acquired by the
cat, yet that he names his cat after a fish, instead of giving him a more "proper" name,
might indicate that the cat's resistance to his power has not been all that successful.
Cats continue to be described anthropomorphically in one of Murakami's latest
novels, Kafka on the Shore (Umibe no Kafuka). Following the "spirit" of Hard-boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World (Rubin, Haruki 270), the novel is made up of
two interlocking narratives: one describes fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura's attempted
escape from his father's prophecy, his journey to Shikoku, and his finding a place in a
small corner of its library; the other recounts the story of old Nakata, who has lost all
his memories after a bizarre childhood affliction, and who works as a tracker of lost
cats, owing to his strange ability to converse with the animals. Later, Kafka acts out
what his father has prophesized - that he will murder his father and have sex with the
mother and sister who mysteriously left the family when he was only four, particularly
as Nakata's murder of the cat-killer in his attempt to save the cats occurs at exactly the
same time as the murder of Kafka's father is reported to have taken place.
As its English translation only came out in 2005, the novel and its multilayered
symbols have yet to be explored by critics working in English. Rubin prefers to read it
as a story of initiation as much as a positive version of Hard-boiled Wonderland and
the End of the World , in which Kafka's maturation depends on his decision not to

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 Amy Ty Lai 173

remain in the library, "the other world's suspended state," but to go back to Tokyo and
take his place as a responsible member of society ( Haruki 274). Following the vein of
Strecher's analyses, one can easily detect the presence of the state in Kafka s father, who
never appears directly in the novel, but re-invents himself as the cat-killer. The cat-
killer, by calling himself "Johnnie Walker," the name one of the world's most famous
brand names of Scottish whiskey, also transforms himself into a commercial icon, a
symbol of globalization and its sweeping power. While his mass killing of cats and his
murder by Nakata indicate the cruelty of war and the danger of countering violence
with violence, the senseless slaughtering of cats might well be read as a metaphor of
how humans, appearing as anthropomorphized cats, are mutilated by the state, be it
imperial or post-capitalist. This is not the end of the symbolism in this incident:
Nakata's salvation of the cats (hence humans) is soon followed by the tumbling of fish
from the sky. As fish are a symbol of Jesus Christ, Nakata's prophecy about the fish,
which has come from nowhere, interestingly likens him to the Christian Saviour.
In his post- 1995 works, Murakami does not merely use animals as symbols of the
fragmented self, he dramatizes how they inspire his characters, rendering Baker's con-
ceptualization much more relevant. At the end of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the
End of the Worldy Toru meets up with his young teenage friend May Kasahara, who
regrets not being able to show him the "Duck People":

The duck people have these flat orange feet that are really cute, like they're wearing little
kids' rain boots, but they're not made for walking on ice, I guess, because I see them slip-
ping and sliding all over the place, and some even fall on their bottoms. They must not have
non-slip treads. So winter is not really a fun season for the duck people. I wonder what they
think, deep down inside, about ice and stuff. I bet they don't hate it all that much. It just
seems that way to me from watching them. They look like they're living happily enough,
even if it's winter, probably just grumbling to themselves, "Ice again? Oh, well . . . ." (592)

May's affection for the ducks, which, in her eyes have become half-duck, half-human,
suggests that she has formed some sort of alliance with them. Like humans, they are
subject to more ominous forces (in her description, the cold weather), but unlike most
humans, they do not seem much disturbed and manage to retain their autonomy.
Having quit school to work anonymously at a wig factory, May manages to find con-
tentment and to think seriously as an individual; by comparison, the protagonist, who
seldom thought "seriously" even when he was an adolescent, and only starts to do so
as an adult, obviously pales by comparison.
Kafka on the Shore emphasizes the creative value of "becoming-animal." Nataka,
always addressing himself in the third person, gives us the feeling that he is coming

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174 Mosaic 40/1 (March 2007)

