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New Words, New Worlds

When I write, I’m kind of like a god, creating everything. I create what looks real to me.

—Murakami Haruki

In one of his very first short stories, “Binbō na obasan no hanashi” (translated by Jay Rubin as “A Poor Aunt’s Story”), Murakami Haruki’s ubiquitous nameless protagonist “Boku” explains the pale image of a middle-aged woman clinging to his back as tada no kotoba, or “just words.” In this one brief statement, Murakami sums up a facet of his fiction that is both simple and yet deceptively complex. It is simple in the same sense that God’s declaration in the opening lines of Genesis is simple: “Let there be light,” says God, and sure enough, light comes into being. But therein lies a multitude of complex questions. We are not gods; can we, therefore, merely speak (or write) and cause new realities to come into being? Is the reality that exists outside our minds and our consciousness truly there, does it exist? If so, how does it exist? How do we comprehend its existence? And if, as a result of our speaking, some new reality comes into being, what qualities must that reality possess for others to accept its existence as legitimate? Who, in fact, is qualified to speak, and who is not?

Some of these questions lie within that branch of philosophy known as phenomenology, the chief interest of which is how the sentient human being perceives and makes sense of the world external to his or her mind. My own phenomenological approach—one supported by the texts that will be treated below—is grounded in the idea that nothing meaningfully exists outside the human mind that has not first been passed through the filters of language, experience, and culture. At the same time, as a linguist and a humanist I cannot help but be skeptical—even seriously doubtful—about the ability of language and experience to mediate effectively between my thoughts and the world I perceive around me through my senses. It is from this essential point of skepticism and doubt that I approach my world, and from which, I believe, Murakami’s protagonists approach theirs.

In this chapter, we will examine several of Murakami’s most recent works, particularly Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84, in order to see how he places words and language first, and existence second, thus positing for language a clearly constitutive function, that is, the power to create new realities. We will also look at several early Murakami texts that reveal the roots of this concept.

At this point it is useful to retrace briefly the theory of the “nostalgic image” to note the metonymical connections between images of the inner mind and the realities that flow from it. As noted in the introduction, the Murakami protagonist, caught in the grip of a nostalgic obsession for things and people he has lost, unwittingly “conjures” the unconscious objects of his obsession (memories) into the conscious world as “nostalgic images,” persons and objects that are (mostly) solid and (almost) real, yet not (entirely) real. These nostalgic images are linguistically grounded; like clever wordplays, they are linked to their unconscious origins via one or more words.

A useful case in point is Pinball, 1973, a sequel to Hear the Wind Sing, which explores its protagonist’s sense of loss as he ponders the death of his girlfriend, Naoko, and the disappearance of his best friend, Rat. Boku is comforted along the way by “the Twins,” identical girls whom he discovers sleeping on either side of himself one morning after a night of heavy drinking. Despite their insistence that they are totally different from one another, physically the girls are indistinguishable but for their sweatshirts, emblazoned with the numbers “208” and “209.” Even more confusing is the fact that the girls have no names. Prompted to choose names, the girls suggest a series of binary oppositions—“up and down,” “left and right,” “vertical and horizontal,” and so on. Boku’s suggestion is “entrance and exit,” which leads him to consider things that have entrances but not exits, such as mousetraps. And this leads us to Boku’s best friend, Rat. The Twins are, in fact, nostalgic images who stand in for the missing Rat; their identical surface features mask their opposite natures beneath, much as Rat and Boku look similar yet are quite different.

Midway through Pinball, 1973 Boku takes it into his head to go hunting for a pinball machine known as “the Spaceship,” on which he often played during his time with Naoko. He eventually traces the machine to a collector in Tokyo and arranges to visit the machine. Upon locating it, locked up with hundreds of others in a freezing cold storage facility, he does not play it but instead holds an intimate lover’s conversation with it—we are perhaps mildly surprised that the pinball machine talks back to him. He then returns home with a vague sense of comfort. The name Spaceship is key, for it connects with Naoko as a storyteller. As a young man, Boku spent a lot of his time listening to stories, some told to him by Naoko, others, according to his narrator, by people from on other planets. “Spaceship” connects to “other planets,” which leads to “stories” and finally to “Naoko.” Given the somewhat fantastical nature of Boku’s encounter with the machine, it is no great leap to see the machine as a nostalgic image for Naoko herself. Like the Twins, however, this connection is grounded in linguistics, in wordplay.

Nostalgic images, conjurings of the protagonists’ tormented minds, form one important and largely unremarked facet of Murakami’s work as a writer: namely, to expose the potential power of language—our internal language—to constitute the real world around us. In that same gesture, however, such images force us to question the existence of objective reality.

The Ontological Status of Language

One need not suppose that such skepticism toward the external world is always such a bad thing. Indeed, having once accepted that there is no absolute reality in the world external to our minds (the conscious world), none, at any rate, that is not filtered through the medium of language, we recognize that language fulfills the extraordinary and necessary function of constituting reality nonstop, creating it anew in our minds from moment to moment. The first premise of our reading strategy for this chapter will therefore be to state clearly that everything we believe ourselves to see “outside” ourselves is created first on the “inside”—in our minds—through language.

But language does not exist in a vacuum; it is, rather, dependent on two fundamental factors: experience and culture. Both of these factors come (perhaps a bit paradoxically) from the world around us. Anyone looking at his or her own life can draw the same conclusion: we move through the world, perceiving phenomena, reacting to them (as they react to us), storing the results—our experiences—in our minds via language. The sum total of these collective experiences, conscious and unconscious (including those contained in what Jung describes as the collective unconscious), is culture; the sum total of our individual experiences, taken in conjunction with culture, results in the self. As we move through the world, performing these operations more or less constantly, we both act upon the culture around us and are acted upon by that culture. And as we do so, we ceaselessly make and remake the world around us in our minds through language. But the world we make is never any better or worse than the language at our command. Infants and small children create simplistic visions of the world because their command of the language is only barely formed. I am not thinking here of vocabulary so much as of the ability to conceptualize, for not all language is words; from gestures, facial expressions, and seemingly meaningless sounds to symbolic logic, musical notation, pure mathematics, and scientific symbols, all of these are forms of language. Language, for the purposes of this chapter, is best understood to be a symbolic or representational system by which intelligent beings order the world around them in their minds, and communicate that order (as far as possible) to others and to themselves.

Linguists and language-based philosophers have understood for some time—followed, a little reluctantly, by members of other fields—that language is more than simply a tool for describing things the way they are, or even for communicating those descriptions. At one theoretical extreme, thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have constructed complex arguments questioning the structure of power, of subjectivity, of the privileging of one side of a binary opposition (“up” is better than “down,” “true” trumps “false,” and so on), grounding their critiques of social systems in how language is manipulated. Such ideas have exerted considerable effect on virtually every field of discourse that relies on language to present its case (and what field of discourse does not?), proving to be a source of liberation for once peripheralized areas of social politics and theory—feminism, postcolonialism, and queer theory, to name a few. At the same time, given that these theories also imply a powerful subjective element in language, they prove unnerving to those fields that traditionally place a premium on objective and detached inquiry.

As recently as 1987, for instance, intellectual historian John Toews remarked on the “linguistic turn” and the gradual acceptance among historians that “language can no longer be construed as simply a medium, relatively or potentially transparent, for the representation or expression of a reality outside of itself.”1 This is most encouraging. At the same time, however, Toews betrays his uneasiness about the apparently bottomless relativism of Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, and others. “If we take them seriously,” he argues, “we must recognize that we have no access, even potentially, to an unmediated world of objective things and processes that might serve as the ground and limit of our claims to knowledge of nature or to any transhistorical or transcendent subjectivity that might ground our interpretation of meaning.”2

Toew’s resistance is not unreasonable, given that discourses such as history—any discourse, in fact, that seeks to establish a detached and objective approach to its subject—will face considerable hardship once we undermine the credibility of the very medium in which their discourse is couched. It is also true that the work of Foucault and Derrida in particular is aimed, among other things, at exposing the gross manipulations of language in the various struggles of power politics.

Exciting as such inquiries are, they are not what I seek to probe in this chapter. My interest lies, rather, in a less complicated epistemological concern for “existence” itself, that is, of what “reality” actually means. While I cannot claim to be free of politics—no epistemology is ever truly free of politics, for language is always political—my inquiry stems less out of the political than the aesthetic and ontological aspects of language and its construction of reality. For a starting point we might leap back almost four centuries, to Descartes’s efforts to prove his own existence—efforts that were met with mixed results, for Descartes had better success proving that he was conscious than he did proving that he truly existed. In the end, cogito, ergo sum proves only that Descartes could think; his act of thinking, however, insofar as it represents a subjective act, must be viewed in terms of interpretation of the things he perceived around him, as well as the fact that he can think.

Such inquiries continue to occupy us today, usually in the application of specific fields of discourse. From the more practical side of linguistics, for instance, Willis Barnstone, a theorist of translation, argues a fundamentally hermeneutic line for all acts of perception, even (or perhaps especially) in our daily lives, when he says that

there is unending process of rewording, retelling, translation, transmutation, and wherever we turn, where meaning is sought, where mental activity takes place, we are living inescapably in the eternal condition of translation . . . every perception of movement and change, in the street or on our tongues, on the page or in our ears, leads us directly to the art and activity of translation.3

Herein we find echoes of reception theory (sometimes called “reader response”), and it is true that such a reading strategy, in which the reader, in the act of reading, rewrites the text through the filter of his or her own language, experience, and culture, is grounded in the idea that the reader plays the fundamental role of breathing life into the text; indeed, the text remains only potentially meaningful until this occurs.

