REBECCA SUTER

5. CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT THROUGH IN HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD

As others have pointed out in this collection, the works of Murakami Haruki are notoriously difficult to categorize, as the author deliberately plays with different literary and cultural conventions, both Japanese and foreign, both from “high art” (or what is known as junbungaku, “pure literature,” in Japanese) and from popular fiction. On one hand, this has led many critics to see Murakami as an outsider of mainstream Japanese literature. On the other hand, it has enabled Murakami’s works to reach out to a vast and varied audience, and has been a major contributing factor to this author’s popularity on the national and international scene. Murakami’s in-between position, straddling highbrow and lowbrow, Japanese and foreign, is what makes his literature entertaining as well as thought provoking. The inclusion of multiple perspectives in his work encourages readers to look at their own culture and society from an estranged, outsider perspective, and arguably induces them to engage in critical reflection on that society’s norms and presuppositions. In this perspective, despite its supposed uniqueness, Murakami’s fiction offers a lens through which we can better understand Japanese and world literature more broadly. In this chapter, I offer one example of how a close reading of one of Murakami’s early can be used to develop an analytical framework that can be applied to other literary works, within and beyond the Japanese context. One of the most significant ways in which Murakami plays with different cultural and literary conventions is by combining realistic and fantastical modes of storytelling. Matthew Strecher (1999) pointed out already in the late 1990s that a recurrent feature of Murakami’s fiction is the way in which “a realistic narrative setting is created, then disrupted, sometimes mildly, sometimes violently, by the bizarre or the magical” (p. 267). This has remained true of the vast majority of Murakami’s works published in the new millennium, from the sudden rain of fish in an otherwise everyday scene in Umibe no Kafuka (Kafka on the Shore, 2002) to the “air chrysalis” and green moon that pop up in an accurately and realistically portrayed 1980s Tokyo in (2009–2010). Strecher (2014) more recently argued that engagement with the supernatural, or what he defines as the “metaphysical realm,” lies at the core of Murakami’s complex political stance. For this reason, Murakami’s fiction has often been compared to Latin American magic realist literature, which shares a similar combination of realistic settings and

M. C. Strecher & P. L. Thomas (Eds.), , 59–71. © 2016 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. R. Suter supernatural events. Strecher (1999) points out that Murakami’s use of a magical realist narrative is different from that of Latin American authors because the latter are typically more directly political, and use local, traditional and myths as a way of challenging the rationalist, universalist attitude that is implicit in (and complicit with) colonialism and globalization. By contrast, Murakami uses fantasy “as a tool to seek a highly individualized, personal sense of identity in each person, rather than as a rejection of the thinking of one-time colonial powers or the assertion of a national (cultural) identity based on indigenous beliefs and ideologies” (Strecher 1999, p. 269). While Murakami is often described as an anomaly in the Japanese literary panorama, in this respect at least his work is arguably representative of a broader trend. In her comparison of Japanese modern fantastic literature and , Susan Napier (1996) notes that both are motivated by “a decision to choose an alternative, consciously non-Western way of representing the world,” but Japanese fantasy combines this revisiting of indigenous myth with the creation of completely imaginary worlds, and, importantly, these worlds are “totally ‘modern’ at the same time as they are ‘Japanese’” (pp. 11–12). Murakami’s fantasy similarly leans towards the science-fictional as much as it relies on the mythical, and this peculiar combination further enhances the works’ entertaining and subversive value. For this reason, an analysis of Murakami’s use of the fantastic genre can provide us with a useful instrument for understanding modern Japanese literature more broadly. While the analogy with Latin American magic realism enables us to highlight by contrast some of the distinctive features of Murakami’s use of fantasy (and by extension the specificities of modern Japanese fantastic literature) another very useful conceptual tool to investigate his combination of realistic and imaginative styles is what Tzvetan Todorov describes as the “fantastic hesitation.” In this chapter, I will examine one early by Murakami, Sekai no owari to hādo boirudo wandārando (Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 1985), as a paramount example of the use of fantastic hesitation as a form of critical engagement. Before delving into the close reading of the text, a summary of the main theories of the fantastic genre I rely on, and a brief summary of the evolution of fantasy in modern Japanese fiction will help us put this novel into its broader theoretical, historical, and literary context, as well as helping us understand how these theories can be used to analyze other texts in a similar way.

FANTASTIC HESITATION, UTOPIA, AND DYSTOPIA

Todorov (1970) describes fantastic literature as lying somewhere in-between realism and the supernatural, and categorizes as genuinely fantastic texts those that present us with an inexplicable event that ultimately leaves the possibility open for both a rational and a magical interpretation. In his own words:

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