3

Gods and Oracles, Fate and Mythology

I’m not just some passive creature caught up in someone else’s plans, brought here regardless of my own mind . . . being here is something I chose myself. My presence here is an act of my subjective will.

—Murakami Haruki, 1Q84, book 3

In chapter 1 we explored how language constitutes realities, as well as the rather vexing question of “who speaks,” that is, who rightfully wields the power of creation through language. Murakami once said that he feels “like a god” when he writes, and the comparison is an apt one, for the creation of worlds is often regarded as the work of divinity. It is time, therefore, that we confront the appearance of the gods in Murakami’s fictional universe, why they have appeared, and what they mean to his overall agenda as a writer.

We might begin by imagining how early humans perceived their environment. It would not be unreasonable to suppose, for instance, that early humans would have looked upon awesome natural phenomena with a certain wonder. They may have wondered why the sun rose and set, why the moon went through phases, why the sky rumbled and flashed in a storm, why the tides came in and went out, why the seasons changed, why earthquakes and typhoons occurred, and so on.

“Man is always found in company with some god,” writes Thomas Bulfinch in the opening lines to his seminal nineteenth-century description of myth, and “left to himself, he constructs one of his own.”1 Let us, then, consider the following scenario. In response to natural phenomena, perhaps to render them comprehensible to our children, we created stories—myths—to explain them. As characters for those myths, we created gods, spirits, fairies, supernatural beings who could take responsibility for what happened in nature. In this manner, we created the gods.

Over time the gods grew to be more than mere embodiments of natural events as they occurred; they were also given the power to determine future events. We hungered for some clearer sense of why we were here, of what the gods had in store for us, so we began to seek them out in an effort to divine their will. Through incantations, divination, prayer, fortune-telling, “prophetic” dreams, and oracles, the gods “spoke” to us, and in so doing, created for us not only what is but what shall be. Thus fate was born.

But somewhere along the way, we forgot that it was we who had created the gods, not the other way around. In our desire to understand and explain the world around us, we relinquished the power to speak in our own right and became prisoners of fate.

The ways of the gods we created are strange, mysterious, and their communications with us are just as mysterious. How can we understand their riddles? We seek the help of wise persons, skilled in interpreting (writing) the messages of the gods in ways that the rest of us can understand. In this manner we recovered some small part of our power to speak, but only some of us—our priests, shamans, vestal virgins, priestesses of Isis—received, interpreted, and codified the messages of the gods, working them into narratives by which we all were governed, passing them on from one generation to the next. Thus the words of the gods became part of a tradition, and the gods gained even more prestige.

And we can no longer recall that we created the gods. We “remember,” instead, that they created us.

From this point forward we lost much, if not all, of our power to determine our own future, to create our own world. More accurately, the worlds we spoke and created through our words were required to agree with those of our codified divine messages, or they had to be declared false. But still we maintained—and maintain now—vestigial ties with that earlier, more basic sensation felt by the first person, who looked out of the first cave, saw the first sunrise, and called it “god.” And from this we understand more than we realize.

In the previous chapter we examined this sensation, this initial act of creation and all acts of creation since, in terms of what Jung called the collective unconscious, mystics call the world soul, and I have been calling “the Narrative.” As we move further into our discussion of this realm, particularly as it relates to Murakami’s more recent works, we find two interesting things taking place: first, that the gods have been allowed back into the game; and second, that a new struggle has developed as a result, one between the traditional (collective) narratives of our fathers and the (individual) narratives of their children. This is the true advent of the mythological in Murakami Haruki fiction.

This is not to suggest that mythological motifs have been absent in Murakami’s writing until now. What was the Sheep in A Wild Sheep Chase, after all, if not a figure of mythology, yet one more attempt to explain the unexplainable? One might even argue that the nostalgic images I have posited have quasi-mythological overtones.

But these stop at the water’s edge, at the “quasi-” stage, for mythology, in my view, requires more than for something simply to be metaphysical; it must tap into something more common to all humanity, must be connected, on some level, to our hopes, our desires, and of course our dreads. Perhaps most important of all, mythology begins and ends with our need to explain the world, how it came to be as it is, and what our own role ought to be vis-à-vis those who made it and us (even if that creator happens to be us). Mythology is an expression of our will to find and commune with the gods themselves.

To speak of gods and their will is to enter deep waters. Every culture has created its own gods, and they vary widely. What do our gods want from us and for us? Is it enough to say that the Greco-Roman gods wanted the love and respect of their people, that Aztec gods required blood sacrifice, that the god of Moses demanded total obedience and an exclusivity clause? There is little point in such wild overgeneralizations, because most gods are a lot like humans: they want something different and have a way of changing their minds without warning. This is because the will/desire of the gods reflects the culture that created them, and as cultures change, so does the divine “agenda.” Just look at what happened to the god of Moses when Jesus came along. . . .

And what of the Japanese gods? Can the native spirits of the Shintō tradition, commonly called kami, be termed gods at all? This depends on our definition of “god,” of course, but we generally envision an immortal being with considerable power. Amaterasu, the sun goddess, and her brother Susano-ō, god of the moon and sea, would certainly qualify, but does one apply the same measuring stick to the inari spirits who look after rice harvests, or local village shrine deities, or even the spirits who belong to shrines no larger than birdhouses? Approaching the question from this angle is likely to result only in our becoming bogged down in hopeless (and pointless) speculation about how Japanese deities compare, both to one another and to other deities from mythologies around the world. Let us instead simply note that like the human communities they represent, Japanese deities vary widely in size, power, and prestige, as well as the kinds of human affairs in which they interest themselves.

For purposes of the discussion that follows, we will find it more useful to examine Japanese deities in terms of how they function within the human communities to which they are connected, from which, after all, they sprang in the first place. This connection is often a highly proprietary one, for local communities and groups in Japan—even some families—have their own related deities, which are supposed to look after them, and vice versa. A spirit who belongs to a particular village is considered a member of the community and will be honored as such. What Japanese gods want, seen from this point of view, is simply to be included, honored, and welcomed into all aspects of community life. This is the purpose of the matsuri, festivals that are held regularly in every community, no matter how small; matsuri comes from an old word meaning “to worship,” and the deafening, joyous music and copious consumption of saké at these events are intended to bring participants and their local deities together in one riotous celebration of life. Traditionally, indigenous Japanese religious practices centered upon fertility and its requirements (much as those of the ancient Hebrews did), and the favor of the gods was—and still is—thus sought for bountiful harvests, healthy birthrates, and, more recently, financial prosperity.2

It is just these sorts of deities—let us term them spirits—who now make an appearance in the literary landscape of Murakami. Their infiltration begins subtly, with a “son of the gods” dancing in tune with the universe in “Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru” (2000; All children of the gods dance), develops into the slightly absurd characters of Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders in Kafka on the Shore, and finally into the Little People in 1Q84. In each of these works the reader is compelled to wonder, what do these spirits really want? And so, like the various heroes and heroines who seek to enact the will of the gods, the reader, too, must listen to the voices, hear the wind sing, in hopes of deciphering the oracle. At the same time, however, like these heroes, we must protect ourselves against being consumed by those oracles, the narratives of the gods—and their interpretations by humans—lest we lose our grasp on the right to tell our own stories.

Mythology’s Greatest Hits

To say that an author’s works contain mythological elements is, in most cases, no great statement at all, since nearly every work of fiction, drama, or poetry—including the most elementally formulaic types—echo our mythological past. Myth is, after all, an expression of our deepest instinctive fears—cold, loneliness, hunger and thirst, disease, darkness, death—and our desires—warmth, brightness, satisfaction, good health, fertility, immortality. Our myths put us in touch with these basic instincts, show us how to avoid (or at least put off) the former and accomplish the latter. Our greatest fear is, perhaps, death, which we associate with what is dark and unknown, and so we construct myths in which we travel into the darkness and mystery of the world of the dead, to Hades, Hell, Yomi-no-kuni, where death is either confronted and reversed (Jesus, Persephone) or accepted and understood as irreversible (Orpheus, Izanagi). Such narratives frequently take their heroes underground, where reign darkness and cold, contrasted with the warm sunlight of the world above. Fear of disease, starvation, and underpopulation have led to myths that enforced taboos against “unclean” foods (Judaism, Hinduism), against contact with putrefied matter and blood (Shintō), against nonprocreational forms of sex (homosexuality, masturbation, bestiality), against incestuous relationships—though chiefly those involving intergenerational partners. The need for obedience to authority has spawned tales of vengeful, jealous deities. We seek our place in the world and universe, and as a result construct and hand down narratives that pit individual desires against the demands of our gods and our society. We seek out a relationship with the gods and create their voices and images, drawing them in our image or from natural places that inspire awe—the horrific bowels of the earth, the stormy depths of its oceans, the freezing peaks of its great mountains.

