Dances with Sheep Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies Number 37 Center for Japanese Studies The University of Michigan Dances with Sheep The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki Matthew Carl Strecher Center for Japanese Studies The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, 2002 Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. © 2002 The Regents of the University of Michigan Published by the Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 202 S. Thayer St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Strecher, Matthew. Dances with sheep : the quest for identity in the fiction of Murakami Haruki / Matthew Carl Strecher. p. cm. — (Michigan monograph series in Japanese studies ; no. 37) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-929280-07-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Murakami, Haruki, 1949—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series. PL856.U673 Z86 2002 895.6'35—dc21 2001059866 This book was set in Bauer Bodoni. This publication meets the ANSI/NISO Standards for Permanence of Pape for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives r (Z39.48-1992). Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-929280-07-0 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-472-03833-6 (paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12806-8 (ebook) ISBN 978-0-472-90202-6 (open access) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ To Mei, Victor, and Lizzie, who have endured with me. Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Abbreviations xvii Introduction The Cultural Milieu of Murakami Haruki 1 Chapter One Mimesis, Formula, and Identity 21 Chapter Two Metonymy, Magic Realism, and the Opening of the "Other" 65 Chapter Three Desire, the Symbolic Order, and Mass Society 109 Chapter Four Historiography, Ideology, and the Politics of Representation 157 Conclusion The Reluctant Postmodernist 206 Bibliography 216 Index 226 Preface I wanted to turn my eyes to the past, and to reconstruct that past in a form that I could comprehend more easily. —Murakami Haruki, "'Monogatari' no tame no Boken" Murakami Haruki (b. 1949) first appeared on the Japanese literary scene more than two decades ago with his novella Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing, 1979). That work earned the coveted Gunzo New Writer's Award and launched Murakami's career as a writer virtually overnight. Up until that time (and for some time afterward) the author had been proprietor of a popular jazz cafe called Peter Cat. Since that debut, regard for Murakami has increased dramatically, not only at home but throughout the world, as a writer of so-called "postmodern" fiction, while a tremendous body of secondary literature has been produced to explain (and in some cases, explain away) his success. And while some critical essays on Murakami have beeji published outside of Japan for non-Japanese audiences, the vast majority, naturally enough, has been written by Japanese critics for Japanese audiences. Indeed, until now there has been no book-length work of criticism on Murakami in the English language that takes into account the growing body of his work available in translation. The present text is intended to help fill this gap. My goal in writing- it has been to produce a study sophisticated enough to do justice to the complexities of Murakami's fictional world—it is complex—and be useful to scholars of modern Japanese literature, on the one hand, and yet to keep the level of discussion such that the book will be accessible to general read- ers, particularly those whose access to Murakami is through translated texts. This, I strongly believe, is the correct approach to this author's work in particular, because he himself has managed, as not many before him x PREFACE have managed, to tread the tightrope that is still widely believed to divide "serious literature" and "popular fiction." Murakami's work is, in fact, both. As Yoshio Iwamoto wrote some years ago, despite the popularity of Mura- kami's texts, "[tjhere is enough of the 'pure' and 'serious' about the work ... to have held critics back from dismissing it merely as popular stuff— enough, it might be said, of the adversarial role against established norms of all sorts that the distinguished writer Kenzaburo Oe sees as the defining feature of 'pure literature'" (Iwamoto 1993). But there is no sweeping aside the popularity of Murakami's writ- ing; each successive novel and short story collection makes the bestseller lists in Japan, and often enough outside it, too (Murakami enjoys rock-star status in Taiwan and South Korea). The readership is diverse and enthusi- astic, and ranges from high school students to college professors. Murakami himself has rarely expressed pretensions about being part of the "serious" literary crowd—though he unquestionably claims a significant role in con- temporary Japanese writing—preferring instead to focus on the "story" as both the medium and the purpose of contemporary writing. This has been especially true in the case of his third novel, Hitsuji o meguru bo ken (A Wild Sheep Chase, 1982), in which he claims to have put stylistic issues away for a while and concentrated instead simply on his task as a story- teller (Kawamoto 1985, 62). Such statements should be read, I think, pri- marily as a rejection of writing as "art," either as an effort to beautify the human condition, or to perfect humanity by aestheticizing it. This does not mean, however, that Murakami's fiction is irrelevant to contemporary society. Quite the contrary, he would argue that it is art that is now irrelevant; in today's world, awash in the artificial images of television, advertising, and the mass media, of computers and "cyberspace," the story is our reality, and thus is the most direct means to reach the pub- lic. It was for this reason, as Alfred Birnbaum pointed out some years ago, that Murakami and other young writers—among them, Shimada Masahiko, Yamada Eimi, Murakami Ryu and Yoshimoto Banana—began to distance themselves from terms like "pure literature" (junbungaku) in favor of "fic- tion" {fuikkushori) (Birnbaum 1991, 1). Others, looking at the broader picture of Japanese literary history, have pointed out that it is pure literature itself that has changed with the times, and that writers like Murakami Haruki have been part of this evolu- tion from the beginning. Kawamura Minato argued quite recently, for in- stance, that both Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryu, having debuted in Gunzo, were marked for pure literature from the start, but that they faced formidable resistance from the entrenched "old guard" of the Japanese lit- erary establishment. PREFACE xi Both Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryu began their ca- reers with Gunzo, and thus came out as so-called "pure" writers at the outset. There was, of course, resistance to them. The more conventional writers and critics of pure literature—especially the older ones—certainly set themselves against them, but by then they had already won a place for themselves. (Kawamura and Osugi 2000, 133) Of course, the same could be said of many young writers seeking to win acceptance by the literary establishment. The difference in Murakami's case is that he has never really actively sought the acceptance of the literary establishment at all, insisting instead that he simply writes what he wants, however he wants (Kawamoto 1985, 39-40). His decision to turn to writ- ing, rather, was a result of his own internal need to understand the major events of his generation's past. "I wanted to turn my eyes to the past," he says of writing Hear the Wind Sing, "to reconstruct that past in a form that I could comprehend more easily" (Kawamoto 1985, 38). Unquestionably, some of this impulse toward understanding remains in Murakami's writing to this day. Much of his interest in the world of mul- tinational capitalism, in terrorism and violence, and most recently in the effects of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), especially related to the 1995 Kobe earthquake, and the AUM Shinrikyo cult's 1995 sarin gas at- tack in the Tokyo subways, is an attempt to make sense of these things to himself.1 At the same time, both Murakami and his protagonists have ma- tured enough over the past twenty years or so to develop some interest in helping others to understand better themselves and their world, too. Ac- cordingly, in addition to his own fiction, the author's repertoire of writing today includes translations of major works of American fiction, numerous travelogues, two nonfiction works (discussed below) connected with the AUM incident, illustrated comic-type books, and even a "guidebook" to recent Japanese fiction for young readers. Clearly, he has diversified con- siderably since 1979. Having said this, a word or two about the admittedly limited scope of the present volume is appropriate. I have deliberately ignored Murakami's travelogues, his translations of American authors, the guidebook to Japa- nese short fiction, and those works obviously written to appeal to the comic book readership among Japanese high school and college students. Instead, my study is focused almost exclusively on the author's fiction. My reasons 1. The matter of PTSD comes up in particular in a 1996 discussion between Murakami and clinical psychologist Kawai Hayao, published in Sekai, vol. 46, no. 621 (April 1996) as "'Monogatari' de ningen wa nani o naosu no ka." xii PREFACE for this are numerous, but foremost among them is my belief that we will find the most comprehensive expressions of Murakami's worldview, his raison d'etre as writer, in his original fiction—particularly his novels.