MURAKAMI HARUKI AND THE SEARCH FOR SELF-THERAPY A ...

MURAKAMI HARUKI AND THE SEARCH FOR SELF-THERAPY A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Japanese at the University of Canterbury by J.P. Dil University of Canterbury 2007

Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………………………………………………...1 Abstract……………………………………………………………...3 Conventions…………………………………………………………4 Introduction Seeking Salvation in Late-capitalist Japan……………........................5 What is Murakami Seeking Self-therapy for?………………………………..7 What is the Nature of Murakami's Therapeutic Discourse?............................19 The Question of Relevance………………………………………………....27

Chapter One The Search for Self-therapy: Murakami as Existential Gnostic…………………………………....34 Writing as a Means of Self-therapy: Learning How to Enter the Second Basement………………………35 Searching for the Self: Individuation and the Jungian Cast of Characters……………………50 The Self as Story: What is an Existential Gnostic?……………………………………..69 Individual versus Collective Salvation: Campbell's Monomyth and the Question of Commitment…………..83

Chapter Two Loss, Mourning, and Melancholia: The Appeal of the Imaginary……………………………………….93 Responding to Loss: Mourning, Melancholia, and the Value of a Fetish…………………94 The Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real:

Lacanian Readings of Murakami's Work…………………………115 The Other of the Other: Sinister Sheep and the Difficulties of Cognitive Mapping………..123 Eternal Children and Early Deaths: Growing up in Norwegian Wood…………………………………136

Chapter Three Self-therapy as Symptom: The Modernist and Lacanian Critiques……………………………146 The Politics of Subjectivity: Shutaisei and the Modernist Critique………………………………147 Cognitive Mapping in a Hard-boiled Wonderland: The Dilemma of the Writer in Late-capitalist Japan……………….169 The Ideology of Late-capitalist Japan: Learning how to Dance, Dance, Dance……………………………184

Chapter Four History, Violence, and Jouissance: The Return of the Real……………………………………………202 Woman as Symptom: South of the Border, West of the Sun……………………………...203 Missing Objects: Jouissance and the Promise of Fullness…………………………...213 Healing and Wholeness: Yin/Yang and the Promise of Balance…………………………….221 Entering the Well, Touching the Void: An Example of a Lacanian Act……………………………………232

Chapter Five The Search for Commitment: Earthquakes, Aum, and Oedipus………………………………… 253 Absent Fathers and Fathers Found: Learning to Live After the Quake…………………………………254

Absent Fathers and Fathers Found: Learning to Help Those Trapped on the Other Side………………264 Oedipus on the Shore: Did Kafka Kill his Father?................................................................274 A New Subject for a New Day: Is there Hope After Dark?.................................................................297

Conclusion From Self-therapy to Commitment: Rethinking the Question of Salvation in Late-capitalist Japan……310 References………………………………………………………..322

Acknowledgments Heartfelt thanks firstly go to my primary supervisor, Dr. Kenneth Henshall, who has supported this project from conception to completion. He has faithfully fulfilled his role as "devil's advocate" and has been an ideal mentor and motivator. I have appreciated his practical approach to things and his "can do" attitude. Thanks also go to the rest of the staff in the Japanese Department at Canterbury University, particularly Dr. Chigusa Kimura-Steven who provided secondary supervision and detailed feedback of my work. I also wish to thank Dr. Rumi Sakamoto at Auckland University who first introduced me to Murakami's work as an undergraduate student. In Japan, I wish to thank Dr. Matthew Strecher who provided informal supervision while I studied under a Monbukagakush scholarship at T y University. His expertise on the subject and generosity of time were invaluable. His first class scholarship on Murakami was also a major source of anxiety and inspiration. My thanks also go to Murakami Haruki, the late Dr. Kawai Hayao, Dr. Kawai Toshio, Dr. Jay Rubin, and Dr. Shibata Motoyuki, all who agreed to be interviewed over the course of this thesis. While not all of these interviews are directly quoted in the text, all played a major role in shaping my ideas and in opening up new and valuable insights. I thank them all for their generosity in meeting with me. Research in New Zealand was supported by a New Zealand Government Top Achiever Scholarship, while research in Japan was supported by a Monbukagakush Scholarship. I thank these institutions for their financial support.

Last but not least, I wish to thank my family without whose constant support and encouragement this thesis may never have been completed. Most of all, I wish to thank Anne whose good humour, adventurous spirit, and unwavering support made this whole journey possible.

Abstract

This thesis offers a reading of the first eleven novels of popular Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki, as well as a selected number of his short-stories and non-fictional works, as an evolving therapeutic discourse. In short, it is a response to Murakami's own claim to have started writing fiction as a means of self-therapy. Murakami, I will argue, is primarily responding to existential anxieties that have been magnified by conditions of cultural decline in late-capitalist Japan. His resulting therapeutic discourse shares interesting parallels with certain psychoanalytic theories of the twentieth century. Previous psychoanalytic readings of Murakami's work have tended to take either the writings of Carl Jung or Jacques Lacan as their starting point. This thesis will argue, however, that both theoretical frameworks are needed if one is to truly understand where Murakami is coming from. This kind of therapeutic reading might seem to justify those critics who see only the escapist elements in Murakami's fiction and who fault him for failing to engage fully with the important political and social issues of his day. In fact, a therapeutic reading, I will argue, is the best way to see how closely related Murakami's search for self-therapy and his growing search for commitment really are.