Of course, every work of fiction that contains a hero, a protagonist who confronts a dilemma, task, or quest, is to a greater or lesser extent grounded in mythological archetypes, and this is naturally true of the works of Murakami as well. But Murakami’s exploitation of the quest structure goes considerably beyond generalizations concerning protagonists who overcome problems to resolve the central conflict in the narrative; they follow, rather, a more recognizable pattern or progression commonly seen in myths and legends from around the world. Joseph Campbell postulates these patterns as specific phases to the archetypal mythological quest, which include the call of the hero to the quest (and his initial reluctance to undertake it), the supernatural assistance he is granted, his journey belowground to battle dark forces (or encounter benevolent ones), his defeat of the enemy, and his restoration of some essential need to his community, whereby, in Campbell’s words, he “brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole. . . . Tribal or local heroes . . . commit their boons to a single folk; universal heroes—Mohammed, Jesus, Gautama Buddha—bring a message for the entire world.”3

The purpose of this chapter, then, is to explore some of the specific mythical antecedents to Murakami’s texts, for by expressing his mythological underpinnings explicitly, Murakami does comment, wittingly or not, on the role of myth in the grand human narrative, what we have been calling the Narrative, that grounds and informs all meaningful human experience. Perhaps because of this, his use of the structures and tropes of myth reveals something about the connectivity of all myth, for Murakami creates in his fictional universe a nexus of mythological expression that both celebrates and obliterates regional distinctions and cultural specificities, mingling in particular elements from classical Greek and ancient Japanese mythology so seamlessly that it becomes at times difficult to see where one tradition ends and another begins. Perhaps it is an inevitable result of our greater global awareness in the face of communications technology that seems constantly to shrink the distances and gaps between geographically separated regions and cultures, but as we grow less culturally distinct, emerging as so-called global citizens in a shrinking world, our mythological roots appear to grow together, intertwined, until we have finally gained access to a global mythological narrative that is capable, simultaneously, of expressing national origins (i.e., Japanese myth) while acknowledging a connection with the rest of the world that begins to reflect “the Narrative” in earnest.4

In addition to its revelations about cultural aspects of myth, however, Murakami’s fiction, almost from the beginning, can and should be read with an eye toward the political underpinnings of mythology, particularly with regard to religion and its role in satisfying the human need for the inner narrative, that is, an ideology or belief system on which to order our individual lives. We note, for instance, that even as we explore the metaphysical realm as a manifestation of the human psyche, the collective unconscious, as we did in the previous chapter, we find also an essentially mystical quality to that realm, one that lies within the purview of spiritualism, if not always religion proper.5 It should come as no surprise that religion—or at least spirituality—has grown considerably more prominent in Murakami’s fiction during the past fifteen years or so, given the greater prominence of organized religion in the public mind-set following the Aum Shinrikyō incident of 1995, and the simultaneous attacks against multiple targets in the United States on September 11, 2001. This is not to suggest that Murakami has jumped onto the bandwagon of demonizing religion in general—particularly Islam—in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, however; quite the contrary, the author has shown restraint and sensitivity in handling religious groups, both in his fiction and nonfiction.

One aspect of this restraint is the lack of specificity that marks his portrayal of religious groups. This presented no particular difficulty when Murakami’s manifestations of the “spiritual” amounted to fantastical elements like magical sheep, talking pinball machines, and clairvoyance. It became trickier in works like “All children of the gods dance,” in which a young man named Yoshiya is told he is the son of God or the gods (the Japanese word kamisama does not distinguish), and in Kafka on the Shore, whose spirits/deities, as we have seen, take the forms of iconic consumer goods. Neither of these last claims to be a god, but in their ability to take on any form they resemble trickster spirits with extraordinary powers and are thus potentially associated with Japan’s native animist tradition of Shintō. “‘I’m currently appearing to you in this temporary human form, but I’m neither a god (kami) nor a buddha,’” the spirit taking the form of Colonel Sanders explains to Hoshino, the young man who looks after Nakata. “‘I’ve never had feelings, so my mind works differently from that of a human.’”6 As beings grounded in the metaphysical, spirits like these transcend both human emotions and also such human constructs as “good” and “evil,” “right” and “wrong.” What does concern them, as we saw in the previous chapter, is maintaining a sense of balance in the universe.

Most recently, the religious cult to which Aomame belongs in 1Q84 is recognizably similar to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, as Jay Rubin has noted,7 and the cult “Sakigake” is strongly reminiscent of the Aum Shinrikyō, one of the so-called new religions, but in neither case does the author come straight out and identify the religious tradition he depicts. One reason for this, I suspect, is that Murakami seeks to portray something more or less universal to all spiritual belief systems, something that reveals, as do myths, that beyond the cultural specificities of each mythological or religious tradition lie commonalities that mark all believers as connected to a universal (metaphysical) whole.

In the pages that follow we will explore some of the mythological aspects of Murakami’s fiction, paying particular attention to the author’s use of recognizable elements from classical Greek mythology but also exploring how he fuses these Western elements—which might be called elemental to the very fabric of Western culture itself—to those of ancient Japanese mythology. The result is a kind of hybrid mythology that contains elements of Eastern and Western spiritual and religious thinking, a nexus of two worlds in which new ideas are hatched concerning traditional taboos and the role of the sacred or spiritual world in everyday life. What emerges from his experiments in this regard is a new model by which the contemporary subject might develop the spiritual resources to encounter, interpret, and develop his or her own inner narrative, one grounded in the realm of the eternal and sacred, capable of responding to the collective human Narrative, and yet able to free the individual from the traditional snares of fate and social convention.

The Mythological Murakami

While the Murakami protagonist’s ongoing battle with an evil presence has been widely noted, it is somewhat surprising that more has not been written on the deeply mythological underpinnings of the author’s work, especially the peculiar affinity he shows for classical Greek mythology. Among those who have taken notice of this aspect of Murakami fiction is Uchida Tatsuru, who discerns “a mythological narrative structure in the Murakami world in which the Murakami heroes, acting as sentinels, do battle against some sort of ‘cosmological evil’ that invades their world.”8 Uchida goes on to note that this structure is present in virtually every Murakami work yet written. Both Rubin and Susan Napier note an Orphean reference; Rubin, writing on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, notes the similarity of Okada Tōru’s forays into the unconscious “other world” to a variety of mythological tales:

He becomes a modern-day Theseus, advancing into the dark convoluted labyrinth of linked computers, guarded by the half-human, half-bull Minotaur named Ushikawa (Bull River). Or he is Orpheus or Japan’s earth-creating god Izanagi, pursuing his dead wife into the depths of the underworld, where she forbids him to gaze upon her physical decay.9

As we have seen in our discussions of the metaphysical realm in the previous chapter, the “underworld” aspects in Murakami’s fictional landscape have been around more or less since the beginning of his career. The image of the well in particular, already discussed as a passageway linking physical and metaphysical worlds, conscious and unconscious, while suspending the temporal and spatial constraints of the physical realm, may be likened to the Delphian oracle, a fissure in the earth through which the gods—Hermes, Apollo—speak to mortal humans, foretelling the future, (partially) revealing the course of fate, guiding and instructing, though always in riddles that require interpretation, a point that will be important to my discussion of 1Q84 below.

Whether Murakami had Greek antiquity consciously in mind when he constructed his dichotomy of “this side” and “over there,” some of his portrayals do bring to mind what we find in those ancient works. Kawai Hayao notes a similarity between Johnny Walker’s jovial slaughter of cats in the scene leading up to his death and the treatment of the tortoise by Hermes, messenger of the gods, in the Homeric hymn.10 Asked by Nakata why he kills cats and removes their internal organs, Johnny Walker replies that he is “constructing a flute.” “‘I’m killing cats in order to collect their souls,’” he explains cheerfully to a horrified Nakata. “‘Then I use the souls I’ve collected to construct a special flute. When I play that flute, I can collect larger souls.’”11 Johnny Walker’s immunity to such human constructs as pity and remorse reminds us of the young Hermes’s laughing speech to the tortoise prior to bringing it into his home, scooping out its insides, and stringing it with a cow’s intestines to make a lute.

“Hail, comrade of the feast, lovely in shape, sounding at the dance! With joy I meet you! Where got you that rich gaud for covering, that spangled shell—a tortoise living in the mountains? But I will take and carry you within: you shall help me and I will do you no disgrace, though first of all you must profit me. It is better to be at home: harm may come out of doors. Living, you shall be a spell against mischievous witchcraft; but if you die, then you shall make sweetest song.”12

Kawai finds something unsettling in the way Hermes can look at the living turtle yet see only a musical instrument. Johnny Walker is cut from the same cloth. “This is how the gods are,” writes Kawai. “Words like ‘treacherous’ and ‘heartless’ belong to the human realm, but a god spots a tortoise and instantly sees a lute. To carry on with such treachery in order to construct a lute is the god’s task. Johnny Walker is like a god. Coming across a cat, he sees the flute therein.”13

Murakami is not rewriting the myths of ancient Greece (or for that matter, of ancient Japan), but we sense these tales always lurking behind his texts, particularly in how spirits and deities populate his metaphysical realm, how ordinary mortals confront that metaphysical realm as the domain not only of those spirits and deities but of the “invisible” form, as Kamata Tōji terms it, of the physical self.14 There is no denying that Murakami’s characters, as they drive ever deeper into the metaphysical landscape, confronting eternity itself in the dark and forbidding underworld, seem to relive some of the more widely disseminated events both from classical Greek myth and from ancient Japanese mythology.

Most prominent among these would likely be the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice and the early sequences of the Kojiki (ca. 712; Record of ancient matters), Japan’s creation myth. In the former, Orpheus, a surpassingly skilled musician, loses his beloved wife to the bite of a venomous snake, and travels into the underworld in hopes of persuading its ruler, Hades, to allow her to return. Hades initially refuses but, wooed by Orpheus’s sweet song, at length relents, allowing him to lead his wife back up to the surface on condition that he not look back at her while they make their journey out. Because Eurydice makes no sound as she walks behind him, however, Orpheus doubts that she is there, and turns around to look. At this moment she is whisked away back into the underworld, there to remain forever.

The Kojiki myth, while quite different in many respects, contains certain common elements. In it, two gods—the brother-sister/husband-wife team of Izanagi and Izanami—create the earth by dipping a spear into the ocean, churning it around, and pulling it out, allowing the muck from the ocean floor to drip off the end of the spear, forming the islands of Japan. This obviously sexual metaphor is followed by more conventional copulation, resulting in the birth of the various elements that make up the earth, including water and fire. In giving birth to the element of fire, however, Izanami suffers severe burns to her genitals and eventually dies of her injuries. She then descends (or perhaps is placed) into Yomi-no-kuni, the land of the dead. Yomi-no-kuni, at this point, is still accessible to the living, and the grieving Izanagi has no difficulty entering the underworld in search of his wife. Locating Izanami, he invites her to return to the land of the living. Izanami agrees to do so, but because she has already eaten the food of the dead, she warns her husband not to look upon her.15 When he does, he is repulsed by the sight of maggots consuming his wife’s face, and cries out. Greatly shamed, Izanami flies into a rage and chases Izanagi out of Yomi. Upon his escape, he rolls a boulder across the entryway to Yomi, dividing forever the worlds of living and dead, reminiscent of the stones used to close ancient kofun tombs in the third and fourth centuries.16

Myths of this type are, of course, meant to demonstrate behavioral proscriptions (such as contact with the dead) and at the same time to explain how the world came to be as it is. The tale just related no doubt reflected ancient burial practices during the period in which it was written down, but the deeper lesson given is that the worlds of the living and the dead are divided by an insurmountable barrier, just as life and death, while separated by only a moment, are nonetheless divided irrevocably, for death is not reversible.