While hermeneutics (in its simplest form understood as the “theory of interpretation”) is, to be sure, a basic grounding factor in my own argument for this opening chapter, I propose to carry the question beyond textual exegesis, wherein we permit the reader a voice in rewriting the text; rather, I propose, following Barnstone (whose “translation” might be viewed as “interpretation” here), that we “read” the world (within our minds) and “write” the world (external to our minds) all the time, and moreover, that the realities we construct are not merely virtual, nor even potential, but as real as it gets. Stated another way, there is no reality perceptible to us that we do not create ourselves through language. Among other things, this means that we can formulate an answer to the age-old question, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer is no, it makes no meaningful sound, because no one is there to recognize it as such and thus “concretize” it with the meaning that our minds construct; at the same time, the answer is yes, because I can imagine the sound a tree makes when it falls (I am imagining it as I write this line, in fact, and perhaps some of my readers are doing the same as they read it), and somewhere in the world, in some forest, a tree surely is falling at this moment. . . .

For those who choose not to follow me into the solipsistic tunnel, let us propose a less unnerving proposition: that language is frequently assigned a constitutive role in literary works, by which I mean simply that it is given the power to create realities within the fictional framework. Such an idea, no doubt, arose in part out of the more sophisticated theories of language that attended the 1960s and beyond, particularly as linguists probed ever more deeply into how language and words actually managed to carry meanings, more or less intact, from one person to another; it is also, however, a first principle for anyone who approaches a text as a series of critical decisions made by its writer and (often unconsciously) by its reader.

If such ideas have been with us since Genesis, they continue to find modern-day expression in literature and film. These range from the absurd—popular films such as Ghostbusters (recall the arrival of the giant marshmallow man near the end) and Jumanji (wherein drawing a card from the deck brings into reality whatever it says)—to more sophisticated works of fiction. A number of writers from the past three decades, including Murakami Haruki, have addressed the question of whether language, in addition to describing reality, is in fact capable of creating it as well. We will explore this important facet of Murakami’s writing, but before that, let us examine the works of other novelists who have given language a dominant role in the construction of reality.

Ecos of the Past

In pursuit of fiction in which great events and realities are hinged upon the apparently nondescript or insignificant, one comes across a number of interesting works. Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, for instance, follows the movements of one Tyrone Slothrop, a U.S. Army lieutenant, the locations of whose sexual exploits in London appear to match the German V-2 missile strikes near the end of World War II, raising the question: are the Germans targeting Slothrop (or his dates)—unlikely, since the V-2 were unguided and fell more or less at random—or do Slothrop’s sexual conquests cause the unguided rockets to land on those spots?

A similar motif is seen in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980), in which children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947—the precise moment at which India’s independence from Britain began—seem to determine their nation’s development. The work focuses on Saleem Sinai, one such child, who believes that his personal destiny somehow guides greater India’s destiny, and therefore sees the occurrence of great events as somehow originating with himself. Referring to the India-Pakistan War of March 1971, for instance, he notes that “the purpose of that entire war had been to re-unite me with an old life, to bring me back together with my old friends.” As in Slothrop’s case, one cannot be certain whether Saleem causes these events in India to occur, but clearly in his own mind things happen because he needs them to happen.

In terms of declarative language constituting new realities, however, the Italian writer and semiotician Umberto Eco surely has produced the most intriguing narratives. Beginning with Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), Eco explores what happens when one tells just the right story to just the right people and waits for them to bring it to life. At its heart the novel centers on three men—an elderly book editor named Belbo, his assistant Diotallevi (a cabalist who fancies himself a lost Jew), and the young Casaubon, a recent college graduate who invents for himself the vocation of “information detective.” As these three men begin to solicit authors for a series of books on the history of the occult, the three editors begin to discuss what they know about the connections between the Templar Knights and the occult, particularly rumors that the Templars had discovered the secret to immortality. As they pursue some of the more colorful characters in the Templar story, and what Belbo and Casaubon (facetiously, at first) term “the Plan,” some of their writers—whom they now term “the diabolicals”—appear to assume those identities, as though they were immortal. It would be comic, except that Belbo goes too far in trying to discover “the Plan,” losing his life in the process.

But Foucault’s Pendulum is less about Templars and the occult than it is about the credulity of those who would attempt to force connections between things that have nothing to do with each other, to invent realities where none existed. Eco’s satirical view of such things finds voice time and again in Casaubon’s character, whose view of his peculiar vocation is strictly cynical. “I knew a lot of things, unconnected things, but I wanted to be able to connect them after a few hours at a library. . . . It was a little like that game where you have to go from sausage to Plato in five steps, by association of ideas.”4

Such gestures, ultimately, are without much merit, and Cas aubon’s work represents for Eco not the emancipation of unfettered intertextuality, of free association and interpretation, but rather the hazards of uncritical association, of letting one’s imagination run wild and free. A pattern is discerned, it matches what one wishes to see, and soon it takes on the illusion of reality, of fact. Games like this are almost irresistible, and the more unfathomable they appear, the more readers are inclined to play. “‘Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish,’” Casaubon reasons, “‘the human race spends centuries deciphering the message. The Templars’ mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That’s why so many people venerate them.’”5 And yet, there is no denying that the patterns constructed between writer and reader have a tendency to take on lives of their own, to escape the control of their creators. “‘Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one’s free to take it and run with it. At the end they’ll see who’s done the best job. . . . Actually, though, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what’s happening, it’s too late.’”6

What strikes one as odd in this tale is that so down to earth a character as Casaubon, by novel’s end, appears to believe in “the Plan” himself, and yet, what other options lie open to him? Though it may well be a figment of the collective imagination of “the diabolicals,” it is nonetheless a lethal figment; it has already claimed the life of Belbo and threatens that of Casaubon as well. By novel’s end he cannot even bring himself to leave a final note explaining how things have come to this pass; he will only be misunderstood yet again, for “if They were to read it, They would only derive another dark theory and spend another eternity trying to decipher the secret message behind my words. It’s impossible, They would say; he can’t only have been making fun of us.”7 Ultimately, however, this is exactly what Casaubon does, and he mirrors the fun Eco pokes at those who read far more into a text than it can possibly hold. And yet, the “reality” Casaubon is so determined to reject is undeniably there; it has killed Belbo, and it soon will kill him. It does not get much more “real” than that.

Eco’s later books bring this point to the fore as well. Baudolino (2000) concerns a young man with a gift for languages and storytelling, who attaches himself to Frederick the Great during his days of conquest in Europe, helping the king to speak with the various villagers and burghers they encounter in Italy, interceding when Frederick is inclined to get too rough. Seeking to assist his king in gaining equal footing with Pope Alexander III, Baudolino enlists the help of several friends, and they begin to fabricate Christian “relics” that will gain Frederick the prestige he requires to achieve this aim. Baudolino discovers his gift for creating realities out of words during a visit to Rome after Frederick has declared himself the new emperor, and he convinces the emperor’s soldiers that certain relics exist in the city:

Everyone hung on my lips. If I felt like saying I had seen a sea siren—after the emperor had brought me there as one who saw saints—they all believed me and said good boy, good boy. . . . After all, I thought, whatever I say is true because I said it.8

Throughout the story Baudolino defends his brilliant ability to lie, arguing that he simply brings into actuality things that lie dormant for want of proper narratives to support them. As he prepares to construct a story by which to transform three mummified corpses into the Magi who, according to legend, brought gifts to the baby Jesus, Baudolino rationalizes his actions:

“I also thought that a relic is valid if it finds its proper place in a true story. Outside the story of Prester John, those Magi could have been the trick of some rug merchant; within the true story of John they became genuine testimony. A door is not a door if it does not have a building around it; otherwise it would be only a hole—no, what am I saying?—not even a hole, because a void without something surrounding it is not a void.”9

In the end, after transforming the simple wooden cup that had belonged to his peasant father into the Holy Grail of Christ—again, simply by declaring it to be so and constructing a narrative to make it so—Baudolino spends fifteen years traveling to the ends of the earth, seeking the fabled kingdom of Prester John, the so-called earthly paradise, where the language of Adam is still spoken in all its purity, and immortal creatures from the age of the Garden of Eden still live. He finds this land and dwells there for a time, but readers are uncertain whether this is (for him) a true story or a fabrication that, like Casaubon’s, has simply gone too far. It might also be the result of the “green honey” (apparently a type of hallucinogenic) that Baudolino and his friends ingest for inspiration. Indeed, Baudolino himself seems uncertain.