out of his human self and becoming even closer to the cats with which he converses.
The black cat comments that despite Nakatas childhood affliction and its damaging
effects, his simple life is "a pretty good life" after all (50). The cat has probably felt that
Nakata s life is very similar to his own. Despite leading a simple life, the black cat is
portrayed as possessing a strong individuality. Upon noticing that Nakatas shadow is
very faint (which associates him with the protagonist in the Town of Hard-boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World), he urges him to reclaim the other half of his
shadow (53-54), meaning to make his selfhood become whole again.
The creative alliance between human and animal is nonetheless best exemplified
in "the boy named Crow" who, as the plot unfolds, reveals himself to be Kafka's alter-
ego, spurring him on his journey, and conversing with him at some critical points of
his life. In the unnumbered chapter entitled "The Boy Named Crow," found between
Chapter 46 and Chapter 47, the crow attacks the cat-killer, who seems to have been
resurrected from his death after his murder by Nakata in Chapter 16 and is once again
describing how he uses the souls of the cats to make up a huge flute for no particular
reason. While the episode makes us skeptical of whether the cat-killer and what he
symbolizes can ever be eradicated (as there is no evidence that he is killed, even in this
chapter), it also strengthens the link between Nakata and Kafka, who never cross paths
in the novel, and makes the boy named Crow's message to Kafka, that he must get his
"self" back (417), much more urgent.4 Kafka, unlike the protagonist in Hard-boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World, indeed comes out of his journey as "the world's
toughest 15-year-old" and returns to his society (4, 505). As Nataka in the novel is not
only an old man, but serves as the "other" of Kafka, his death should not be read trag-
ically or as a sign that he has failed to reclaim his shadow and his selfhood.
That these creative alliances are found in works after 1995, the year when the
Kobe earthquake and the sarin gas attack took place, is not coincidental, and my dis-
cussion will move onto "Honey Pie" ("Hachimitsu pai"), the last story in after the
quake (kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru), before fleshing out further the signifi-
cance of such a creative turn. "Honey Pie" tells of Junpei, who has secretly loved
Sayoko throughout the years despite her marriage to, and subsequent divorce from,
his best friend, Takatsuki. Takatsuki urges Junpei to marry Sayoko, even revealing to
him that she is also in love with him, but Junpei thinks that this violates his standard
of "decency." It is only after the earthquake has struck Japan that he is plagued by a
feeling of rootlessness, suddenly feeling that he is not "connected" to anyone or any-
thing at all, that he considers a life with Sayoko (124).
After the earthquake, Sayoko's daughter Sala has nightmares in which she finds a
scary "Earthquake Man" threatening to stuff all the people into a small box, and so

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 Amy Ty Lai 175

Junpei comes to the house to make up bedtime stories for her. He invents Masakichi,
a bear who collects honey to sell to the humans in town, which he has modelled after
his own personality; he also invents Tonkichi, a bear who catches salmon and trades
it for Masakichi's honey, modelled after Takatsuki. When all the fish flee from the
river, Tonkichi refuses the free honey from Masakichi. Masakichi and Tonkichi finally
come up with a solution: Tonkichi will make honey pies out of Masakichi's honey, and
Masakichi will sell them to the town. As he finishes his fable, Junpei decides to follow
his desire to form a happy family with Sayoko and Sala.
While the story of the bears can be taken as a simple allegory of Junpei's own life,
there is more to the character of Masakichi, who speaks human language. As Junpei
describes him: "Meanwhile, Masakichi looked just like a bear, and so the people would
say, 'OK, he knows how to count, and he can talk and all, but when you get right down
to it he's still a bear.' So Masakichi didn't really belong to either world - the bear world
or the people world" ("Honey Pie" 105).

That neither,
neither,themeans
"bear"thatmeans
in thefalls that of
process in inits between
creation the process
it has turnedtheinto
beara "hybrid."
of its world creation and the it has human turned world, into belonging a "hybrid." to
Junpei learns from his own creation, which enables him to think much more cre-
atively than he normally could. Having claimed his selfhood, he feels that no one can
ever threaten to put him and others in the small box of Sala's dream, so reminiscent
of the state so prominent in Murakami's other fiction.
It should be noted that Murakami does not glorify the power of "becoming-ani-
mal." "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" ("Kaeru-kun, Tôkyô o sukuu"), also in after the quake,
offers a dystopian version of "becoming-animal," in the form of "becoming-monster."
Katagiri finds a giant frog in his apartment one day, who urges him to help save Tokyo
from a second earthquake caused by Worm, a monster residing underground who has
been aroused from his slumber. He will not have to do any real fighting, only stand
behind Frog and offer him verbal and spiritual support during the fight. Before the
battle takes place, Katagiri gets shot by a man, but when he wakes up in the hospital,
the nurse tells him that no earthquake has struck Tokyo, and he was found passed out
on the ground unharmed. After the nurse leaves, Frog appears to Katagiri again, reas-
suring him that Worm has been defeated, and the "whole fight occurred in the area of
imagination," which is the "precise location of the battlefield" (98-99).
We are inclined to interpret Frog as an imagined character existing in Katagiri's
mind, borne out of his desire for recognition. Frog, though realistically portrayed as
an animal, appears well-educated and well-read, and claims to have "the profound-
est respect" for Katagiri (89), who has an unglamorous job at the bank and who has