Journeys into the underworld, visitations to the dead, Orphean quests to recover those who have been lost, do indeed run throughout the full body of Murakami fiction. A sampling would include the following: Boku’s quests for Naoko in Pinball, 1973, Rat in A Wild Sheep Chase, and “Kiki” (the ear model who goes missing at the end of A Wild Sheep Chase) in Dance Dance Dance; add to this Watanabe Tōru’s attempts to bring Naoko back from the precipice of death in Norwegian Wood, Okada Tōru’s rescue of Kumiko in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, K.’s search for Sumire in The Sputnik Sweetheart, Mari’s attempts to reawaken her sister Eri in After Dark, and Tengo’s visits with Adachi Kumi in 1Q84, and we begin to see something of a pattern developing. Not all of these involve the underworld per se (those in The Sputnik Sweetheart and After Dark, notably, do not include an actual journey by the hero into the metaphysical realm), but others bear a striking resemblance to the very kinds of mythological quests from antiquity just described.

The Early Underworld: Cold Storage

The most obvious of these quests is in Pinball, 1973, in which Boku goes hunting for a pinball machine that, in his imagination at least, comforted him around the time Naoko died. His obsession with pinball begins when he hears the pinball machine calling to him. “The 3-flippered Spaceship . . . she kept calling to me from somewhere. This went on for several days.”17 Near the end of the work he receives a tip from a friend about a collector of pinball machines and makes a journey to the warehouse in which it is stored. Boku’s journey to find the “Spaceship” contains numerous similarities with his later journey to find Rat, most notably, a michiyuki marked by a sense of uneasiness; looking out of the window, he sees a darkness that is “no longer just dark, but as if someone had plastered it on like butter with heavy paint” (1:230), and Boku cannot help but ask his friend whether they are even still in Tokyo. “‘Of course,’” replies the other man. “‘Does it seem like we’re not?’” “‘It’s like the end of the world,’” replies Boku (1:232). He is correct, in a sense: it is the end of the world of the living. Boku’s friend also carries out a recognized mythological role, as a guide to the underworld, while the unseen collector of pinball machines could, with a little imagination, be read as a Hades-like character. As the taxi approaches the warehouse, “the 3-flippered Spaceship continued to call out to me” (1:232).

Upon entering the warehouse, Boku’s impressions do not dispel the atmosphere of death and burial in the place. The description is that of a well-preserved crypt, with heavy metal doors that open noiselessly, thick walls, pitch-dark and freezing cold.18 Boku is assailed by a fear that “I might be stuck in here forever,” and describes the place as looking like an “elephant graveyard” (1:235). The pinball machines are lined up, row upon row, in perfect order, all facing the same direction, not one of them even a centimeter out of place, giving the impression of a vast cemetery, with row upon row of perfectly equidistant headstones, identical but for the names carved on them. At length, Boku makes his way down five steps to the level of the pinball machines—a symbolic and actual descent into the underworld—and wanders among the machines “as if I were inspecting troops,” (1:238) he says, but in fact more like a man seeking the grave of a loved one. The machines themselves are varied, familiar and unfamiliar. “Some were vintage machines I had seen only in photographs; others called back fond memories of when I had seen them in arcades. And some had simply been lost to time, remembered by no one” (1:238). Is this not an apt description of the land of the dead and the souls who inhabit it?

Not surprisingly, although Boku locates his beloved pinball machine, he cannot restore Naoko to life, nor can he bring her out of the storehouse with him. There can be no return from the world of the dead, and even visits to that place by the living must be kept brief lest, as Boku worries, we might never get back. What Boku can do is to find a sense of closure with Naoko, to offer her words of comfort—and apology—and receive her forgiveness in return.19

One final point needs to be made concerning Boku’s communion with Naoko’s soul in this novel, and that is the role played by sound. Boku’s quest begins, as we have seen, with Naoko’s cries from the “other world.” His closure occurs through the “sound”—albeit only in his head—of her words of forgiveness. This use of sound is prominent in Hear the Wind Sing as well, in the wind to which the boy listens, and the voices of the dead that call out for the nine-fingered girl. Boku’s quest for “Kiki” in Dance Dance Dance begins with Kiki’s cries for him; Naoko responds to Kizuki’s voice in Norwegian Wood; Okada Tōru catches the tune of the “wind-up bird” in the novel of that name, along with his wife’s (distorted) voice over the telephone; Sumire calls out for K. in The Sputnik Sweetheart; the “Boy Called Crow” offers advice and encouragement in Kafka’s moments of doubt or confusion; and the Leader listens to “the voices” of the Little People in 1Q84.

There can be no doubt that sound plays a central role in the process by which the “other world” communicates with “this world” and vice versa. As we will now see, however, its significance in mythological terms goes considerably beyond that.

Thunder of the Gods

Sound—both human-made and the sounds we find in nature—is a key element in a great many world mythologies, beginning with music. We must not forget that the Muses were closely affiliated with Apollo, god of music, and like him, connected to music and poetry; or that Orpheus’s principal tool in dealing with the hostile spirits of the underworld was his own singing voice. In the Old Testament, Psalm 100 reminds us to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord . . . come before his presence with singing,” Job 38:7 tells of how “morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy” when the god created the universe, and Genesis 4:20 tells of Jubal’s amazing skill on the lute. Most religions contain some form of singing or chanting in prayer, the simplest of these being perhaps the sacred aum, a sound that connects us with all the cosmos, combining the beginning and end, alpha and omega, of all things. Uttering this sacred word, according to the Upanishads, can allow us to grasp everything in the universe, not merely those things that exist but also those that do not. In Japanese culture, too, this syllable contains all, the first and last sounds in the Japanese syllabary, beginning and end.

To these various sounds of worship and meditation, the gods respond through the myriad sounds in nature. The hissing of the steam at the oracle in Delphi was said to be the dying breath of the great serpent slain by Apollo there, but through its sound came the messages from the gods. Ancient Norse mythology claimed that thunder came from the sound of Thor hurling his massive hammer across the sky, while in Greek lore it was Zeus flinging his lightning bolts like javelins. Other sounds harm or warn of danger: Odysseus and his crew are tormented by the lovely voices of the Sirens, mermaids who lure sailors to their doom, while Celtic and Welsh mythology tells of the banshee, a fairy whose cry can harbinger death for those who hear it, or in some traditions, may actually cause death itself. These are, of course, but a handful of examples, but they illustrate the importance of sound in our connectivity with the supernatural.

Japanese mythology and traditional religious practice also place great significance in sound. We have already noted that the matsuri tends to include music—particularly the flutes and drums that once kept time during the planting of rice seedlings—and worship at Shintō shrines begins with loud clapping of the hands, intended to make the gods aware of our presence and to show respect, and also with the ringing of bells, calling the gods to join us in celebration.

And when the Japanese gods seek to make themselves known to us? Naturally, their presence is announced by thunder.

In this regard, mythologist Kamata Tōji has carried out useful analyses of the various terms that inform traditional Japanese religious and supernatural concepts, arguing for the typically aural, rather than visual, manifestations of Japanese kami. This is seen easily enough in the term kaminari (“thunder”), which is homonymous with words meaning “be/become a deity” (神成り) and “cry/call of a deity” (神鳴り). Perhaps less widely known is the origin of the word kami itself, which Kamata argues comes from a contraction of kakurimi (隠身), or “hidden body/hidden self.” His point is that Japanese deities have always been aural first, a fact that highlights the importance of ears in Japanese folklore and mythology:20

It is highly doubtful whether humans, had they lacked ears, would ever have discovered the gods. The term kami has its origins in a contraction of the word kakurimi, and if the gods are invisible, they would likely never have been “discovered” or “invented” by humanity. To play on the words, the “birth” (hassei 発生) of the gods occurred simultaneously with the vocalization (hassei 発声) of the gods. . . . The gods visit humans first through their ears.21

As we have already noted, however, while hearing the gods “speak” through the thunder of the heavens may be common to all, catching their meaning—grasping what the gods are trying to say—is another matter entirely, and this becomes the role of the priest, shaman, the “hearer of the voices.” In ancient times, he (or, more likely, she) who possessed the knack would have taken up the role of shaman, of priestess, as indeed prehistoric Japanese chieftains were said to be. And this is where Murakami reenters the discussion.

The gift of hearing and comprehending divine voices is given only to a chosen few, as we have already seen in a great deal of Murakami fiction. This is surely what the Leader refers to in 1Q84, as well, when he points out to Aomame that ancient kings were religious rulers first and thus very clearly sacred beings, for as Kamata reasonably points out, “if the gods do indeed show themselves through sound and voice, then the ear that catches these sounds may be called a divine vessel (yorishiro).”22

This may aid us in understanding to some extent Murakami’s fixation on ears, particularly in his early fiction. As Rubin notes, “Murakami’s characters take extraordinarily good care of their ears. They clean them almost obsessively so as to keep in tune with the unpredictable, shifting music of life.”23 The ability to hear things that others cannot is most obviously portrayed in the character of Boku’s ear model girlfriend in A Wild Sheep Chase, whose ears are in fact revealed to be more or less directly connected to the metaphysical world, marking her as the possessor of the very sort of “divine vessel” to which Kamata refers. Yet even as early as Pinball, 1973 we find references to the importance of ears and hearing. In a hilarious scene near the end of that novel, Boku has his ears—his direct “conduit” to the other world—cleaned by the Twins, who stand on either side of him, patiently working away with cotton swabs. Just then, disaster strikes: Boku sneezes, causing the Twins to jam their cotton swabs into his ears, leading to temporary deafness—closing off the “other world” to him. Interestingly, the physician who treats Boku informs him that his ear canal is “‘much more twisted than most people’s’” (1:252). Is this a sign that his ears are special, or a hindrance that leads to his chronic inability to catch the messages being passed along to him from the “other side”?24 Finally, it is both.