More recently, Eco has written The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna (2004), the story of a modern-day bookseller who, following some sort of cerebral incident (perhaps a hemorrhage), loses his memory, yet can remember every line he has ever read and quote whole passages from thousands of books, all from memory. His wife, a psychologist, brings to his attention the case of a mental patient who, having lost his memory, allows his hand to write his life story, gradually recovering it: “‘It was as if his hand, with its automatisms, was able to put in order what his head couldn’t. Which is like saying that what he wrote was more intelligent than he was.’”10 Traveling back to his childhood home, the narrator seeks out his past in the books, comics, and notes of his childhood, eventually rediscovering himself in these written texts. In the end, however, having again entered the fog of a coma, he begins to doubt both his memories and his perceptions, concluding finally that reality is a subjective matter, a personal choice: “In order to survive (odd expression for someone like me who may already be dead) I must decide that Gratarolo, Paola, Sibilla, my studio, all of Solara with Amalia and the stories of Grandfather’s castor oil, were memories of real life.”11 Ultimately, every reality is always already grounded in perception, language, and narrative, and so the choice lies with the perceiver whether to accept this reality or that.12

This sentiment is—dare one say it?—echoed in Eco’s most recent novel, The Prague Cemetery (2010), as well. In it, a man calling himself “Captain Simonini,” suffers (like the narrator of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna) from partial amnesia and reconstructs the missing elements of his memory by carrying on a diaristic “conversation” with one of his alter egos, the persona of a man he has already killed. The reconstruction of his memory takes place through the writing of his life story, but this story in itself is strongly reminiscent of Baudolino, for in it Simonini explains his lifelong work as a creator of documents that help to guide the political movements of the various political factions at work in late-nineteenth-century Europe. He gets the idea for this from a charlatan lawyer who cheats him out of his inheritance when his grandfather dies, then employs him to help produce documents. Interestingly, his employer insists that his work lies not in forgeries but in the “recovery” of documents that ought to have existed but do not. “‘What I produce,’” the man explains to Simonini, “‘are not forgeries but new copies of genuine documents that have been lost or, by simple oversight, have never been produced, and that could and should have been produced.’”13

As the novel progresses, Simonini works for a variety of political entities, first in Italy, later in France, and somehow his work in constructing documents is always tinged by his memories of his grandfather’s anti-Semitic leanings, leading him to construct an elaborate narrative about a worldwide plot on the part of Masonic lodges and the Jews to ruin Europe’s economy (“It didn’t occur to me that a conspiracy of five continents might be an excessive way to change constitutional rule in France,”14 he admits), a theme—particularly the involvement of the Jews—that seems to attract interested parties in the same way that Casaubon and Belbo drew in their “diabolicals.” Simonini’s own narrative, however, contains the seeds of a much more frightening aftermath than anything we find in Foucault’s Pendulum, as is clear when the German agent “Goedsche” (meant to remind us of Goethe) explains to Simonini how German Jews had been handled in Luther’s age, using expressions that ring a disturbingly familiar bell: “‘all their gold, money and jewelry was to be taken from them, and their young men given axes and spades and their women flax and spindles. That is because,’ said Goedsche, sneering contemptuously, ‘arbeit macht frei, work sets you free. The final solution, for Luther, would have been to drive them out of Germany like rabid dogs.’”15 In the end, Simonini realizes that “[t]he Prague cemetery was slipping out of my control, but I was probably contributing to its success.”16 His memory also returns; it seems that his amnesia may have resulted from mental strain caused by the men and women he has killed in the course of protecting his position as government agent. In a sense, however, Eco seems to suggest that Simonini’s trauma is also the result of the innumerable killings yet to come, clearly set into motion by the scribblings of this seemingly insignificant person. Through the construction of his narrative—a fabrication—on the Jews, Simonini is given de facto credit for the Holocaust. This is the true (and, here, the truly terrifying) power of language.

Of Dogs and Men

As noted earlier, this powerful aspect of language is clearly evident in Murakami’s first works of fiction, particularly from Pinball, 1973. One of the more striking examples comes up early in that work, shortly after the character “Naoko” has been introduced. Naoko’s role in the narrative is to tell Boku stories, in a sense to help him envision the “other world,” of which she is already to some extent a part and to which she will soon return permanently in death. Naoko’s character is only barely developed in this work, but the story she tells to Boku in this instance, a description of her hometown, is interesting for the fact that it later comes to life:

“You could barely even call it a town,” she continued. “There’s one road, and a train station. The kind of pathetic station the conductor might forget to stop at on a rainy day.”

I nodded. For a full thirty seconds we were silent, watching the cigarette smoke moving in a shaft of light.

“A dog keeps walking from one end of the train platform to the other. That kind of station. Get it?”

I nodded.

“In front of the station is a little rotary and a bus stop. A few shops. . . . barely conscious places. If you go straight through it you run into the park. It has a slide and three swings.”

“How about a sandbox?”

“Sandbox?” She thought about that for a while, then nodded in confirmation. “It has one.”

We were silent again. I put out my burnt-down cigarette in a paper cup.

“It’s a horribly boring town. Like, you can’t even imagine why they’d build such a boring town.”

“God reveals himself to us in many forms,” I suggested.17

Naoko offers this description of her hometown to Boku in the spring of 1969, as a new school year begins for them. Interestingly, her description, which does not end with the passage above, contains semipermanent aspects, such as the fact that the town is known for its tasty water, and momentary ones, such as the dog pacing the train platform. Yet it is this momentary aspect that Murakami’s protagonist latches onto and seeks out when he visits the town some ten pages—and an unspecified period of time—later:

I waited for exactly one hour, but the dog did not appear. . . . Then, under that vague spring sunshine, a white dog—he looked like he had been brought by one of the men fishing—appeared, diligently sniffing at the clover.18

Is this the same dog described by Naoko in her narrative? In the end it does not matter; Naoko has declared that a dog paces the train platform, and so Boku must find a dog there, or he cannot trust the reality of what he has been told. In short, Naoko has created this “reality” in which a dog perpetually paces a train platform, and Boku, out of an urge to confirm this fact, goes to visit it. It would be more accurate, however, to say that in responding to the narrative constructed by Naoko and the world it describes, Boku in fact concretizes this world, constructs it, brings it into actuality by the very act of acknowledging it.19 For reality, like the narrative, is a discursive act, one that connects and requires mutual acknowledgment from both maker and viewer, the latter of whom in turn becomes maker.

Prophesy and Prediction

One of the more common mechanisms by which language constructs reality in Murakami fiction is the use of prophesy and prediction, and while it is easy enough within the fictional landscape to attribute this to magical forces, it also represents a manipulation of time by the author, either by its apparent suspension altogether (as occurs in the so-called other world) or through the introduction of multidirectionality. As one of the central defining aspects of the “other world,” time will be discussed at some length in the chapter that follows; here I will note only that time, commonly taken to be an objective fact of the natural universe (chiefly due to the incontrovertible effects of deterioration and decay), is in fact a construct like any other, bound to language and culture and by no means absolute. We are fooled by time into granting it greater ontological status than it deserves because it may be divided and expressed uniformly through the symbolic system of mathematics. We speak of how long “a day” is on other planets and make adjustments for the rate of rotation and circumference of those planets, and yet in the end we are still playing with the clumsy tool of our arbitrary divisions of time, with hours and minutes, which can be made to divide one year on earth into 365 (almost perfectly) even days. But why not measure time in sticks of incense, as used to be done in Asia, or by the occurrence of the full moon, as ancient humans did and some modern people still do?

Time may be looked at culturally as well, in terms of human historical development, as Jean Baudrillard does, and when it is viewed in this way, something interesting occurs: we see that time is not necessarily linear nor even unidirectional but may well move the way the wind does, now in this direction, now in that. Near the end of his admittedly esoteric work The Illusion of the End, in which he confronts the massive wave of revisionist history that accompanied the closing years of the twentieth century, Baudrillard has this to say:

We have to accord a privileged status to all that has to do with non-linearity, reversibility, all that is of the order not of an unfolding or an evolution, but of a winding back, a reversion in time. Anastrophe versus catastrophe. Perhaps, deep down, history has never unfolded in a linear fashion; perhaps language has never unfolded in a linear fashion. Everything moves in loops, tropes, inversions of meaning, except in numerical and artificial languages which, for that very reason, no longer are languages.20

But there is, lying outside the boundaries of the artificially constructed time that divides our daily lives, a more permanent, all-encompassing Time that binds the vastness of all human experience, a realm of Time that contains no directions, that is eternal and always a single, unified whole. In this mode of Time there is no past or future, only an endless present, constantly renewing itself. Japanese critic Shimamura Teru examines the Greek myth of Cronus swallowing his children in order to clarify the presence of both forms of time (“time” and “Time”) in Murakami fiction. Alarmed by the prophesy that he would one day be dethroned by one of his children, Cronus swallows each of the children his wife, Rhea, bears him, until, fed up, she hides Zeus and substitutes a stone for her husband to swallow in his place. Eventually Zeus returns, and having arranged for his father to vomit up his siblings (Hades and Poseidon among them), he leads a rebellion against Cronus. Shimamura’s point is that even as Cronus attempts to extend his own reign as king at the expense of his children, he not only disrupts the forward movement of time, but he also postpones or even negates his eventual inclusion in the more permanent timelessness of what Shimamura calls “the chronicle” and what I am terming Time:

For Cronus, to change places with his son as successor represented the end of his “time.” As each previous father/king was killed by his son/prince, so too was history/chronicle constructed, and the father/old king would be bound up into that chronicle.21

In other words, until he is succeeded by the next generation, Cronus effectively remains a part of living time, thus causing a stagnant present and depriving the future of its rightful ruler, but at the same time he prevents himself from joining the narrative—the chronicle— of Time, which, unlike living time, constantly constitutes and is constituted by all collective memory.

It is precisely this sort of linearity, this forward progress in time, that is so frequently disrupted in Murakami fiction. What we see instead is the apparent disappearance of time, as in the “other world,” where it cannot exist in its regulated, divided form. Thus we have what seems to be the temporary stoppage of time, as in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in which moments the cries of the semimythical “wind-up bird” signify that the world’s springs have run down. At such moments physical time is briefly supplanted by the metaphysical Time, causing past, present, and future to collide with one another, opening a new dimension in which time and space seem to disappear, allowing certain characters to see “backwards” into the future.