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 176 Mosaic 40/1 (March 2007)

sacrificed his life to care single-handedly for his ungrateful younger brothers and sis-
ters. By agreeing to support Frog, Katagiri attempts to form a creative alliance with
this superior animal, which he hopes will enable him to escape from a society that
labels him a "loser." The animal is nonetheless insufficient by human standards: he
possesses no "balls," and when he laughs, he shows that he has no teeth either (95).
After he has fallen asleep, worms and other insects crawl out of his body and devour
him; they then swarm the room and invade Katagiri 's body, and only disappear as the
nurse enters and turns on the light.
Frog's predicament is reminiscent of Kafka's protagonist in Metamorphoses , who
turns into an insect and finally dies, making the story a statement of fife's absurdity
and despair. Roland Kelts contends that the meditative power of the stories in after the
quake derive from "the characters' discovery of their hollowness" and their "often
uncertain attempts to fill it." While Junpei in "Honey Pie" is optimistic that his future
will be rid of uncertainty, Katagiri remains unsure about this. Murakami, while dis-
cussing "Super-Frog," vaguely mentions that the "evil" comes from "within" (Kelts
2002), a remark that echoes Frog's "The enemy is

animal" therefore offers only a possibility of freedom, but the

more reliable than the human; Frog's fatigue and exhaustion
devoured by worms, indicate the importance of faith and pers

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attack and the victims Japanese and Psyche the Aum (Andaguraundo), cult members,
Murakami describes the danger of losing one's ego and "self" (201) and of offering
some part of it to "greater System or Order" (203). The animals in his fiction confirm
the importance that he accords to the self, as well as necessitating a reconceptualization
of the postmodern animal. While Baker focuses on how "becoming-animal" offers a
creative way of escaping from state repression, Murakami uses animals as an emblem
of selfhood, human-animal hybrids as manifestations of the fragmented self, and
"becoming-animal" as an inspiring and creative process in which humans can fare bet-
ter in a late-capitalist society that is never entirely free from the imperial shadow. This,
perhaps, explains why the elephants are spared in the zoo massacre in The Wind-up
Bird Chronicle, after all other animals have been killed: because they are "too large" to
be done away with, their survival suggests that even though human fives are readily
wiped out, their consciousness is not, and should not readily be obliterated.
"Becoming-animal," with its tinge of optimism, has become more prominent in
his post- 1995 works. "Honey Pie," the story of a writer, even looks like Murakami's own
signature of such creativity, imagination, and optimism. All these signs of optimism

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 Amy Ty Lai 177

might indicate his concern for his fellow Japanese, for and about whom he has always
been writing (Gregory, Miyawaki, and McCaffery). His message is that they should
live their lives creatively and imaginatively, adding that such creativity and imagina-
tion should be sustained by faith and perseverance. Katagiri, a middle-aged man,
seems to lack these attributes, but children and teenage characters in The Wind-up
Bird Chronicky Kafka on the Shore and others tend to inspire adults or are simply supe-
rior to them. The favourable portraits of the younger generations in Murakami's work
is not surprising: he describes what he calls a "generational sense of responsibility,"
namely that he feels the need to pass something onto his young readers (Rubin,
Haruki 291-92). It is not too much to suggest that with no children of his own, he
enjoys an intimacy with his young characters, who are like his young readers: both are
dear to him, like his own children.

NOTES

1/ Loughman uses A Slow Boat to China ( Chugokuyuki no suro boto, 1980) to suggest Japanese loss of con-
nection with their cultural past, of which China and Chinese culture form a significant part.
2/ Kami is translated as "gods, deities, or spirits," but also means "above," "superior," or the "numinous or
sacred nature" (Kitagawa 12).
3/ Rat wishes that he had been born in nineteenth century Russia, gotten involved in the "something-or-
other Rebellion" and finally been exiled to Siberia (76); in reality, he has gone to the wilderness of
Hokkaido, a place which had yet to be urbanized at that time, in order to detach himself from the city.
4/ Kafka in fact means "crow" in Czech; the crow also reminds the reader of the cult movie, The Crow (1994),
where the bird, as the carrier of dead souls, helps the dead protagonist to seek revenge on his enemies.

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AMY TY LAI received her Ph.D. from Cambridge University, and is curren
Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has published on Gao Xingjian, Xin
Hello Kitty, and has works forthcoming on Japanese cinema and other C

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