Twisted or not, Boku spends the better part of this novel attempting to do what its predecessor commands in its title, to “hear the wind sing,” that is, to hear the “other world,” and it is his inability to catch more than fragments of that tune, or to make sense of what he does hear, that causes Rat, throughout Pinball, 1973, to grow increasingly despondent, cut off as he is from Boku, his other self. This connects to our earlier discussion of “flow” between the two worlds, a point highlighted in one of Naoko’s stories, in which she describes the exceptionally tasty water people enjoyed in her town. Their supply of this excellent water was interrupted, however, when the diviner who located the right spots to dig their wells was killed in a train accident. The connection between “this side” and “over there” is thus neatly metaphorized as the flow of water from underground to the surface. If we understand the diviner here to perform the role of the priest, the one who establishes contact with the gods, however, then we quickly recognize that water is a metaphor for the divine voices themselves, whose communication must be unobstructed in order for the world to function in proper balance. Beyond an obvious psychological significance, this lends a new dimension to the fact that Boku has always found water wells to be a source of comfort. “I’ve always liked wells,” he relates immediately following Naoko’s tale. “It’s my habit to toss a stone into any well I happen to see. There may be no more comforting sound than that of a small stone hitting the surface of the water in a deep well” (1:133). By converse logic, there may be no more despondent sound than that same stone striking hard, dry earth at the bottom of a dry well.

It is not only sounds themselves but changes in sound that mark the approach of the metaphysical world or, in later works, the arrival of the gods. As Boku and his ear model girlfriend make their away around the treacherous “dead-man’s curve” en route to Rat’s villa in A Wild Sheep Chase, “the sound of our boots on the ground continually changed,”25 and the hero of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, when he first descends into the subterranean caverns of the old scientist in that work, is unnerved by the completely silent environment (owing to the fact that the scientist he is going to meet has “removed the sound” from the surrounding area).26 Naoko’s mountain sanatorium in Norwegian Wood is similarly marked by the peculiar way that sound absents itself there: “What an incredibly quiet place,” Tōru muses as he enters the grounds. “There wasn’t a sound anywhere. I wondered if it was siesta time or something. It was a quiet afternoon on which every person, animal, insect and plant was sound asleep.”27 Sometimes those who can hear the voices themselves have their external sound turned off; early in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Okada Tōru and his wife, Kumiko, are reminded by the deaf clairvoyant, Mr. Honda, to “listen to the flow,” the subtle changes in sound that occur as the energy between worlds ebbs and flows.

But this is easier said than done. It is precisely his catastrophic inability to perceive the correct frequency of psychic energy as it passes from one world to the other that lies at the heart of the Murakami hero’s inability to reconnect with Rat, to “save” Naoko, to find Sumire before she goes “over there,” to discover the identity of the “telephone woman.” This is the true significance of the ubiquitous embedded narratives that litter the Murakami literary structure as well; each time a character relates a story to the protagonist, they are revealing something essential—an “oracle” of sorts—to him. And when he listens to these voices with his ears fully opened, the Murakami hero draws just a little closer to hearing them meaningfully. The problem, of course, is that Murakami’s heroes seldom do listen with their ears “fully opened,” and when they do, they show spectacularly poor ability in unscrambling the coded messages contained in what they hear. And so their friends die or simply disappear, and the hero has no clue as to why.

This, at any rate, was the case up to—and possibly including—The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, when, after three agonizing volumes and more than 1,200 pages, Okada Tōru finally riddles out who the “telephone woman” is, and what she is trying to tell him. But was he in time? The novel ends inconclusively, and we are left wondering, along with Tōru, whether Kumiko will ever actually be restored to a life with him in the physical world. It is not until Kafka on the Shore and, later, 1Q84 that the Murakami hero at last catches the messages being delivered to him and acts upon them in such a way as to lead to positive results.

Interestingly, Murakami uses thunder as a metaphysical marker in both of these novels with considerable effect. In Kafka on the Shore, on the evening that Kafka confronts Saeki with her past and discusses the “other world” with her, a tremendous thunderstorm occurs, and we later realize that this is the very same moment that Nakata and Hoshino are lifting the Gateway Stone that blocks the passage between the physical and metaphysical worlds. Here, opening the passageway between “this side” and “over there” means suspending not only the laws of time and space but of social and moral code, right and wrong, good and evil, and it is at precisely such moments that our thoughts and dreams of forbidden things that normally remain “over there”—sexual liaisons, violent acts—are free to manifest themselves with impunity on “this side.” Furthermore, Murakami’s choice of a stone for his gateway is not accidental; in mythological terms it hearkens back to the stone that protected Izanagi from his wife’s wrath when he fled the underworld, the stone that covered Jesus’s tomb prior to his resurrection, a physical, yet also symbolic, barrier that guards the passage between life and death. To move it is to release the awesome power of the metaphysical into our world, to tamper with the natural order of the universe itself; seen from the opposite angle, it also signals the infiltration of the metaphysical realm (the realm of deities) by mortals. It is little wonder, then, that the gods roar with thunder.

This sacred thunder returns in 1Q84 on the night that Aomame kills the Leader, but in this case both rain and lightning are conspicuously absent, leaving only the “voice” of the thunder itself. This, as noted earlier, is also the precise moment that Tengo and Aomame achieve their metaphysical connection through Fukaeri (yet another kind of “Gateway Stone”) and conceive a sacred child through what can only be termed an “intensely sexual immaculate conception,” one in which penetration and ejaculation occur, yet the two parties never come within five miles of one another. This is only possible because Tengo and Aomame are sacred beings themselves.

It’s Not Easy Being Divine

Only recently has Murakami begun writing about the “sacred,” and the author might even be a little uncomfortable with such a term, but it is the right one, for ever since the short story “All children of the gods dance,” he has been inching his way toward the production of divinely inspired—indeed, immaculately conceived—heroes and heroines.

This began, as noted near the beginning of this chapter, with the character Yoshiya, whose name means “goodness,” and whose mother, according to the narrative, took every possible precaution against getting pregnant yet still conceived Yoshiya. If the story related to Yoshiya can be believed, she had a physical affair with a man, was careful to use a condom, yet still conceived. The doctor, believing that she used the condom incorrectly, demonstrates its use to her himself—in bed. Again she conceives, and this child is Yoshiya. The doctor denies responsibility, and Yoshiya is determined to find this mysterious doctor and confront him with his patrimony. His mother, however, has a rather different interpretation of the story. She tells Yoshiya:

Your father is “the One” (this was what members of her religion called their god), his mother kept repeating to him from the time he was small. And because He is “the One,” He can only exist in the sky. He cannot live with us. But he who is your father will always care about you and watch over you.28

Yoshiya, refusing to believe this story, persists in seeking out the doctor, in effect denying both his heritage as a child of heaven and whatever adventure or responsibility might accompany such an acknowledgment (insofar as divine sons are rarely sent into the world just for fun). In the end he discovers, however, that he cannot simply walk away from his divinity. Riding a train one evening, Yoshiya spots a man who meets the description of the doctor he believes to be his biological father (among other things, he is missing part of one ear). He follows the man off the train, chases him by taxi, and is led to a baseball stadium—judging from the area they exit the train, it is most likely to be Jingū Stadium,29 near the Meiji Shrine—where he follows “the doctor” onto the playing field, only to find the man has vanished. Thereupon Yoshiya makes his way to the top of the pitcher’s mound (a symbolic journey up the mountain to meet the gods), stretches his hands toward heaven, gazes at the moon for a moment, and then begins to dance, “one movement calling out for the next and then, all on its own, connecting with the next movement after that” (92). As he does so, he has a vision of a kind of forest opening inside him. “Its interior was filled with terrifying beasts the likes of which he had never seen. Eventually he would have to pass through the forest, but he was not afraid. The forest is inside of me, after all, he thought. I gave shape to this forest myself. The beasts are part of me” (92).

Much as Kafka and Nakata are drawn to Takamatsu, as Boku is guided to Hokkaido, as Tōru is attracted to the well, Aomame to the Leader, Yoshiya has been led by unseen forces to this exact spot to receive some sort of message from the gods. Exactly what Yoshiya’s divine mission might be is left out of the narrative, but this could not matter less, for the point of this story is the process by which a young man discovers and acknowledges his proper place in the world. The story illustrates and celebrates spiritual awakening to the internal narrative and to the omnipresent Narrative.

If divine grace plays a central role in this brief tale, then so does the potential for taboo. Yoshiya, in his reminiscences about growing up alone with his mother, recalls that she always looked younger than she was and that she had the peculiar habits of wandering around their home in her underwear and of crawling into bed with him in the middle of the night:

Wearing next to nothing, she would come into his room and crawl into his futon with him. Like he was a dog or cat, she would wrap her arms around him and sleep. Yoshiya knew his mother had no impure intentions, but he was certainly not at ease at such moments. He would have to lie in the most unnatural positions so that his mother would not be aware of his erections in these instances. (71–72)

Titillating as this scene may be for readers in a culture where mother-son incest fantasies are a staple of the pornography industry, there is a deeper significance to this relationship. Late in the story, while on the pitcher’s mound, Yoshiya recalls Mr. Tabata, a family friend, who had made a deathbed confession to Yoshiya about having harbored lustful thoughts about Yoshiya’s mother. Standing on the pitcher’s mound, the young man remembers his urge to confess similar feelings of his own for her. But this causes him to recall the words he would like to have said to Tabata: that our hearts contain both good and evil, but in the end what matters is sharing our souls with one another. This, finally, seems to bring Yoshiya inner peace, and if there is a “quest” in this story, we might conclude that it is not for the absent/invisible father but for self-absolution. In confronting and forgiving himself for his incestuous thoughts, Yoshiya has for the first time truly given himself up to his inner narrative, and in so doing discovered the sacred spark that dwells there. The final lines of the story are singularly beautiful:

Yoshiya crouched on the pitcher’s mound, surrendered his body to the flow of time. He heard the faint sound of an ambulance siren in the distance. The wind blew, making the blades of grass dance, the prayer of the grass song.