A moment like this occurs in Aldous Huxley’s novel Time Must Have a Stop (1945), in which a young man—who might remind us just a little of Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus—is taken from his dull life in London to live with his Uncle Eustace in Florence. Near the end of the novel, however, Uncle Eustace, all alone in his bathroom, suffers a fatal heart attack, and while his life ebbs from his body on the bathroom floor—and presumably beyond, as well—he hears and joins in the laughter of the universe around him, seeing visions of the things past, present, and future:

Yes, the whole universe was laughing with him. Laughing cosmically at the cosmic joke of its own self-frustration . . . . A counterpoint of innumerable hilarities.22

There was a kind of side-slip, a falling, as it were, through the intricacies of the lattice—and he knew himself remembering events that had not yet taken place.23

As part of the cosmos itself, the world soul, Eustace has jettisoned the bounds of physical life and of the limitations of its time and space, though for him it is a disconcerting feeling, and at one point, when he is brought back into a medium’s body during a séance, he experiences pleasure at emerging from “mere incoherent succession into the familiar orderliness of time. . . . It was enough just to have this feeling of space and time and the processes of life.”24 This “incoherent succession” is, of course, the movement of the universe outside the boundaries of human time and space, and it permits Eustace to see everything at once, as a great and terrible simultaneity. This, too, is seeing the future, but only insofar as the future is a never-ending present.

This conception of Time may assist us in making sense of the frequent prophesies that occur in Murakami fiction as well, a motif that should and will be discussed in terms of its quasi-spiritual qualities in chapter 3 of this text. But prophesy also has an important linguistic aspect to it, for it is one of the more dramatic examples of how speaking the future can create the future. Put another way, one can never be certain whether the prophet is reading what is to be, or writing it.

At the beginning of A Wild Sheep Chase, for instance, the sequel to Pinball, 1973, in which the protagonist searches for a semimythical, all-empowering sheep—and at the same time, for his missing friend Rat—Boku reminisces about a woman he slept with in college, who told him, rather matter-of-factly, “‘I’m going to live to be twenty-five . . . and then I’ll die.’”25 The following sentence informs us that she died just a year later than predicted, at twenty-six. Did this woman predict her death, or did she bring it about? We cannot be certain. In the same novel, the protagonist is assisted by his clairvoyant ear model girlfriend, who informs him that a telephone call will soon come, one that has to do with a particular sheep, and that this will be the start of a great adventure. Sure enough, the man’s business partner telephones ten minutes later with the news that someone has come around asking what they know about a certain sheep. It would be natural enough to assume that the girlfriend is simply reading the future, but can we really be certain that she is not arranging the circumstances by which Boku’s great “sheep chase” may begin?

Dance Dance Dance, which narrates Boku’s quest to find “Kiki”—the same ear model, who disappears near the end of A Wild Sheep Chase—raises similar questions through the thirteen-year-old Yuki, yet another clairvoyant companion to Boku, who expresses profound uneasiness about her ability to see things that are about to happen, for she comes to feel responsible in some way for the events she predicts. “‘Sometimes I have these periods where I’m sort of blank, like in a dream,’” she tells Boku. “‘And when those come, it happens. It’s not a premonition. It’s more vague than that. But it happens. I can see it. But I don’t say anything anymore. Whenever I do, everyone cries “witch”.’”26 In the end Yuki is uncertain whether she is seeing the future or making it happen, and does all she can to block her visions out. Boku experiences something like this himself when he reflects on those who have died in his life and those who appeared likely to do so. In one unnerving scene, while chasing Kiki, he enters a room—part of the “other world,” which will be explained in the next chapter—and sees a group of skeletons. Are these people who have died, or those who are yet to die? He has no way of knowing. “In my mind I went over the list of those who might die. I felt like the Angel of Death. I was unconsciously choosing the order in which they would die.”27

Reconstructing the Self through Words: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

As noted earlier, the great majority of Murakami’s characters concern themselves with preserving or recovering their threatened or lost individual identity. Until the mid-1990s and publication of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, they employed two common approaches to this end: (a) the protagonist would enter his own mind and reencounter elements of his previous experience, in a sense, reminding himself of where he came from; or (b) the protagonist would draw elements of that past out, as the aforementioned “nostalgic images,” into the conscious world, using them as direct links to his past and also as an emotional salve while confronting his past. This task is for these protagonists an intensely personal operation, for this was the period in which both Murakami and his protagonists were still maintaining distance—both physical and emotional—from the rest of Japanese society.

Whereas this earlier model was, as we have seen, linguistically grounded in metonymical connections between objects and words in Murakami’s early texts, the concept of (re)constructing oneself through the act of writing a story (and having it read by another), something like what we saw in Eco’s work, is first seen as a concentrated theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, particularly the later chapters. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is essentially a quest novel in which the work’s hero, Okada Tōru, seeks to rescue his missing wife, Kumiko, from the clutches of her evil brother, Wataya Noboru. Structurally, the novel shifts frequently between the present narrative of Okada Tōru, Kumiko, and Wataya Noboru, and the brutal history of the Japanese Imperial Army in Manchuria during World War II. As with previous Murakami fiction, the work’s central theme is the loss of individual core identity, whether to the amnesia of history or by its being forcibly stripped away by another.

An example of the former is “Lieutenant Mamiya,” a survivor of Japan’s disastrous clash with the Soviet Union at the largely forgotten 1939 battle of Nomonhan near the Mongolian border. Captured while on reconnoiter, Mamiya is dropped into a deep Mongolian well and left to die but is rescued instead. Yet, it is only his physical body that is saved; his inner self, his soul, is left behind in that well, and now he leads only a half existence, a metaphor for the collective Japanese amnesia that has forgotten all those who fought at Nomonhan, whether they survived or not. Mamiya, however, unlike his forgotten comrades, has the opportunity to recover at least some part of himself by telling his story to Okada Tōru, some in person, the rest through a series of letters that detail his experiences. In having his story heard and recognized by Tōru, Mamiya in some small measure is reconstructed by Tōru.

Others—generally those who have confronted death in some manner—find their inner selves threatened through violence in the present era: Kumiko, her older sister (who committed suicide), and a clairvoyant named Kanō Creta are assaulted by Wataya Noboru, though our only account of this comes from Kanō Creta, who throughout her life suffered from severe, unexplained physical pain and eventually attempted suicide. Following this attempt, which resulted in the disappearance of her mysterious malady, Kanō Creta became a prostitute, and one of her customers was Wataya Noboru. During one of their sessions, she tells Tōru, Noboru reached into her body through her sexual organs and “‘removed something wet and slippery’” from her.28 This was her core identity, something akin to her soul, and without it, like Lieutenant Mamiya, she leads only a partial existence. This will likely be the fate of Kumiko as well, should Tōru fail to rescue her from the metaphysical prison in which her brother keeps her.

Herein we see the true function of Okada Tōru in this novel: to read (or listen to) the stories of the afflicted and, in doing so, to recognize them as individuals and thereby restore some small part of their core identity to them. He does this with his neighbor, the sixteen-year-old Kasahara Mei, who survived a motorcycle crash that killed her boyfriend (a symbolic splitting of inner and outer selves) and now spends her time chatting with Tōru, whom she has nicknamed “Mr. Wind-Up Bird.” Somewhat less directly he also does this with “Cinnamon,” the mute son of “Nutmeg,” the latter of whom employs him to use his special connection to the “other world” in order to help women who have become disconnected from their own core identities. All of these instances highlight the crucial importance of language, for it is through the construction of these narratives, and their reconstruction through the reading/writing process, that identities are created. Each character who shares his or her story with Tōru is both recognized by him and in that act of recognition re-created—“concretized,” in the terminology of reception theory—as a viable ontological presence.29

This process is best illustrated through the narrative of Cinnamon. We learn late in the novel that Cinnamon, following a bizarre encounter with the “other world,” lost the ability to speak. Cinnamon’s affliction begins when, as a small boy, he awakens one night to what sounds like a spring being wound—the springs of history, of time, are actually being wound up here—and happens to look outside his bedroom window, where he sees a man who looks like his father climb a tree in the garden but never come down, while a second man buries a mysterious bundle. Later, the boy dreams—or believes he has dreamed—of going outside to dig up the bundle, which turns out to contain a human heart, still beating. When Cinnamon returns to bed, he finds a perfect replica of himself sleeping there and forces his own way into the bed, awakening the following morning all alone but completely mute. What has happened is that the conscious Cinnamon and his inner self have changed places during one of those brief periods when time stops and the passages between conscious and unconscious are unblocked. As noted previously, it is the inner (unconscious/invisible) self that contains memory and experience, while the outer (conscious/visible) self provides fresh experience, living the story. What it means, then, for the two to switch places, in brief, is that the Cinnamon living in the conscious world—who remembers all but does not speak—must keep the record of his experiences, while the Cinnamon living in the unconscious realm (who, presumably, can still speak) must feed new information to the mute Cinnamon, who will (silently) put it down in writing. The fact that most of Cinnamon’s chronicle deals with past events stems from the fact that the “speaking” Cinnamon lives in the unconscious repository of (collective) memories, the unchanging and unchangeable past itself, and thus has no “present” that may be distinguished from past; or rather, we might say he lives in an endless present.