Conventions All Japanese names in this thesis will be written in the common Japanese order: the family followed by the given name. An exception is made, however, for those authors with Japanese names writing in English. Macrons are included to indicate long vowels in Japanese. An exception is made for common nouns which are commonly written in English without macrons (i.e. Tokyo rather than T ky ). Italics have been used to indicate Japanese words not commonly found in English. An exception is made for the personal pronoun Boku which is used repeatedly in this study. When a translation has been used in the main body of the text, the reference for the translation is included in brackets in the footnote immediately following the reference to the original source. Where no reference for a translation is given, the translation is my own. In those cases where only a translated work has been referenced, brackets are not used. The common practise of capitalising certain Lacanian terms is followed in this thesis (i.e. Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real). Some other unique conventions found in English Lacanian studies are also followed (i.e. big Other rather than Big Other).

Introduction Seeking Salvation in Late-capitalist Japan

When you get right down to it, writing is not a method of self-therapy. It’s just the slightest attempt at a move in the direction of self-therapy … And yet I find myself thinking that if everything goes well, sometime way ahead, years, maybe decades from now, I might discover myself saved. 1 Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing, 1979) p.7

Murakami Haruki (b.1949) first started writing fiction as a means of selftherapy. He just had no idea of it at the time. In fact, his decision to start his first novel in 1978 seems to have come as much of a surprise to him as to anyone. At the time, Murakami was the successful owner of a jazz bar that he ran together with his wife in Tokyo. His moment of epiphany came during a baseball game at Tokyo’s Jing Stadium as American batter, David Hilton of the Yakult Swallows, hit a double against the Hiroshima Carp. For Murakami, this was the moment he knew that he wanted to write a novel. As he explains, “It was like a revelation, something out of the blue. There was no reason for it, no way to explain it. It was just an idea that came to me, just a thought. I could do it.”2 Following the game he bought some stationery and then, every night after work, would write at the kitchen table into the early hours of the morning. The product was a short work, Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing, 1979), that went on to win the Gunz prize for new writers.

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With hindsight, however, Murakami has come to detect a deeper motive behind his sudden flash of inspiration. Speaking in 1995 with Jungian psychologist Kawai Hayao, for example, he put it this way: “Why did I start writing novels, even I do not really know, I just suddenly wanted to start writing one day. Thinking about it now though, I think it was some kind of step toward self-therapy (jiko chiry ).”3 As the opening quote above suggests, Murakami may have had some doubts about whether writing as a means of self-therapy was even possible. The hope, however, was that if things went well, some time in the future, he might find himself saved. This, of course, is a rather lofty goal. What might salvation even mean for a non-religious author writing in the cultural milieu of latecapitalist Japan? What was Murakami seeking self-therapy for to begin with? This thesis, first of all, is an attempt to read Murakami's eleven novels to date, as well as a few of his short stories and non-fictional works, as an evolving therapeutic discourse. It is an attempt to take seriously his claim to be writing as a means of self-therapy. More than this, however, it is an attempt to consider what critical relevance, if any, this discourse might have when read as a response to wider historical and cultural conditions in late-capitalist Japan. Murakami, I will argue, is primarily responding to existential anxieties unleashed by what will be described in Lacanian terms as the decline of the big Other in late-capitalist Japan4. His resulting therapeutic discourse shares interesting parallels with certain aspects of the psychoanalytic theories of Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan. These two figures #$ %

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might seem to make a strange pairing, especially when one considers how far apart they are on the key foundational issues, and indeed previous psychoanalytic approaches to Murakami's work have tended to take either one or the other for their starting point. Here, however, I will argue that both are needed if one is to truly understand where Murakami is coming from. Acknowledging these therapeutic tendencies might seem to justify those critics who see only the escapist elements in Murakami's fiction and who fault him for failing to fully engage with the major historical and social issues of his day. In fact, a therapeutic reading, I will argue, is the best way to see how Murakami's growing sense of responsibility and commitment to contemporary Japan has been reflected in his work. As a means of framing these larger issues, the remaining sections of this introduction will start to explore three key questions: What is Murakami seeking self-therapy for; what is the nature of his response to this situation; and how might one begin to consider the question of its wider critical relevance? What is Murakami Seeking Self-therapy for? At first glance, it is difficult to understand why Murakami ever felt the need for self-therapy at all. As Jay Rubin has concluded of Murakami's formative years, for example, “he had none of the early life-warping experiences that seem to propel certain sensitive souls towards writing as a form of therapy for themselves or their generation.”5 Murakami grew up in an affluent neighbourhood in Kobe, Japan, the only child of responsible and caring parents. He had no obvious dysfunctional family background or major personal traumas to deal with. This is not to suggest that biographical details hold no explanatory appeal whatsoever. Rubin, for !!