God . . . Yoshiya said, aloud. (95)

If Yoshiya is unable to escape the fate of being a child of god, at least he does seem to come to terms with his troubling memories of his mother. Given the peculiar nature of his conception, however, his connectivity to the metaphysical/divine, we might also argue that Yoshiya transcends mundane notions of incest, for in uttering the name of “God” (kamisama) at the end, Yoshiya declares himself as well.

If the divine spark, as it were, makes its first appearance in Murakami fiction in the character of Yoshiya, it becomes a central theme for the first time in 1Q84. In that work, while continuing to pursue the tension between the individual and the forces that surround the individual, Murakami tackles the extremely sensitive issue (particularly in Japan) of religious cults and the role they play in contemporary society. Surprisingly, given the general public rancor and mistrust directed at religious cults since the Aum Shinrikyō incident, Murakami not only portrays aspects of the “Sakigake” cult in 1Q84 in a generous—even positive—light, but within the context of the story actually seems to ground origins of the cult in the sacred.

Of True and False Prophets

If the metaphysical world is as real as the physical one (at least within the context of Murakami’s fictional world), so too the “sacred” realm, as part of that metaphysical world, must be regarded as real. Ordinarily such a point would not need to be made with respect to Murakami, except that there is a natural inclination, particularly in “modern” societies, to regard people who hear voices as mad. (It is an interesting point of irony that there is a greater tendency among people—especially those living in advanced industrialized societies—to place their faith in religious leaders whose faith is grounded in sacred writings rather than in direct sacred experience.) Perhaps this is because most organized religions exist at a comfortable distance from the direct experience of the ancient seer on whose teachings their belief system is founded. Then, too, it may be inevitable that industrialized people should be more comfortable with the sense of order that comes with organization and tradition.

But all religions must start somewhere, and if we think about the growth of some of the major ones—Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, for instance—we note that they generally begin with a charismatic leader who claims direct experience and contact with a deity or deities. Certainly this was true of Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed. Even assuming that their experiences and instructions were preserved for a generation or two by disciples, fellow mystics or seers, eventually those teachings were codified, written down, and maintained by a priesthood whose ordained have little or no direct contact or experience with the deity/deities but whose faith is grounded in the codified teachings themselves. This process is not confined only to ancient religions; new religions and cults spring up regularly even into the present era, many of them offshoots of established religions (many Japanese cults, for instance, are variants of Buddhism, founded by leaders who claim direct mystical experiences). Invariably, tension is born between the established, textually based religions and the “new,” experience-based derivatives, and religious history is filled with stories of burning or banishing as madmen or “heretics” those who claim to have had a direct encounter with the deity. Joseph Campbell usefully defines these two phases of religious experience as those of the “shaman” and the “priest”:

The figure now in the primary role is the priest, who is an ordained official of the tribal or village deities; these are not of his personal experience. He is in the service of the society and its deities, for the priestly society. The shaman is an archaic danger. He represents the early mystic, one who has had the individual mystic experience and is supported by his familiars—his own special deities—whereas the priest is supported by and is in turn the supporter of the cultural deities. The two systems are inherently in conflict. The priest is the man of the book; the shaman is the man of the experience.30

What Campbell describes can also be expressed as the conflict between collective thought/experience and individual thought/experience. In the case of 1Q84, we see this best exemplified, sometimes explicitly, other times more subtly, in the conflict that comes to exist between what below we will term true prophets, that is, those genuinely touched by the divine spark, and false prophets, who champion the sort of “myths” of which Roland Barthes wrote, artificial constructs such as “morality” and “justice,” as well as religious and political ideological systems, quite as though they represented absolute truth.

In fact, the structure of 1Q84 sets up these oppositions quite plainly, for divinely inspired characters are clearly marked with exceptional physical or mental qualities. Fukaeri, for instance, is marked physically; she is beautiful yet somehow lacks “balance”; physically she is small, but her breasts are unusually large and draw a great deal of attention. But most of all she seems simply artificial. “Her expression was devoid of the scent of life,”31 Tengo reflects the first time he sees her. Other areas of her body, as we saw in the previous chapter, actually look as though they are not real. But Fukaeri is also “marked” by her inability to communicate in the ordinary way, speaking in extremely short sentences, with virtually no intonation (difficult words for her are written in the text phonetically in katakana as a signal to the reader that they are more sounds to her than pictorial images or concepts). It is a point of humor that she always asks questions of Tengo “without the question mark” (gimonfu o tsukezu ni) (1:86).

In the context of our mythological analysis, we may associate Fukaeri’s difficulty in communicating through normal human channels as a sign that she is a direct receiver—the mouthpiece—of oracles, the first to hear the “voices” of the gods (or of the Little People, in this case) and to pass along what they have said. As with many oracles, however, those messages arrive in jumbled form—as riddles, as parables, in code—and are not intelligible to the uninitiated. Thus, the messages that emerge from Fukaeri must be interpreted by those with the gift for transposing the sublime into the everyday. Initially, Fukaeri’s “oracle” is interpreted and transmitted in a primitive form by the teenage daughter of Professor Ebisuno, who provides refuge to Fukaeri after she has run away from the cult. The real task of interpreting and transmitting the contents of the oracle to the masses, however, falls to the Leader and, later, to his son Tengo.

Both Tengo and the Leader (who certainly is Tengo’s spiritual father, if not his actual, biological one) are marked as divine by their extraordinary physical size and strength, as well as their more intellectual gifts in language and reasoning. We recall that Tengo, upon reading Fukaeri’s story (as transposed by Ebisuno’s daughter), is taken by it in a way that he cannot ignore; the narrative has awakened something inside him, and when directed to rework the piece for publication, despite strong ethical misgivings, he finds that he cannot resist. Like Yoshiya, Tengo cannot deny the divine spark that he carries, nor can he escape his sacred task as prophet, intermediary between humans and the gods. His editor Komatsu says much the same thing when he tells Tengo, “‘You’ll be the mediator, you’ll connect Fukaeri’s world with the real world’” (1:101). From the start, then, Tengo has been marked to replace the Leader, whose ability to interpret the words—the Will—of the gods (the Little People) through Fukaeri wanes as his physical body deteriorates. In the tradition of ancient animistic religions—including Shintō—the Leader performs the function of shaman, his experiences with the spirit world immediate and personal. As a holy man he intercedes between the earthly masses and the spirit world, interpreting the raw data transmitted through Fukaeri and transposing it into intelligible Law. And Tengo, in rewriting Fukaeri’s narrative for wider dissemination, has unwittingly already begun to take over the family business.

In mythological terms, if Tengo and the Leader are prophets and Fukaeri functions as oracular messenger of the gods, then Aomame fulfills the dual role of bringer and taker of life. Aomame at times strikes us as a series of paradoxes: she can be friendly and appealing, yet her grimace can cause children to soil themselves; she is a fitness instructor and nutrition expert who moonlights as a serial killer and whose best friend is a police officer; she detests the religion in which she was raised yet unconsciously appeals to that very same god when faced with sudden uncertainty. Aomame’s lack of consistency is physically marked by her breasts, which are of different size, symbolizing the two sides to her personality and her dual roles. She is a force of nature itself, monster and angel, bringer of death and (as mother to Tengo’s unborn child) giver of life. Even as Aomame uses her ice pick–like instrument to turn off the “life switch” at the base of her victims’ brains, she zealously nurtures and protects the fragile and defenseless life that grows inside her. In fact, it is precisely for control of her womb—and thus control of her body itself—that the final conflict in this story will be fought out.

This leaves Ushikawa, the last of the characters I would identify as divinely marked, though readers may wish it were not so. Ushikawa, whose name means “bull river,” is actually more of a doglike character, marked physically by his small stature and misshapen head. His appearance is particularly striking given that he comes from a family of tall, well-proportioned, good-looking people. He alone is hideous, but this is our best indication that he has been marked by the gods. Blessed with extraordinary instincts, a keen intellect, and a talent for finding things that are unfindable, Ushikawa enters the narrative as a temporary retainer for the Sakigake cult, which sends him to approach Tengo in order to rediscover the whereabouts of Fukaeri; later, in book 3, he is sent out to locate Aomame following the death of the Leader. However, while Ushikawa works for Sakigake, from a narratological point of view his role more closely resembles that of Nakata, whose task is to open the Gateway Stone and restore a sense of balance between the two sides. Despite his unpleasant appearance, Ushikawa’s position is neither benevolent nor malevolent. This, however, is also why he must die; the balance must, temporarily at least, be upset in order to break the stalemate and bring the conflict to a resolution. Like the Leader, Ushikawa is a necessary sacrifice.

The stakes in bringing about this reunification are considerable: they involve the establishment of the next generation of divinely sparked humans—beginning with Aomame and Tengo’s child—who will be free from the false narratives with which these two characters have struggled their whole lives. Their task, which they must perform together or not at all, is to show the way by breaking free of the various ready-made narratives that have bound them until now.

As we have already seen, both Aomame and Tengo spent their childhoods under the care of parents who zealously adhered to rigid belief systems. In Aomame’s case this took the form of evangelical Christianity, and she, too, was forced to follow these customs and rituals without question. Tengo was left in the hands of an equally zealous worshipper of the Japanese State—represented through NHK. His father’s loyalty to NHK is understandable; having returned to Japan from mainland Asia following World War II, with neither education nor family, Tengo’s father survived because he found employment—an actual home—with NHK.

Sincere as their parents may have been in their devotion to these belief systems, however, those systems ultimately prove unsuited to Aomame’s and Tengo’s needs, precisely because even as children their inner selves were intact; ready-made narratives such as organized religion and State ideology can only stunt their spiritual and emotional development. Their only hope of meaningful existence is thus to break free and continue to develop their own inner voices. As children, both Tengo and Aomame were pawns for their parents; as adults, it is imperative that they live for themselves.