This comes to the attention of Okada Tōru when Cinnamon deliberately leaves his computer running, giving Tōru access to a series of memoirs he has been writing about himself and his mother, all under the general title of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” This is certainly disconcerting for Tōru, given that it repeats a nickname that he believes is strictly between himself and Kasahara Mei. Does it mean that Kasahara Mei and Cinnamon are connected in some way? Or is Cinnamon somehow tapped directly into Okada Tōru’s own memory banks? This is merely one of the many riddles for which Murakami is famous, and readers may turn gray attempting to decipher them. We might conclude, for instance, that Okada Tōru is himself nothing more than a character in “Cinnamon’s” narrative (and thus, mere words), a figment of his imagination, like the Cartesian “evil genius.”30 (No doubt many readers of Murakami’s various works have, at some point or another, wondered whether the entire narrative they read is not simply a figment of the protagonist’s overactive imagination.) Such a scheme, in narratological terms, at least, would shed light on Cinnamon’s inability to speak: as the author of the text, his “voice” would necessarily be reserved for the narrative itself, rather than for direct, vocal interaction with the characters in his work. It would also be compatible with our contention that actual worlds can be and are created from words. In fact, this is more or less what happens in 1Q84, wherein a world created within the confines of a novel comes into actual being, encompassing its authors and all those connected with it.

Perhaps a more useful reading of this point within the context of the present text is that Cinnamon, closely connected to the “other world” of Time as a collective unity, has direct access to all human memory and experience, past, present, and future, and thus is not only aware of Okada Tōru’s nickname and its meaning—as “the bird who rewinds the springs of time”—but is eager to make this fact known to Okada Tōru as well. Why? Perhaps it may be read as a distress call from the Cinnamon, who has remained trapped “over there” since the night when he wrestled unsuccessfully with his inner self for control of the outer body. Cinnamon’s “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” would then be an SOS directed at Tōru, who alone possesses, as Cinnamon knows perfectly well, the ability to “read/write” him back into existence.

In this sense Cinnamon succeeds; Tōru reads the narrative he has constructed, interprets it against what he already knows, what he has conjectured, and what he has guessed, and in the end constructs his own “Cinnamon,” in the reflection of which Cinnamon then views himself as an autonomous being. It is, ironically, the same process by which Kumiko herself attempts to catch Tōru’s attention; the recurring calls from the “telephone woman” early in the novel are actually from Kumiko, who is doing all she can to let Tōru know what has happened to her. Out of his natural prudishness, and of course his inability to recognize her voice, altered by the “other world,” however, Tōru completely fails to catch her signals and thus does not “read/write” Kumiko until it is too late. Indeed, whether Kumiko or Cinnamon can actually be saved by Tōru’s “reading” of their texts is left unclear by the end of the novel.

Reconstructing the Self through Words: Kafka on the Shore

Nearly a decade before The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami played with the idea of the inner mind as a construct of language in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the author’s only quasi- science fiction novel to date. Its parallel narratives—one representing the outer mind, the other depicting the inner—create a powerful tension between the individual Will of the conscious world and the somnambulant repose of the unconscious state. The conscious protagonist (Watashi) is a hard-boiled operative who works as a human information encoder for an organization calling itself the System. As part of an unauthorized private experiment carried out by the lead scientist in charge of programming Watashi’s brain, however, a third circuit is added to the structure, one containing an approximation of his inner mind, constructed out of words and images found in his actual inner mind. This third circuit, known as “the Town,” is a walled enclosure containing a bucolic sort of village, and as the circuits in Watashi’s brain begin to fuse together, he is threatened with permanent imprisonment in “the Town.”

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is actually a useful representation of how characters like Kumiko and Cinnamon get to be the way they are, for it begins with the forcible removal of the protagonist’s “shadow” (kage), a recurring image in Murakami fiction that can represent, all at once, the soul, memory, self, identity.31 Without the shadow, a Murakami character becomes quite literally mindless, without memories and without a sense of individual identity. At novel’s end, the protagonist and his librarian friend, both of whom retain traces of their shadows but not enough to be considered “whole,” are given the opportunity to escape the Town, presumably back to the conscious world, but elect not to do so. At the same time, not wishing to return to the mindless stagnancy and control of the Town, they choose a third option: to stay in the forbidden forest outside the Town, where they will, presumably, attempt to reconstruct (or construct anew) their lost selves.

Nearly two decades after completing this work, feeling a sense of responsibility about what had happened with those people,32 Murakami set to work on Umibe no Kafka (2002; translated as Kafka on the Shore), a lengthy and complex work to which we will have occasion to return in greater depth later in this volume. Kafka on the Shore concerns a fifteen-year-old boy named Tamura Kafka who seeks (unsuccessfully) to escape his father’s prophesy that he will one day kill his father, then locate and copulate with his long-lost mother and older sister. Fleeing to Takamatsu City in Shikoku, several hundred miles away from his home (and father) in Tokyo, he believes he has avoided his fate, until he awakens from a deep trance one night behind a Shintō shrine, covered in blood. Initially he takes refuge in the apartment of a young woman named Sakura, whom he met on the bus to Takamatsu and who is, coincidentally, just the right age to be his missing sister. Later he finds his way—or perhaps is led by fate itself—to the Kōmori Memorial Library, a small, private library managed by “Miss Saeki,” a woman with a mysterious past who is, also coincidentally, just the right age to be Kafka’s missing mother.

The flip side of Kafka’s movements is a parallel narrative that features “Mr. Nakata,” a man of approximately sixty, who describes himself as “not very bright” but has the peculiar ability to speak the language of cats. This makes him popular with cat owners in his neighborhood, who frequently call upon him to help locate their missing pets. While on such a mission, Nakata encounters a kind of spirit or deity calling himself “Johnny Walker”—a perfect replica of the Scotch whiskey icon, complete with top hat—who has taken over the body of Kafka’s father. While in Johnny Walker’s home, the normally mild-mannered Nakata becomes suddenly enraged when the other man shows him his collection of captured neighborhood cats and then proceeds to vivisect them one by one, swallowing their internal organs afterwards. Nakata kills him with a kitchen knife, then (without really knowing why) heads for Takamatsu City in Shikoku himself, aided by a cynical truck driver he meets along the way named Hoshino. Once in Takamatsu, with the help of another spirit/deity, taking the form of “Colonel Sanders” (the Kentucky Fried Chicken founder), they locate a stone known as the “Gateway stone” (iriguchi no ishi). They “open” this by lifting it up, thus opening the passage between the worlds of the physical and metaphysical, permitting movement between them. Not long after this Nakata finds his way to the Kōmori Memorial Library, where he meets Miss Saeki, who seems to recognize him, takes her by the hand, and sends her peacefully into death.

Saeki and Nakata actually share the same crippling debilitation: like the protagonist who is trapped in “the Town” in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, both have lost their shadows and must now live in the conscious world—on this side—while their other halves go on existing “over there.” Nakata’s story begins in the closing days of World War II. For reasons that are never made clear—perhaps it was to escape the rampant violence that surrounded him in his own world—Nakata entered the “other world” as a child, emerging some weeks later without his “shadow.” Along with his shadow, he has lost the ability to remember anything from his past or to form new memories. Put in a slightly different way, he is no longer a being in “time,” divided into past, present, and future, but of Time, that unified eternity in which past and future are bound up in an endless present. Saeki, on the other hand, having once entered the “other world” as a teenager in the mid-1960s, appears to have returned without her complete physical self. Today she has the appearance of a woman in her midforties, but she is, almost literally, a mere shadow of herself with nothing but memories to sustain her. Much like Cinnamon, she spends her time writing memories in a notebook.

Owing in part to his liberation from the snares of the human construct of time, like Yuki in Dance Dance Dance, Nakata is able to sense when certain things are going to happen. And yet, again like Yuki, he cannot be certain whether he is merely seeing what will happen or is actually making it happen. Following his murder of the spirit known as “Johnny Walker,” Nakata visits the nearest police box and confesses what he has done, but he is taken for a senile old man and told to go home. As he prepares to leave, Nakata helpfully suggests to the officer that he bring along an umbrella should he be on duty the next evening, even if the sky is clear, because “‘fish will fall from the sky like rain. A lot of fish. Probably sardines, though there may be a few mackerel mixed in among them.’”33 The following day, as he predicted, a great plague of fish rains down upon that section of Tokyo. Somewhat later, at a rest area on the way to Shikoku, Nakata observes a man being beaten to death by a biker gang in a parking lot. As when he witnessed Johnny Walker’s cruelty toward the neighborhood cats, Nakata’s inner self reacts to this brazen violence and rises to the surface of his consciousness, incensed:

Nakata closed his eyes. Something in his body was quietly boiling over, and he was powerless to hold it back. He felt faintly nauseated. . . . Nakata looked up at the sky, then slowly opened his umbrella above his head. Then, carefully, he took several steps backward. . . . At first it was just a few spatters, but soon the numbers swelled and it became a downpour. They were pitch-black and about an inch long. Beneath the lights of the parking lot it looked fascinating, like black snow. This unlucky snow stuck where it landed on the men’s shoulders, arms, and necks. They tried to pull them off, but this was not easily done.

“Leeches,” someone said. (1:332–33)

Does Nakata open his umbrella because it is about to rain leeches, or does it rain leeches because Nakata opens his umbrella? Even Nakata appears uncertain. Later in the novel he confides to Hoshino that he is afraid of being used for some terrible evil: “‘Suppose, for instance, that what falls from the sky next time is ten thousand knives, or a huge bomb, or poison gas? What would Nakata do then?’” (2:140). The truth is that Nakata, by his own admission, is an “empty shell”; we might say he is a mere vessel through which ideas—words—pass at the whim of others, and it is this, rather than any willpower of his own, that brings these new realities into being. He has never truly been in control of his life or of the things that happen in this world through him.

