Laconic “I”
While novels of the popular author Murakami Haruki focus on the lives of young and middle-aged people looking for connection, the political and social appear in symbolic form, sometimes at the edge of the narrator’s life.
In the beginning of an early novel The Wild Sheep Chase (1982) the narrator in a college class watches the live broadcast of Mishima Yukio extorting the crowd to rise and join his political movement. However, he loses interest before the conclusion and interlocks hands with a lover and walks out. This casual dismal of revanchist rhetoric as alien to the youth reflects Murakami’s disillusionment with grand-scale social movements. By dismissing Mishima, he bucks the rules of the literary establishment. His work is often derided as “smelling of butter,” a common insult for undue foreign influence.
And he does use foreign references and sentence structure perhaps too pervasively and sometimes without need. Generally, he uses the first-person perspective, but it is clearly not autobiographical in nature. Unlike the probing existentialism of Oe, the main character is obdurate and impenetrable. Even in the closest to an autobiographical novel, the stunning Norwegian Wood (1987), the main character barely recognizes any agency and may be unreliable.
But regardless of all this, Murakami is a Japanese writer. And his work shows the possibility of a Japan open to but not dominated by the West. Unlike Oe and Mishima, his work resonates time and again with the everyman and woman providing solace to readers trapped by the impersonal machinations of late-stage capitalism or modern life which Soseki warned against. His work is his strongest when this individual expands and takes on larger social conditions in the (external) world. Nowhere is this more evident than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994).
Chronicle
The main character, Watanabe Toru, has just been laid off from a job and his wife and cat have disappeared. He spends much of the beginning of the novel going through daily rituals and walking around his neighborhood in Tokyo. The “wind-up bird” is an almost supernatural entity that “winds up” the day to function is an orderly, productive way. Toru’s journey begins when this regulatory system breaks down.
This novel is light on plot but is like his earlier novels in that it is a detective story that connects the narrator-protagonist to a shadow world. Toru ends up meeting characters that enable a connection with this other world, where his wife appears to be trapped and where her brother, a media and political power-player, generates his grip on the masses.
Unlike Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), the main character does not remain trapped within his interiority. He uses strange means to affect the social world to make political, external change. His brother-in-law, a fascist in a business suit, climbs to a prominent role in Japanese government and in the end, Toru confronts him in the shadow world.
The most affecting and raw sequences in this novel are the passages where a World War II veteran, Lieutenant Mamiya, relates his experience as a soldier and prisoner-of-war in the Manchurian front soon before the Soviet invasion. Like in Soseki’s Kokoro, Murakami crafted a novel structure to incorporate a section that reads like a shishosetsu, or a Japanese autobiographical novel.
Murakami snuck this topic into what seemed like another individual-centric tale of a dislocated male. In the historical passages, there is always a question of why soldiers are there and why Japanese citizens were ordered to subjugate barren lands outside their home country. In ending his last letter, Mamiya describes himself as a hollow man: the war had destroyed his interior life and, by extension, many Japanese who survived.
Fear and Assertion
If you define a psychological, societal, or physical “interior” as solely opposed to something else, then you are defined in the terms of another. If you define yourself in the terms of another, then you define yourself as lacking outside attributes. You fear the power of that other thing. This fear can yield an aggressive assertion of one’s name to establish legitimacy. However, such assertion through violence is empty and self-destructive because you destroy that which would give you that legitimacy: a partner.
You need to establish your own independent character. And since an independent character is not defined solely in terms of another, your character and practice need to be open and relational. The officials in the Meiji regime established some channels with the non-Japanese world, but were stymied by their own Constitution, economic and violent shocks to the body politic, and this aggressive assertion of dominance over others.
How does Japan, and we, establish this independent character? Toru’s journey in search of his wife shows his commitment to her and his confrontation with the brother-in-law shows his breaking free of the media fueled apathy of contemporary culture to clearly see the threats to open society. Murakami the author then probes this relationship between the individual and society with Underground (1998) a nonfiction chronicle of the 1995 sarin gas attacks in Tokyo. He interviewed youth who were influenced by the perpetrators or regular people who were swept up in the attack and found similar people to those in his novels: rootless with a hazy path to a rich, deep, humane way of living.
Murakami won the prominent Yomiuri Prize (1994) for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Oe Kenzaburo, who had criticized Murakami for simply making entertainment, was the one who presented this prize with a ringing endorsement for this political work. But apart from Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Underground, his work returned to the hall of mirrors of a narrator’s interiority: a way forward was too difficult to find and solidarity not possible when trapped in small units of one or two or four.