But do they? Herein, I think, Murakami sets a subtle trap for his readers, for while Aomame and Tengo may appear to have shaken off the shackles of their childhood restrictions and come into their own as adults, I would argue that, quite the contrary, in the process of escaping the evangelical roots in which they were brought up, both have run directly into the arms of a new manifestation of the same sort of ready-made narratives, in the form of the zealotry represented in the old woman and Komatsu. Aomame is still a pawn, an enforcer of the old woman’s campaign of vengeance against abusive men, meting out justice, to be sure, but whose justice and on whose terms? Tengo, similarly, is drawn into Komatsu’s game of revenge and humiliation against the pretensions of the literary and artistic community. Like Aomame, he got into the game for compelling reasons of his own, but in the end he serves as a mere tool advancing the agenda of Komatsu himself. Komatsu and the old woman, then, within the quasi-religious context of this discussion, represent merely one more pair of “false prophets,” exploiting the gifts Tengo and Aomame possess to further their own schemes. Neither Komatsu nor the old woman are presented as evil per se; they are simply a new variation on an old theme.

In time, both protagonists come to recognize this reality. Aomame has no difficulty in accepting the need to stop abusive men from harming their wives and children but is troubled by a vague sense of guilt. “She had just sent someone ‘over there,’” she reflects after one kill. “He may have been a useless little rat bastard who had no business complaining even if he was killed, but he had been, after all, a human being. The sensation of extinguishing a life still remained in her hand” (1:102). In other words, justified or not, Aomame understands that her actions are murder. This differs significantly from her first kill, an act of revenge against the man who drove her best friend to suicide, for these later kills have nothing directly to do with her; she has no personal connection with either her targets or their victims. The old woman, seeking to alleviate Aomame’s sense of responsibility for these actions, attempts to pay her for her services. “‘Because you are neither an angel nor a god,’” she tells Aomame. “‘I know perfectly well that your actions sprang from pure feeling . . . But pure, genuine feelings can be dangerous, too’” (1:330). At length Aomame accepts this explanation and allows the old woman to set aside money for her, but this, finally, only proves the point that Aomame is caught up in a narrative not of her own making; in fact, the only possible means for establishing the purity of Aomame’s actions is to commit them solely out of “pure feeling,” as she did in her first kill. This point is driven unerringly home immediately following this scene, when Aomame receives a telephone call from her friend Ayumi, who has been accepting gifts of money from the various men she sleeps with. The parallel between “money for sex” (prostitute) and “money for murder” (assassin) is bluntly made, but it serves a secondary purpose, both for Aomame and the reader: to highlight the fact that Aomame’s sexual activities, which have always had the purpose of relieving her sexual stress in order to keep her love for Tengo “pure,” are now at risk of being deflected down a more mercenary path through the influences of her more depraved friend Ayumi. Perhaps only in Murakami fiction could we thus find ourselves drawing the following conclusion: that for Aomame, acts of meaningless sex and ruthless killing are losing their “purity.”

Tengo’s side of the narrative fares little better. A pure wordsmith, Tengo’s job until the start of this novel has been to lend stylistic flair to texts produced by writers who have interesting stories to tell but who lack his genius with language. Like any good ghostwriter, Tengo has been content to remain anonymous, placing his technical skill at the service of others. When presented with Komatsu’s scheme to rewrite Fukaeri’s manuscript into something worthy of the Akutagawa Prize, on the other hand, he is deeply troubled by the ethical questions involved. Komatsu attempts to put him off by paraphrasing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: “‘The end is good in itself. Good is an end in itself. Doubts should be left for tomorrow,’” to which Tengo aptly responds, “‘What does Aristotle have to say about the Holocaust?’” (1:307). A young man who seriously values his integrity, Tengo is uncomfortably aware that he is being used by Komatsu to perpetrate fraud.

What, then, are Tengo and Aomame to do? How can they escape, once again, the forces that bind and control them? The answer is that they must break faith with the belief systems of Komatsu and the old woman, much as they once broke with their parents, and reconnect with the internal narrative that binds them together, a narrative that originated at the precise moment that Aomame first took Tengo’s hand in that empty classroom some twenty-five years earlier. At that moment the two exchanged something—the seeds of a narrative that connects their souls and, like the novel written by Tengo and Fukaeri, must be written to the end by both of them or not at all. From that moment in the classroom there has existed a need to reunite them, to continue and complete the story. In this regard, Fukaeri fulfills an additional role in this novel, serving not only as the mythological oracle but also as a symbolic surrogate for Aomame until such time that she can be reunited with Tengo. Just as Fukaeri serves as a sexual connection between Tengo and Aomame on the night the Leader is killed, she also serves as a temporary carrier of the story they shared. This is why so many of Fukaeri’s movements echo Aomame’s, and why she seems so explicitly to equate the sexual act with that of their collaborative writing, for both are acts of procreation. Fukaeri views this act, rightly, as a sacred one, and her description suggests marriage and its consummation when she tells Tengo that “‘We have become one. . . . We wrote a book together’” (1:426).

In carrying out this act, however, Fukaeri proves herself to be a rogue oracle, for in exposing the story of the Little People through her story Kūki sanagi, she has in fact revealed forbidden knowledge to the uninitiated. Her role in this novel is thus ambiguous, not unlike that of Ushikawa: as a conduit by which the new “hearer of voices” is conceived she performs the will of the gods (the Little People), who require a prophet; in revealing them to a wider audience through her story with Tengo, however, she also undermines their authority over the world, threatening the deterministic fate with which they control events of the present and, more importantly, the future. It will, finally, be up to Aomame to act upon these revelations to shatter the imaginary bonds of “fate” and reassert the “free will” of the individual for the sake of herself, Tengo, and their child to be. This is a central issue not only in this novel but in Kafka on the Shore as well.

Fate versus Free Will: Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84

We return, then, full circle to the critical question of how fate and free will are handled in Murakami fiction, and for this, once again, we find important antecedents in the author’s early works, for while the question is most prominently explored from Kafka on the Shore, it begins with the struggle between Rat and the Sheep in A Wild Sheep Chase. What is the Sheep, after all, but a “ready-made narrative”? It is a system of thought that offers a kind of crystalline perfection, to be sure, a closed utopian circle not unlike the one sought by Kizuki and Naoko, by Nakata and Saeki, but which, finally, comes at a terrible price. That crystalline perfection, beautiful yet mindless and sterile, is balanced by the imperfection, sometimes termed “mediocrity,” of the human soul, with all its weaknesses. Yet it is precisely these flaws in our souls that make us all unique, and this is what is at stake for Rat—and through him, Boku, for Rat is the most unique part of Boku’s mind. Asked why he finally rejected the Sheep, Rat answers quite simply: “‘Because I like my weakness. I like the pain and hardship, too. I like the light of summer and the smell of the wind. I can’t help liking them.’”32 What Rat really loves are the human aspects of his life, for these are what make it real and unique for him. And so, rather than surrender all this in exchange for the Sheep’s perfection, Rat chooses to destroy the Sheep, and himself with it.

This is a pattern repeated throughout Murakami’s fiction. What is Wataya Noboru really claiming when he removes that “something wet and slippery” from Kanō Creta’s body in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle? Finally, it is any and all traces of her individuality, including her pain and confusion, which he will then replace with something of his own making, an ideology that will have the appearance of perfection yet will finally be a sterile, closed system, cut off from the collective Narrative from which we all construct our internal narratives. Why is Wataya Noboru portrayed as a slick politician? He represents, once again, the illusion of truth bound up in Roland Barthes’s definition of “myth,” bound up in all political ideologies. Okada Tōru’s Herculean task in that novel is to hurl himself—once again the “egg” metaphor is useful here—against the massive “perfect wall” of Wataya Noboru’s artificial narrative. The egg may shatter (at it does in Rat’s case), but it mars that perfection and preserves its integrity as an egg, rather than become, as Pink Floyd has it, “just another brick in the wall.”

No one is talking about “fate” yet in these novels, and even Kafka on the Shore does not make an explicit point of it. Yet herein lies the real point of building this novel around a retelling of the Oedipal myth. Sophocles’s message in that tale is, ultimately, that the more we attempt to run from our destiny, the more likely we are to run squarely into it. Fate is inexorable, it cannot be fought. Tamura Kafka, however, has other ideas, his solution to the problem resting on the unlikely combination of fate and genetics.

Yet, if one stops to think about it, fate and genetics are not wholly unrelated concepts; the former is an assumption that certain things are bound to happen (or at least likely to do so) through the will of the gods, the latter an assumption that certain traits will be carried on due to shared genetic material, passed on from parent to child through the blood. But if the blood is changed, might not one’s genetic “fate” also be altered? Can we, in other words, “rewrite” our blood just as we can rewrite our own inner narrative?

Blood is a key motif in Kafka on the Shore from the start, for Kafka’s “trauma” stems not solely from his father’s bizarre prophesy but from even before that, when he feels himself to be trapped by what he sees as his father’s tainted blood, by the very genetic material that flows through his veins. Moreover, because his father has taken the precaution of having DNA testing performed, Kafka does not even have the comforting possibility that his father might be someone else. Once again we find the dichotomy between flesh (vessel) and spirit playing a key role:

“Ōshima, in all honesty, I don’t like this container I’m in at all. I haven’t liked it once since the day I was born. In fact, I’ve always despised it. This face, these hands, my blood, my genes. . . . it’s like everything that was passed along to me by my parents is cursed. If I could, I’d escape from them, like someone running away from home.”33

Kafka’s entrapment is paralleled by the Oedipal prophesy with which he is saddled; the point of the prophesy is less to raise the specter of sexual taboo (though this is an intriguing by-product) than to bring up the tension between fate and free will, or, put another away, an individual’s control over himself/herself versus the control exerted by an external power, whether divine, social, or political.