It is, instead, Saeki who represents the more active aspect of the two characters, for in contrast to Nakata’s “pure flesh” existence, Saeki is something closer to “pure thought,” or “pure spirit.” Like all Murakami characters—like the “poor aunt”—she has a corporeal form but one that can change; her true existence is bound up in the pages of manuscript paper on which she scribbles, virtually nonstop, with her fountain pen. In response to Nakata’s admission, late in the book, that he understands nothing but the present, Saeki declares to him that she is the opposite, that “‘I haven’t had anyone I could call a friend for a very long time . . . except for my memories’” (2:286–87).

But what exactly has Saeki been writing on her manuscript paper, so much that it fills many large file folders? “‘Since returning to live in this town, I have been sitting at this desk, writing this manuscript,’” she explains to Nakata. “‘It is a record of the life I have followed’” (2:290). Her final request to Nakata, before he touches her hand and sends her “over there” for good, is that he burn the entire manuscript, so that not a single fragment remains. This collection of manuscript pages thus stands in for the physical remains of Saeki; its burning will be her cremation.

Though he is unable to read or write himself, Nakata intuitively grasps the importance of both, for as Saeki tries to explain to him, the process of writing is synonymous with the act of living, of existing meaningfully, something about which Nakata has had no firsthand knowledge since his childhood:

“It is a very important thing, the act of writing, isn’t it?” Nakata asked her.

“Yes. That’s right. It is the act of writing that is so very important. There is nothing meaningful in what has been written, in the result itself.”

“Nakata cannot read or write, so I cannot leave any records behind,” said Mr. Nakata. “Nakata is just like a cat.” (2:292–93)

Stated another way, words—spoken or written—create a new reality for themselves. The act of writing, rather than what is written, is important because through this means we create a new, often tangible, reality. And Saeki is correct in stating that what is written is meaningless, but fails to add, “until it is read by another.” It is the acknowledgment of another that brings the reality of all words to fruition. For Saeki, however, the only person she might wish to read her words is long gone from this world, so she directs Nakata to destroy them.

The most important reality generated through words in this novel, of course, occurs for the title character, Tamura Kafka himself, whose solution to the Oedipal prophesy/curse that governs his life is to create the reality he desires by fulfilling every last detail of that prophesy as it was spoken by his father. In so doing, as we shall see later, Kafka uses his oracle to construct a world in which he regains not only his mother and sister but a renewed (and for him, more acceptable) sense of identity.

A Question of Subjectivity

As we have noted in the case of Nakata, who struggles to cope with the responsibility of this power he possesses to create realities, yet whose control appears to rest in the hands of others, the issue of who narrates—that is, for us, who creates the world—comes more into play in these later Murakami texts. This becomes an issue in the short story “Hibi idō suru jinzō no katachi o shita ishi” (2005; translated as “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day”), which appears as part of the collection Tōkyō kitanshū (2005; Strange tales of Tokyo). In “The Kidney-Shaped Stone,” a young writer named Junpei has a brief romantic relationship with a mysterious woman named Kirie. Here, as in Kafka on the Shore, Junpei’s father has burdened him with a haunting prophesy: in his entire life he will meet exactly three women, neither more nor less, who will be important to him. This pronouncement, however, while lurking all the while at the back of Junpei’s mind, proves to be less central to the story than the actual relationship between Junpei and Kirie, who maintains a playful but determined sense of mystery about herself. In response to Junpei’s repeated queries about what she does for a living, she invites him to guess—but in the end she never reveals the answer. From her side, rather unfairly given her own reticence, she demands that Junpei reveal something that is, for him, even more personal: the plot of the story he is currently writing. For Junpei this is a serious thing, the violation of a strict personal rule, but his reluctance to comply is more than a writer’s quirk; rather, it lies in his recognition of the power of words and the potential risk that attends relinquishment of that power:

He made it a rule never to tell anyone the contents of stories he was still writing. It would be like a jinx. The moment the words left his mouth, a certain something would vanish like the morning dew. Subtle nuances would become superficial scenes. Secrets would no longer be secrets.34

The Chinese have a saying: When once a single word escapes, four horses cannot draw it in (Yi hua ji chu, si ma nan zhui). It reminds us that something said cannot be unsaid, and by extension, when once a reality is created, it cannot be uncreated. For Junpei, the risk is that a thought, an idea, once spoken aloud, becomes something real, and when this happens, that something will cease to be within the speaker’s (or writer’s) power to control but will instead belong to the public at large. In the end Junpei does tell Kirie the basic plot of his story, up to the point where he has stopped writing. His story began life as a psychological thriller about a female doctor who brings a kidney-shaped stone back from vacation, only to find that it changes positions in her office every night when she is away. Once Kirie has heard this much, however, she comments to Junpei that the woman is perhaps not being tricked—either by a malicious prankster or even her own psyche—but rather that the stone possesses a will of its own. She envisions the stone to possess a divine force, for it is part of the natural world, like the wind. “‘The wind, for instance, has its own will. Normally we live our lives without noticing it. But then, one day, we are made aware of it. The wind purposely envelops you, shakes you. The wind knows everything that’s inside you. And not only the wind. All things. Stones, too.’”35

As these words take root in Junpei’s mind, his story is inexorably changed into one of fantasy, and he does indeed lose control of it. “As he wrote the short story, Junpei thought about Kirie. She (or something inside of her) seemed to be pushing the story forward.”36 As Junpei writes, his drive to complete the story reinvigorated, he gives himself wholly over to the narrative, in which his doctor-protagonist at once abandons her lover. Junpei intends to call Kirie after the story is completed, but when he does, rather predictably in Murakami fiction, he finds her number has been disconnected. Like other Murakami characters of this type, Kirie is both a part of Junpei’s own inner mind—a projection from the dark recesses of his imagination—and also part of the actual, physical world. Her purpose is to turn the story down a new path, to create a scenario in which the doctor casts aside her lover, just as Kirie will now cast aside Junpei. In this scenario, Kirie is able to “take control of the story” from within Junpei’s mind, but she is also part of that narrative—may, in fact, be its protagonist.

In this sense, Kirie is rather like “the Twins” from Pinball, 1973, who emerge from the protagonist’s mind to help him deal with the loss of his girlfriend, or like “the Sheepman” in A Wild Sheep Chase, who assists him in locating his missing best friend “Rat” in that novel. It is unclear whether Kirie has, like the Twins and Sheepman, gone back “over there” once her task is completed, however; Junpei’s next encounter with her comes when he chances to hear her being interviewed on the radio and discovers she is a high-wire walker, hence her intimate knowledge about wind. But on a deeper level, Kirie’s sense of oneness with the wind as she walks high wires strung between skyscrapers comes into better focus when we reflect that she belongs “over there,” where the wind (as expression of the inner mind) originates, and is herself thus a pure embodiment of language, with no more permanent corporeal existence than the words themselves, despite the powerful effects she generates. Perhaps this is why Murakami names this character “Kirie,” a homonym for the Greek kyrie (κύριε, “lord”); for if words are ultimate constitutive building blocks of reality, then Kirie proves herself not only to be constituted by words but to be a master of them as well. In this sense, we might also say that she resembles the inner mind, constituted of language, yet also using language to constitute and project its own realities.

“The Kidney-Shaped Stone” is not the only story in the Tōkyō kitanshū collection to suggest a direct connection between tangible reality and words. In “Shinagawa saru” (2005; translated as “A Shinagawa Monkey”) we encounter the peculiar tale of Andō Mizuki, who has the misfortune of suddenly forgetting her own name at odd moments. She can remember everything else, including lists of telephone numbers, important dates, addresses, anything, but not her own name. The root of her problem, it turns out, goes back to her school days, many years earlier, when a schoolmate, Matsunaka Yūko, entrusted her school name tag to Mizuki, asking her to prevent its being stolen by a monkey while she went away for the weekend. While Mizuki takes this for a joke, she fails to question it further even when the school learns some days later that Matsunaka Yūko committed suicide over that weekend.

Yūko’s plea to protect her name tag comes back into play in the present time when a local mental health counselor, who has been helping Mizuki deal with her memory problem, informs her that she keeps forgetting her name because her own name tag has been stolen from her bedroom by a monkey. Upon restoration of the name tag, Andō Mizuki’s problem disappears. While the monkey (who can speak) never fully explains why he steals people’s names, he insists that the act benefits its victims in some way. “‘I steal people’s names, it is true. But when I do, I can also carry off a certain amount of their incidental negativity. . . . Had I been successful in stealing Matsunaka Yūko’s name, I might have been able to carry away with it some of the darkness that lurked in her heart.’”37 Here we see the beginnings of a new perspective on names in Murakami fiction, namely, that they now form a direct connection with something more essential in the subject’s identity. No longer merely an arbitrary signifier by which to delineate one person from another, the name becomes a distinct entity in itself, a word that somehow contains the essence of that person. Murakami returns to this theme briefly in his most recent novel, Shikisai o motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, kare no junrei no toshi (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage), when his protagonist Tazaki Tsukuru reflects that he was nothing before being named:

In any case, that was how he had become the individual person known as “Tazaki Tsukuru.” Until that point he had been nothing, a nameless little bit of predawn chaos. Barely capable of breathing in the blackness, a wailing, not-quite-three-kilogram lump of pink flesh. First a name had been given. Then came consciousness and memories, and finally his self was formed. The name was the starting point for everything else.38

That a single word can contain the essence of the individual, or even the soul, is a provocative idea, for, if true, it ought to follow that one could evoke the totality of the individual merely by uttering his or her name. But this also highlights the vulnerability of the individual soul; if the name has a physical presence, then—like the soul taken from Kanō Creta—it is vulnerable to corruption at the hands of those who would abuse it. This is essentially what happens in “A Shinagawa Monkey,” and while we can never know whether the monkey truly was attempting to help Andō Mizuki, the fact that the physical presence of her name is something that can be lost or stolen (a literal case of identity theft) is extremely unnerving and once again demonstrates the awesome power of words.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage will receive full attention in the final chapter of this volume. Here I would like to turn to its predecessor, 1Q84, to discuss how its construction of a fictional world in a work of literature is projected out into the actual world as a new reality.