example, in fact goes on to mention one such factor, noting that Murakami has always been something of a “stubborn individualist” in a country where such an attitude is not always highly valued.6 Such an attitude helps to explain, in part at least, the years Murakami spent overseas, first in Italy and Greece and later in America, in an attempt to protect something of his privacy and time. It also helps to explain the detached quality of his early writing, as well as his need to find new forms of literary expression outside of the mainstream of the Japanese literary tradition. Clearly, however, there is more to Murakami's therapeutic quest than just a driving need for independence. This, I will suggest, is only the first piece of a much larger puzzle. Staying with biographical influences, another important factor worth considering is Murakami's strained relationship with his father, a relationship that in interesting ways is connected to ambiguous feelings about China. The specifics of this conflict remain vague; Murakami is usually careful not to talk too much about those closest to him.7 One interesting exception, however, can be found in an interview carried out by Ian Buruma for The New Yorker magazine. As Buruma explains, Murakami’s father fought in China, and as a child, Murakami vaguely remembers him sharing something shocking about his wartime experience there. Murakami even goes so far as to speculate that the distress he felt on hearing his father’s words might explain his aversion to Chinese food. As Murakami uncharacteristically acknowledged to Buruma, he has little "

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desire to talk with his father about such matters: "It must be a trauma for him. So it’s a trauma for me as well."8 Ambiguity about China and the Chinese has continued to be an important theme running through his work. As Rubin also reveals, this estrangement between father and son was further aggravated by Murakami’s determination to get married before graduating from university and to open up a jazz cafe with his wife, both decisions his father strongly disagreed with. This is undoubtedly one area where his stubborn individualism has added to the tensions in his interpersonal relationships. In this light, it is interesting to note that father figures played little role in Murakami's early fiction. His central protagonists seemed to exist in fatherless worlds and family connections were almost non-existent. It still seems too speculative and reductive, however, to read too much into this. Again, while such details offer interesting anecdotal grounds for understanding Murakami's therapeutic tendencies, they fail to account for the depth and power of a drive that has continued to sustain his writing now for over a quarter of a century. A broader perspective, I will argue, is still needed. Murakami's determined individualism and strained relationship with his father can usefully be seen as symptomatic of a more general disposition that has affected the way he continues to interact with the world. While Murakami's hard feelings towards his father seem to have mellowed over time, for example, he still has a strong antipathy towards more abstract, universal kinds of father figures. As he explains: My father was not so authoritarian. I have no personal prejudice against him … at least not now. But Father-like figures in this society, Japanese society, meaning the system, I despise those figures very strongly. Too 6

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! strongly I guess. I think that is why I couldn't get along in the literary world. If I see somebody who is strong and who gives orders, sometimes I get mad; that's my nature. Basically I'm gentle and I'm not a violent person … but if somebody in a high position orders me to do something, I get mad … I hate those people and I hate their position. I think that feeling is unusually strong in me … When I write something about those figures my writing might change somehow.9

This desire for personal freedom is one of the most important values guiding Murakami's writing. There is a tension, however, between private forms of freedom and the public forms of commitment that are needed to protect and maintain them. This is one of the major thematic tensions running through Murakami's work. Another potential factor worth considering is Murakami's need to mourn for deep personal and historical losses of the late 1960's. Murakami came of age during this politically turbulent season in Japan, and as a student at Waseda University, was close enough to the action to witness the ideological battles of his generation.10 Though not necessarily an active participant in the mass protests, he felt the excitement of the age and the disillusionment which followed when the student movement was defeated.11 Again, while the details are vague, Murakami also talks about

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the fact that he lost close friends during this period.12 It is easy to imagine how this sense of loss could have solidified into a more prolonged sense of melancholy and how this could have subtly motivated him to start writing in 1978. As Murakami began to write, he would first turn his attention to the summer of 1970, the immediate aftermath of this turbulent political season. He would become the spokesperson of a generation that had lost their political ideals overnight and who were still trying to find a sense of meaning and compensation in the present. Seen together, these factors start to paint a compelling picture of why Murakami could suddenly have felt the need to start writing as a means of self-therapy. Growing up in Japan, he seems to have had a vague sense of historical guilt about the war that was somehow transmitted through his father. He was also a stubborn individualist who, despite his parent's best wishes, was determined to find his own path through life. Though fairly introverted and reflective as a child, he was more than capable of standing his ground when he felt others were trying to order him around. He had a determination and even stubbornness that sometimes drove a wedge between him and authority. Murakami had then moved to Tokyo for university, and had been caught up, to some degree, in the excitement and idealism of the late 1960's. He had also witnessed, however, the defeat of the political left and the disillusionment which had followed. This sense of loss would come to be mixed in his mind with the deaths of some close personal friends lost during this same period. Before graduating from university, he would get married and start a small jazz cafe in the suburbs of Tokyo.13 It was his way of avoiding the mainstream corporate world and of building his own little private sphere of freedom. There was perhaps a 3 + %% 7 7! ; #3 % ' # = # * < %, * # * *',, ,' # , 8

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