Kafka’s challenge, clearly, is of the first type, for (in the very fashion of the Greek hero) he is driven first this way, then that, by the power of his prophesy, the ending that fate has decreed for him. Initially he hopes to escape fulfillment of this prophesy, which is precisely why—echoing Oedipus himself—he must leave his home. There is, however, one vital difference between Kafka and Oedipus, noted also by Kawai Hayao: Kafka is fully aware of his fate from the start. For Kawai this is most unnerving, for “in ancient times only the gods knew [our fates], but what was once enacted according to the will of the gods is now done by humans, and must be done.”34

And yet this is precisely Kafka’s advantage, for though he cannot change his fate, he is free to turn it to his own advantage. Hearing of his father’s murder in Tokyo and surmising (correctly) that he is responsible for it, even if only by proxy, Kafka recognizes immediately that further evasion is pointless. Thus, still advised by “the Boy Called Crow,” he turns himself squarely into the path of his prophesy and determinedly sets out to fulfill its remaining conditions. Not so much convinced but deciding that Saeki will be his mother, he joins his body with hers—though, significantly, both he and Saeki, in the metaphysical no-man’s-land of Kafka’s bedroom, seem throughout this scene to shape-shift back and forth between their present selves and those of the fifteen-year-old Saeki and her boyfriend from many years earlier. A few chapters later Kafka has a vivid dream in which he forces himself on Sakura, despite her protest that she thinks of him as her younger brother. In this case Sakura protests not that Kafka is her brother, but that she thinks of him as a brother, and she also warns him that if he persists, this will be tantamount to rape, but Kafka, having brought his prophesy this far, cannot possibly stop now. By the end of this scene, the quiet and determined Kafka has committed patricide (by proxy), matrilineal incest (in partially metaphysical form), and rape (in a dream).

The superb irony of these acts being carried out as an act of will (albeit in the metaphysical world) is that they allow Kafka to succeed where Oedipus failed: he completes the prophesy placed in his path (reasoning that there was no way to avoid it), and in so doing he turns it to his advantage. That is to say, by intentionally coupling (albeit metaphysically) with two women who might be his mother and sister, Kafka effectively forces them to become his mother and sister, thereby recovering his missing family. Clearly, then, he stands to gain a great deal from these acts, though we must wonder, at least in mythological terms, why Kafka is not damned as a result. If patricide, rape, and incest are among the most severely punished taboos in our world, then why is Kafka not punished for transgressing all three?

One important reason is that these “transgressions” are carried out in the metaphysical world, which we have already established to be a realm that lies beyond time, space, or indeed good and evil, and by acting in (or perhaps “acting through”) this realm Kafka is able to subvert even the process by which the most prohibited taboo acts are normally judged and sanctioned. Logically speaking, if Kafka and Saeki exist in the “other world,” where time cannot exist, then how can generational distinctions exist? And if generations have been erased through the suspension of time, then is intergenerational incest even possible? Similarly, if a murder is committed in the metaphysical realm, where death cannot exist, then how can it be murder? If this is so, then surely Kafka is absolved of the killing of Johnny Walker, which clearly took place while he, at any rate, was in a very metaphysical place indeed.

All of this merely reinforces what we have been observing all along, namely, that the infiltration of the “other world” on this one has the power to suspend the artificially constructed divisions that govern this side. The most important of these remains “time,” for in conflating past, present, and future, the metaphysical realm excludes all events posited on that structure—decay, aging, death—and thus renders the most serious of human taboos, including murder and incest, largely irrelevant, even impossible. In this manner the “other world” transcends such other human constructs as morality, good and evil, as well.

It also transcends the individual, as suggested in the previous chapter. Near the novel’s end, when Kafka again makes his way into the metaphysical forest led by the two deserters from the Imperial Army, he finds Saeki living in a place that is so quiet and peaceful it seems to numb the very mind, and much as Adachi Kumi tells Tengo near the end of 1Q84 to get out of “Catsville” before it is too late, Saeki also warns Kafka at the end of this novel to leave the metaphysical forest and return to his own world while he still can. What will prevent him? Nothing so elegant as rivers or chasms, or even gateway stones; rather, simple lack of self-awareness and individual volition are the bars that keep inmates of the other world where they belong, for as the fifteen-year-old Saeki tells Kafka, “here we are all, every one of us, merging our selves together with this place.”35 As such, no one possesses a fixed identity, and Saeki, too, is wholly a part of this realm, for she is now completely erased from the physical world. It is a predominantly Eastern philosophical message, one central both to Buddhism and to Daoism, the erasure of the individual self, which joins with and dissolves into the cosmos, the mystic One, with nature itself, achieving the blissful state of nothingness.

And yet this lack of fixed identity, too, works to Kafka’s advantage in the end. Just before Kafka departs, with the remaining traces of consciousness she possesses, Saeki is finally able to give him the one thing he has wished for his whole life: new blood. Pulling a pin from her hair, she thrusts it into her arm and allows Kafka to suck her blood from the wound:

I stoop down and put my lips to the small wound. My tongue licks at her blood. I close my eyes and savor its taste. I hold the blood I’ve sucked in my mouth, and slowly swallow it. I take her blood into the back of my throat. It makes its way very quietly into the dry flesh of my heart. I realize for the first time how much I’ve wanted this blood.36

The significance of this act cannot be overstated: in swallowing Saeki’s blood, he replaces (or at least dilutes) the hated blood of his father with that of the woman with whom he most desperately desires a blood relationship and now in actual fact does have such a relationship.

This is the final step in Kafka’s manipulation of his prophesy, which has permitted him to regain his lost family members (even if only for a short while) and to loosen the dark hold of his father over him. He has not so much “cheated” fate as he has simply forced it to work in his favor. Following this interesting new twist on the transfer of bodily fluids, Kafka summons the strength of will—the power of the world’s strongest fifteen-year-old boy—and forces himself to leave the forest while still in possession of his mind.

Returning now to 1Q84, we may see that Aomame is in a situation not unlike Kafka’s: for all her strength and fortitude through most of the novel, she still feels herself to be a slave to fate. For all her bravado, she remains neurotically attached to the religion of her childhood, and she has left the question of whether she will ever find Tengo, as noted earlier, in the hands of chance. She expresses this sense of helplessness before fate to Ayumi over dinner one night as they ponder their dinner menus:

“Whether it’s menus or men or anything else, we always feel as though we’re making choices, but maybe we aren’t really choosing anything at all. Maybe everything has already been decided, and we are only pretending to decide. Maybe free will is nothing more than an idea.” (1:344)

It is an issue that Aomame must and will address by novel’s end, when, feeling a sense of responsibility for the child growing in her womb and for the joint “narrative” with Tengo it represents, she elects to defy the Leader’s dying prediction that Tengo’s life will require the sacrifice of her own. Here, too, genetics will form a critical relationship with fate, for, as I noted earlier, Tengo and Aomame are given the responsibility of bringing into the world the start of a new generation that will be capable of connecting with its own internal narrative.

The matter of evolution, of improving future generations, is very likely the purpose of the Gilyak story on Tengo’s side of the narrative, one that otherwise strikes one as rather gratuitous. The Gilyak people, primitive forest dwellers, are presented to us as hard-working and honest, yet their men are notoriously unkind to their women, whose status in the community is lower than dogs, “‘treated as barter goods, or as livestock’” (1:468). Innocuous though it seems, the story is useful in a comparative sense, for despite the fact that humanity has, supposedly, advanced far beyond the “primitive” stage of the Gilyaks, still Aomame must spend her spare time exterminating men who continue to treat their women worse than dogs. Here, too, we see the contrast between our modern, “civilized” humanity and our primitive, “bestial” past. But is our primitive nature truly a thing of the past, or does it always lurk just beneath the surface of our modern veneer? Aomame implicitly ponders the same question:

Men who get off to raping pre-menstrual girls, muscle-bound gay bodyguards, people so zealous they’d rather die than have a blood transfusion, women who commit suicide with sleeping pills when they’re six months pregnant, women who stick needles into the necks of rotten men, men who hate women, women who hate men—with such people existing in the world, what possible good was being passed through our genes? (1:443)

Herein lies the purpose behind the apparent fixation in 1Q84 with genetics and the control of the womb, for the only way of progressing beyond the primitive stage of the Gilyaks, and, indeed, the brutality that continues to haunt our modernity, is evolution. The cause of that brutality, then as now, is the urge to control the destiny of others. “‘Human beings, finally, are nothing more than carriers of genetic material’” (1:385), says the old woman, and it is precisely this aspect of womanhood that she is determined to protect at all costs. Recalling the case of little Tsubasa, whose reproductive organs have been severely damaged due to violent and repeated sexual entry, the old woman sees this as nothing more or less than an attack on the girl’s reproductive system itself and therefore on the one and only thing that truly sets a female apart from a male. “‘When a woman is robbed by force of a right with which nature itself bestows her, well, this is not easy to forgive’” (1:430).

But finally, Tsubasa’s reproductive system is just one more metaphor for the inner narrative itself, the “story” now being the (re)production of replicas of ourselves through childbearing and the rearing of those children in such a way that they may be free from the “ready-made” narratives that their society will thrust upon them, including their eventual function within that society; will it be as free individuals or as “barter”? Will they determine their own destiny or be forced into predetermined roles by their society? This is the lofty task with which Aomame, Tengo, Fukaeri, the Leader, and Ushikawa are charged: to expose the artificiality of human constructs like tradition and ideology, thereby beginning an enlightened new era in which we are free to develop our own inner narratives unmolested, and to pass that enlightenment on to our offspring. To this end these characters are created with a divine “spark,” and they must struggle (without necessarily knowing they are struggling) against the innumerable “false prophets” that surround them. In so doing, they will take up, commit, and dispense with a wide variety of social and mythological taboos, reminding us that those who have been selected for sacred tasks, like the spirits with whom they interact (the gods, the Little People, “Colonel Sanders,” and so on), are beyond the concepts of “good” and “evil,” for these concepts belong to the realm of the constructed, are grounded in culture, history, and finally language, but not in any absolute sense of right and wrong.

If this is true, then I think one of Murakami’s major points in these novels that deal with the transgression of taboo (whether by “divine” beings or ordinary people) is that such transgressions are sometimes necessary, and perhaps even permissible, when they restore contact with the inner narrative that connects to the Narrative, to the world soul. Perhaps this is what Murakami meant to imply in Jerusalem, when he vowed to stand with the egg (individual) against the wall (the System), even if the egg should be in the wrong.

Under what circumstances is authority to be challenged? At what point and to what extent are we permitted, even compelled, to rebel against the systems that bind us and to break free? In short, when do we shake loose of the destiny plotted for us by others and assert our free will? It is fitting, in concluding this chapter, to return to Aomame and Tengo and their efforts to reach escape velocity and leave the false systems of their childhood and early adulthood behind. This, as we shall now see, will require the destruction of the father.