A Whole New World: 1Q84

At just under 1,700 pages in three volumes, 1Q84 is Murakami’s longest novel to date, though by no means his most complex. The work may be summed up quite simply as the story of two soul mates, Kawana Tengo and Aomame Masami, who were separated at the age of ten, and the process by which they are reunited as adults some twenty-five years later. Tengo and Aomame are in certain ways polar opposites to one another: as a child Tengo was popular, got excellent grades, and was widely recognized as a math prodigy; today he is a literary stylist par excellence, as well as a celebrated math teacher at a cram school. By contrast, Aomame was a virtual outcast as a child, owing to her parents’ activities (as well as her own) as Jehovah’s Witnesses; today she works as a martial arts instructor at a fitness club, moonlighting as a uniquely talented assassin, targeting men who abuse their wives and children.

Despite the difference in their status at school, however, Tengo and Aomame shared one significant characteristic as children that might be termed traumatic: both were raised by zealots, humiliated by their parents’ adherence to beliefs they themselves could not share and that were not accepted by the communities around them. Aomame’s case is not surprising; as a child she was taken with her mother “witnessing,” visiting strangers’ homes in the hopes of converting them to Christianity, an activity she found deeply embarrassing. Tengo, for his part, was raised by a man who collected monthly dues for NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, or Japan Broadcasting Corporation), Japan’s government-sponsored broadcasting service, which since the advent of television in Japan in the late 1950s has collected “voluntary” monthly dues from every household in Japan that possesses a television set. In an age when television is broadcast into homes whether they pay dues or not, and in which many channels besides NHK are now available, not a few Japanese have come to wonder why such dues are still required, and some avoid paying the dues altogether, recognizing that NHK has no special power to force compliance. NHK collectors have therefore become a widely disliked symbol of unwanted government intrusion into people’s lives. To make matters worse for Tengo, his father insisted on bringing him along on collection rounds on Sundays. Occasionally Tengo and Aomame would pass one another on the street during these Sunday ordeals, so each developed an unspoken understanding of the other’s sense of humiliation and isolation.

The two never really got to know one another as children, however. Their interaction was limited to just two face-to-face encounters. The first occurs after Aomame has been shunned by the other children in their science class; “they referred to her as ‘The One,’ not so much to bully or humiliate her, but rather to indicate that she simply ‘did not exist.’”39 Tengo comes to her rescue and becomes her lab partner, carefully explaining the experiment they are doing until she understands it. “They had been in the same class for two years, and this was the first time (as well as the last) that Tengo had spoken to her. . . . As a result of having stood up for ‘The One,’ however, without any words being spoken, his status in the class dropped a step. In their minds, his association with the girl had caused some of her pollution to be transferred to him” (1:274).

Their second meeting is more significant. One day, after school has finished, Tengo and Aomame find themselves momentarily alone in their classroom. Without a word Aomame takes Tengo’s hand and holds it tightly. At that moment, it seems that something crucial—but not as yet understood—is passed between them. This is one of the central moments in the novel:

There was no one else there. As if she had made up her mind to do it, she quickly crossed the classroom, stood beside him. Then, without hesitation, she grasped Tengo’s hand, and looked up into his face (he was about four inches taller than her). Tengo, surprised, looked back down at her face. Their eyes met. Tengo could see in her eyes a transparent depth he had never seen before. The girl held his hand tightly in hers for a long time. Strongly, without slackening her grip even for a moment. Then she suddenly let go his hand, and with the hem of her skirt flaring, she trotted out of the classroom. (1:275)

Precisely what was exchanged between the two of them is impossible to say, but only a few chapters later, the present-day Aomame tells a friend about him, that he is the only person in the world she loves and that she will wait—for the rest of her life if necessary—for fate to bring him back to her. She will not, however, seek him out herself. “‘What I want is to run into him by chance one day,’” she tells her friend. “‘For instance, we pass each other on the street, or happen to be riding on the same bus’” (1:340).

The novel begins with Aomame on her way to a kill, getting caught in a traffic jam on one of Tokyo’s elevated highways and leaving her taxi to climb down the emergency ladder to the ground level below, from where she plans to take a train the rest of the way to her destination. When she climbs down the ladder, however, she unwittingly leaves the familiar world of “1984” behind her and enters the almost—but only almost—identical world of “1Q84.” In this peculiar realm, more of a “time slip” than another physical dimension, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police have exchanged revolvers for automatic weapons, the world is invaded by metaphysical creatures known as “the Little People,” thunder booms without lightning, and most prominently, there are two moons in the evening sky—one normal, the other smaller, “slightly misshapen, with a greenish color, as though growing with a thin layer of moss” (1:351).

Various conflicting elements—and perhaps fate itself—combine to bring Tengo and Aomame onto a collision course with one another in this strange realm. A seventeen-year-old girl known as “Fukaeri” (short for Fukada Eriko), who has run away from a religious cult headed by her father, known to all simply as “the Leader,” dictates the story of her adventures to another, who writes the story down and submits it to a literary magazine, for which Tengo works part-time as a copy editor. At his editor’s suggestion, Tengo rewrites the story, and they publish it in Fukaeri’s name, winning for her a prize for new writers of literature and creating a major best seller. Meanwhile, Aomame’s attention is drawn to the cult because “the Leader” is rumored to be sexually abusing the preteen miko (something like vestal virgins) in his cult. She is therefore dispatched by her controller, an old woman who arranges her targets for her, to “convey him to the other world” (2:17), as they euphemize their assassinations.

Aomame is initially not aware that Tengo is in contact with the Leader’s daughter, nor does she realize that her actions will eventually lead her to him. Rather, through a lengthy conversation with the Leader, just before she ends his life, she learns that the cult’s grounding in the spiritual world is not feigned and that the Leader himself truly is a holy man, whose function is to hear the voices of the Little People, forest spirits who maintain balance and order in the world. For Fukaeri, the Little People represent the danger of unwanted control in human affairs, and to escape their influence, she flees the cult and tells her story to another. The Leader, feeling similarly used by the Little People and suffering from considerable pain, actually welcomes the death Aomame has come to deliver, but upon hearing his story, Aomame is no longer inclined to complete her mission. In the end she does so only after the Leader assures her that it is the only way to save Tengo from the wrath of the Little People, even though he warns her that Tengo’s salvation will likely require her to sacrifice her own life as well.

Following completion of her mission, Aomame’s original plan is to alter her appearance through plastic surgery and flee the city, but spotting Tengo at a park visible from the safe house where she hides from the cult’s vengeance and also realizing that she is mysteriously with child, she abandons this plan, electing instead for a chance to meet him again and perhaps rescue him—along with herself and her unborn child—from the world of “1Q84.”

This is the basic plot of 1Q84, whose mythological and journalistic aspects will be explored in greater detail later in this volume. Here we will examine the function of Fukaeri and Tengo’s narrative, Kūki sanagi (“air cocoon,” rendered as Air Chrysalis in the English translation of the novel), and how it functions to create a new reality not only for Aomame but for all the characters in the story. This embedded narrative recounts Fukaeri’s experiences within the compound of her father’s cult, centered chiefly upon the Little People, whom I have described as forest spirits but Murakami describes as “‘something like messengers from a primitive, underground world,’”40 and how those Little People teach Fukaeri to spin a cocoon out of the air. When the cocoon is finished, it contains a perfect replica of Fukaeri, permitting one of them to remain behind in the cult’s compound while the other makes her escape.41 Fleeing to the home of a family friend, Fukaeri, who suffers from severe dyslexia and has great difficulty writing, relates her story verbally to her benefactor’s daughter, who then writes it out and submits it to the magazine edited by Tengo’s boss, Komatsu, who then passes it along to Tengo for rewriting.

But how, precisely, does this embedded narrative come to be the reality of “1Q84”? This is a complex question and returns us to Murakami’s notion of the “internal narrative.” Tengo, who is a brilliant literary stylist, struggles at the beginning of the text to produce a surpassing novel of his own because, as his editor Komatsu notes, he has not yet managed to access his inner narrative. “‘What you need to be writing is inside you somewhere for sure, but it’s like a scared little animal that’s burrowed its way into a deep hole and won’t come out’” (1:49). As Tengo recrafts Fukaeri’s narrative in his own words and style, however, his own internal story awakens as well. “As Tengo wrote he sensed the birth of a new wellspring inside himself. No great rush of water bursting forth from this spring, it was rather like a tiny trickle of water coming out of a rocky fissure. The volume of water was minute, yet welled up ceaselessly, droplet by droplet” (1:354).

From this perspective 1Q84 may be seen as a novel about writers and writing, and it is in this context that the obvious and oft-noted references to (if not actual parody of) George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) come into play. Late in the first volume, Tengo attempts to explain the basic plot of the Orwell novel to Fukaeri, focusing particularly on the function of protagonist Winston Smith’s work at the “Ministry of Truth,” which is revising history to match the current political stance of the government. His description of Smith’s task—which is undeniably and uncomfortably similar to revisionist efforts in Japan even now to obscure or obliterate aspects of Japan’s history from 1931 to 1945—speaks volumes about the power of language to corrupt and confuse reality, ultimately to construct new ones. “‘When a new history is created, the old history is totally thrown out,’” Tengo tells her, “‘and when history is changed too often, gradually no one knows anymore what the truth was. . . . Our memories are made up of individual memories and collective memories. . . . History is our collective memories. When those are threatened—even rewritten—we lose the ability to maintain our true selves’” (1:459–60). This process can be applied to the individual as well, and in fact it is precisely what is happening to Aomame, who begins to doubt her memory and her identity as she realizes that the world of “1Q84” is altered from “1984” in minute but noticeable ways. Her first inkling is when she notices the Tokyo Metropolitan Police carrying automatic weapons rather than the revolvers to which she is accustomed. Asking someone when this change occurred, she is told it was following the shoot-out at Lake Motosu—an incident she does not remember despite being an avid newspaper reader. Exploring the incident through newspaper archives, she begins to wonder how she could have missed this major event that led to the shootings of several police officers and a major change in their sidearm policy.

In time, Tengo finds himself enveloped by the world of “1Q84” as well, a fact as difficult for him to accept as it was for Aomame. He is particularly troubled by the fact that this new world is virtually identical to the setting of the story he has created with Fukaeri. “Am I in the world of the novel?” he asks himself when, looking up, he sees two moons hanging in the sky, precisely as he described them in the final manuscript (2:425–26). In time Tengo realizes, as does the reader, that he has internalized that world, so that when he writes—and later, even when he is not writing—he has difficulty keeping track of the various realities that swirl in and out of his mind, until the external, “objective” world has all but ceased to exist, or more accurately, has joined together with all other language-based worlds:

He wrote a story in which there were two moons. A world that contained the Little People and the air cocoon. These were things he had borrowed from Fukaeri’s Kūki sanagi, but by now they had become wholly his own. While he faced his manuscript, his consciousness lived in that world. Even when he had put his pen down and left his desk, his consciousness sometimes remained there. At such times he had the peculiar feeling his flesh and consciousness were separated, and he could no longer distinguish where the real world ended and the imaginary world began. (3:57–58)

In a sense, Tengo expresses many of Murakami’s own statements on the act of writing, the dilemmas faced by the imaginative novelist who grapples with a vast array of worlds, all fictitious, but none necessarily more so than the “actual” world. One hears in the passage above echoes of the author’s metaphor of descending into the depths of the cellar beneath the “two-story house” of the imagination.

Through the simple fact of being declared, then, both in the spoken and written word, the world of “1Q84,” with its two moons, Little People, and automatic weapon–carrying police officers, has come into actual existence; it is unquestionably constructed from words, from language, yet it has also taken on actual, concrete existence—others inhabit it, and those who are capable of doing so remark on its peculiarity.

Interestingly, though privileging neither, Murakami makes a clear distinction in this text between spoken and written language, with Fukaeri and Tengo representing each of these respectively. The new world initially comes into being when Fukaeri speaks it to her adoptive sister, but its potential is not fully realized until Tengo has interpreted it and (re)produced it through the simultaneous act of reading and writing, lending it coherence and order. There is an underlying sense of the sacred in this joint act of creation, for Tengo and Fukaeri have assumed the roles and responsibilities of creator deities, and yet, as even the gods eventually discover, no reality lasts forever; whether grounded in the spoken or the written word, every reality is ultimately revealed to be shifty and impermanent.

And so, we might ask, is there a moral to this story? What can we learn from these texts? First and foremost, we may conclude that words are fallible, not to be trusted, but in the end words are all we have, and it is with words that we must construct and interact with the world’s various realities. For Murakami, these realities are best understood as “narratives,” but we might as easily call them ideologies; and like most human-made constructs—insofar as all ideologies are ultimately revealed to be constructs—such “narratives” prove vexingly unstable entities, despite their apparent solidity as they grow more widespread through the groups, cults, or even societies that generate them, and despite the evident determination of those societies to uphold and protect those narratives (think, for instance, of America and “democracy”). Furthermore, Murakami’s mistrust of language-bound narratives is not a new or recent development; indeed, it has been more than half a century since Roland Barthes constructed his theory of what he called “myth,” describing essentially the same thing as we mean here by “narrative.” Barthes argues that modern, industrialized societies are governed in large part by such myths, constructed by each society’s political arm and disseminated via the mass media (the political arm’s propaganda machine) as commonsensical, therefore as absolutely real. For Barthes, myth is always political, always constructed, and at the same time always constitutive of our view of the world, and yet myth nearly always seeks to masquerade as something timeless, eternal, and “natural.” He says:

Semiology has taught us that myth has the task of giving a historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. . . . The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with Nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a hemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short, a perceptible absence.42

What this finally comes to mean, in slightly less elaborate terms, is (a) that historical discourse, like political discourse (and, as we shall see, journalistic discourse) is a series of decisions, of revisions, many or most of which are calculated to certain ends, while others are accidental; and (b) that myth treats these choices as inevitable, presents such discourses as faits accompli, thereby lending an apparently— but falsely—natural (predestined) grounding to choices that, ultimately, could have turned out otherwise. In a sense, this is also what Jacques Derrida sought to do through deconstruction: to challenge the center, or the grounding, of those “truths that we hold to be self-evident,” as the expression goes, to expose human constructs as constructs, and to “de-construct” (emphasis on the first syllable of construct, as a noun) ourselves, that is, rid ourselves of the burden of such assumptions. In exposing those “self-evident” groundings as fallacies, we encounter both the curse and the blessing of the shifting center: on the one hand we realize that all reality becomes somehow less reliable in the process, mutable as the center shifts, now this way, now that; on the other, we are liberated from constructs masquerading as absolute truths. Thus is all language politicized.43

Tamura Kafka’s friend and protector Ōshima recognizes the risks of such constructs-turned-absolutes in Kafka on the Shore when dealing with activists who spout slogans of which they have no clear understanding, noting that “‘theses that take on lives of their own, empty slogans, usurped ideals, inflexible systems, these are what I fear most. . . . Narrow-mindedness and intolerance born of lack of imagination are like parasites; they change hosts and forms, but they go on living’” (1:314). Inevitably the question arises as to how this process occurs, who is empowered to transform these essentially subjective matters—insofar as all linguistic decisions are ultimately subjective—into apparently objective, “natural,” inevitable, commonsensical reality. This only becomes a major dilemma, presumably, when the inner narrative of the individual is threatened or replaced by that of the group, as noted in the introduction; at such times, individual subjectivity is compromised in favor of social homogenization.

The tension between individual subjectivity and the group has been a central conflict in Murakami’s fiction from early on. Certainly from A Wild Sheep Chase the subversion or appropriation of the individual subject and his/her internal narrative has been a prominent theme. Initially this appropriation was attributed to the postwar Japanese State, which offered in return a comfortable life of affluence and a state-sponsored ideology of economic participation. The State, represented in highly concentrated, yet thoroughly abstract images and characters (the semimythical sheep in A Wild Sheep Chase, the System in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Wataya Noboru in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and so on), appeared to hold insurmountable power, a mixture of political, commercial, and media muscle, and yet, somehow, Murakami’s loner protagonists, representing the voice of the nonconformist, the determined individualist, battled with considerable success against these superpowers. This is what Murakami meant when he spoke in Jerusalem about eggs hitting a great and powerful wall. His protagonists have always been the eggs, and somehow or other, even after shattering, they show that the egg can and does continue its struggle. Indeed, some of them, as will be seen, grow even stronger once having broken out of their shells. . . .

All of this serves to remind us that if language is indeed the progenitor of reality, then he who speaks becomes ultimately powerful—like a god, as Murakami once put it—and so the stakes are rather high in the question of “who speaks.” If, as I contend, our internal “narrative” is constituted by language, and if our identity is grounded in that narrative, then the power to speak amounts to the power to construct (or, more importantly, to reconstruct) identity itself, the very right to exist. And if we expand this argument to include the collective narrative to which all humanity connects, from which all humanity derives its understanding of what it actually means to exist as an individual and a human being (our place determined in the context of all others), then the stakes are even more awesome.

Such questions continue to be played out in more recent works, like Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84, as well, and yet in these more recent works a new model emerges, a more aggressive strategy of resistance to the encroachment of ready-made group narratives that seek to destroy and replace the individual narrative. Not surprisingly, this signals the advent of a new and improved Murakami protagonist. Whereas characters like Rat and Naoko would simply lie down and die, and the old “Boku” characters would leave the field of conflict depressed and apathetic, the new Murakami hero will not go quietly, nor will he or she accept defeat. Tamura Kafka’s reconstruction of his identity is undertaken through the confrontation with and proactive manipulation of his internal narrative, rather than through the denial or erasure of it. Aomame, allied with Tengo and Fukaeri, will battle fiercely to resist the efforts of the Little People to control the narrative world Tengo and Fukaeri have created, and as the parodic nature of the work’s title suggests, at stake is the past, present, and future “history” of humanity itself.

If it is true, as I have argued in this chapter, that all reality is perception and that all perception is based upon language, culture, and experience—individual and collective—then we are naturally led to consider how language and culture play a role in other aspects of human development and social structure. The chapters that follow will explore the nature, structure, and actual landscape of what I shall term the metaphysical realm, an admittedly general and unsatisfying term, but used because that realm seems to embody so many things at once: the individual unconscious, the collective unconscious, the mystical “world soul,” and even the mythological land of the dead.