The Killing of the Father

Throughout most of his career Murakami minimized the presence of father characters in his fiction, and while I cannot entirely agree with Tokō Kōji’s assessment that they have been “conspicuous by their absence,”37 it is true that their role has been limited to that of a negative or neglectful presence in the Murakami text. We do, nonetheless, see father characters play a role in many of the earlier works. As early as Hear the Wind Sing Rat’s own father is presented in absentia as an industrialist who became extremely wealthy selling supplies to the U.S. military during the Korean War, perhaps one of the reasons that Rat despises him. Another father, “Makimura Hiraku” in Dance Dance Dance, neglects his daughter to the point that he finds himself compelled to pay Boku to spend time with her. We have seen how things go for Kafka and his father, as well as for the writer Junpei in “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day.” The father of Asai Mari informs her matter-of-factly in After Dark that she had better study hard, since she isn’t very pretty and has nothing else going for her, and Takahashi Tetsuya, in that same work, worries that he will end up like his father, who was in prison. The NHK dues collector who raised Tengo is actually just the latest in a long line of fathers who cannot relate to their children. In fact, going against the conventional image of the father who dispenses useful lessons to his son about how to live well, Murakami fathers consistently dispense information to their children that is either totally useless or, worse still, totally destructive.

Perhaps this is why the confrontation between the Murakami hero and his father has been so greatly anticipated by readers and critics alike, but it is also true that the enmity between fathers and sons in these works is a necessary construct, for the urge to overcome and replace the father is a crucial step for every man, and every society. As we noted in chapter 1, the replacement of one generation by the next is, in mythological terms, one means of ensuring that time moves in a unidirectional manner and that the human race thus goes forward rather than backward.

This conflict becomes an explicit theme in 1Q84, wherein fathers are portrayed, as the above analyses clearly show, as keepers of a quasi-sacred tradition, as guides to their children, but also as a singular hindrance to the mental, spiritual, and emotional growth of those same children. Freud’s writing on the inherent hostility of sons toward their fathers (the so-called Oedipal complex) is widely known, but we deal here with something else entirely: the absolute necessity of killing the father, symbolically if not actually, in order that his children may grow up to take his place. But this is not always necessarily a hostile confrontation; rather, as Tengo himself comes to recognize, it is simply a necessary step in his continued growth as an individual. In terms of our discussion of mythology, however, this confrontation takes on a new, sacred, and ritualistic quality upon which the very survival of the community rests.

In 1Q84 this is expressed through reference to James Frazer’s seminal work on mythological and magical customs from around the world,38 The Golden Bough, in which he has the following to say about “killing the divine king”:

The man-god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay.39

For they believe, as we have seen, that the king’s life or spirit is so sympathetically bound up with the prosperity of the whole country, that if he fell ill or grew senile the cattle would sicken and cease to multiply, the crops would rot in the fields, and men would perish of widespread disease. Hence, in their opinion, the only way of averting these calamities is to put the king to death while he is still hale and hearty, in order that the divine spirit which he has inherited from his predecessors may be transmitted in turn by him to his successor while it is still in full vigour and has not yet been impaired by the weakness of disease and old age.40

Frazer’s analysis is key here in that it highlights a peculiar fact regarding succession: that the slaughter of the king—frequently in the most bloody and gruesome fashion—was in fact a necessary ritual by which the inner spirit of the king might be liberated in good condition from the vessel in which it was only temporarily housed. That “liberation” was carried out, depending on the culture, either by the king’s own successor or else by one or more priests charged with the duty of maintaining the connectivity between the tribe and the guardian spirit who animated the king. This, in essence, is what the Leader explains to Aomame in the scene leading to his death:

“In ancient times there were places where, when the king had finished his term of reign, he was killed. His reign might be ten or twelve years. When his time was up, people would come and butcher him. This was necessary for the community, and the king accepted this. Their killing method had to be cruel and bloody, but this was a great honor to the king. Why did the king have to be killed? Because in those days a king was a representative of his people, ‘the one who listened to the voices.’ Such people were like circuits who connected ‘them’ and ‘us.’ And butchering ‘the one who listened to the voices’ was an indispensable act for the community after his time had passed. It was to maintain proper balance between the consciousness of the people living on the earth and the power wielded by the Little People. In the ancient world, to reign was the same thing as listening to the voices of the gods.” (2:241)

And while the Leader is not a king, his function within his organization as the divinely marked “hearer of the voices” places him into the role of the human carrier of the divine spirit, a sacred protector of his people, and so he urges Aomame to end his life so that a new protector—Tengo—may come to succeed him. His death will be, in effect, a ritual sacrifice, though he assures Aomame, with a certain dark humor, that “‘there’s no need to hack me to bits or splatter my blood all over the place. This is 1984, after all, and we are in the middle of a major city’” (2:242). But the act of sacrifice itself is an essential one, bringing with it the potential for eternal continuity, for each new succession brings fresh blood, youth, vigor, and strength. Such continuity is equally assured by the child Aomame carries within her.

The Leader’s willingness to be sacrificed for the greater good contrasts powerfully with Tengo’s NHK dues–collecting foster father, who even in a comatose state continues to send his spirit forth to knock on people’s doors, demanding that they pay the State its due. Tengo’s father represents the System itself, a system of collective ideology, whose time, symbolically speaking, has long since passed, yet it refuses to allow itself to be replaced. This is why it is so important that Tengo confront his father, even though it be on his deathbed, and command him to stop knocking on people’s doors. This is the signal to the old man that it is time to give up the ghost. It is also a signal that Tengo has broken loose of his influence and is now prepared to move forth into the world on his own terms, on the merits of his own inner narrative.

This is by no means a trivial matter; rather, the death of Tengo’s father mirrors the demise of the Leader, for it represents yet another changing of the guard, and the elimination of one person requires his replacement by another. Late in book 3, Adachi Kumi explains to Tengo that “‘whatever the circumstances, it’s a big deal when someone dies, because a hole opens up in the world. We have to pay proper respect to that, or else the hole won’t be filled in properly’” (3:483). But 1Q84 looks equally at the other side of that statement: that until a person dies, a new space cannot open up, and thus nothing can progress forward. What is accomplished by Tengo and Aomame at the end of 1Q84, then, is the preservation—or perhaps the restoration— of the three distinct time periods of past (the Leader), present (Tengo-Aomame), and future (their child). Their emergence out of “1Q84” back into “1984” represents final victory, for it will be in this wholly physical world that such concepts have meaning.

As with Kafka on the Shore, it is the future that concerns this novel most: what sort of a future will Aomame and Tengo construct and leave for their own child? This child is the key, finally, to breaking Aomame’s neurotic belief in fate and destiny. While in hiding following the death of the Leader, Aomame chances to read the novel written by Fukaeri and Tengo, and something—her own inner narrative, now intertwined with Tengo’s—is awakened inside of her, just as it has been awakened inside Tengo. This realization, her newfound certainty that the child is Tengo’s, becomes her greatest source of strength to break free of fate and determine her own destiny. Two material points dawn upon her in quick succession as a result: first, that she must protect this child at all costs, transforming herself from destroyer into nurturer; and second, that her destiny is, and always has been, in her own hands:

I’m not just some passive creature caught up in someone else’s plans, brought here regardless of my own mind . . . being here is something I chose myself. My presence here is an act of my subjective will. (3:475–76; emphasis in the original)

This realization parallels Tengo’s command to his dying father to cease his spiritual wandering and give up his body, and represents Aomame’s symbolic killing of the last vestige of her parents’ religion—its belief in a destiny preordained by God. Freed from this constraining influence, Aomame takes matters into her own hands and rescues Tengo from the “1Q84” world, along with their unborn child. Like Tamura Kafka before her, she has confronted her “destiny” and emerged victorious.

What we have seen in this chapter, then, is the systematic employment of a wide variety of mythological tropes on the part of Murakami, some Japanese, others of Western origin, in order to facilitate the infiltration of the divine into a world that had been, prior to “All children of the gods dance,” a largely secular, if highly metaphysical, literary landscape. This has facilitated a genuine confrontation between generations, highlighting the necessary replacement of the present system or narrative by that which is to come. As we have seen, that process has required acts of taboo that, in the context of quasi-sacred ritual, prove not to be taboo at all.

We have also seen that the metaphysical “other world” continues to play a key role in this process, first by providing an appropriate setting in which to enact these rituals, calling down the presence of the gods and spirits to join with the human participants and lend their voices to the event. As is so common in Murakami fiction, however, the performance of ritual—of “killing” the father, for instance, to maintain connection with the gods—can also represent an act of rebellion against the gods. We have seen this in both Kafka on the Shore and in 1Q84, wherein the destruction of the old collective narrative carries with it a rejection of the Will of the gods—fate—in favor of the will of the individual. This is the birth of Modernity itself, in which humankind discovers within itself the ability to think, to reason, and to act independently of God or the gods, determining our own fate. The real question that needs to be asked, as Tengo succeeds to the role of “hearer of the voices,” is, will he still be listening to those voices? Or has he—have we—finally learned to listen to the “voice” within ourselves? It is a question to which Murakami returns in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and to which we will return in the fifth and final chapter of this book.

In the chapter that follows we will explore some of the ways in which the author has combined this logic of self-determination with the general truism, so succinctly summed up in the first chapter of 1Q84 by Aomame’s taxi driver, that “‘things aren’t always what they appear’” (1:22). In the context of this novel he might well have been referring to Aomame’s assumption that she knows the world in which she lives, but in the next chapter I will apply this logic to Murakami’s response to real events, including the January 1995 Hanshin earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyō terrorist attack that occurred just two months later in Tokyo. What we will find is that, even within the context of nonfiction writing, Murakami has an urge to seek out the hidden stories and extenuating circumstances in order to provide the fullest possible explanation of events and those who cause them or experience them. His writing in this regard performs an interesting hybridization of fictional and nonfictional writing tropes, one that relies on the argument, stated repeatedly in this text, that all perceptions of reality are ultimately subjective.