World Literature and Japan: Tokyo, Worlding and Murakami Haruki

Literature Compass (2015): 1–15, 10.1111/lic3.12223

World Literature and Japan: Tokyo, Worlding and Murakami Haruki Rachel Stewart* University of Exeter

Abstract

Following on from the publication of The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, this essay develops understandings of the worldliness of world literature as part of a more inclusive system of exchange, circulation and multidirectional f lows that could create new spaces for multiple world perspectives in literature. Arguing that the world in World Literature should be theorised as a concept as opposed to a marker of scale, Eric Hayot’s On Literary Worlds (2012) forms the theoretical and conceptual foundations for analysing the scope and limits of a more sufficiently global view of the nature of worlding in Murakami Haruki’s contemporary Japanese fiction. Building on David Damrosch’s seminal work What is World Literature (2003a), the aim of this essay is two-fold: to renew common conceptions of the spatial implications attached to the overarching singularity of the word ‘world’ in world literature; and to expand the categories of ‘world’ and of ‘literature’ as individual ‘whole’ parts that together create new overlapping spaces in the history of worldedness as a cultural phenomenon. Overlaps between anthropologists, sociologists, urban planners, urban rhythm analysis, linguistics and academics are discussed with reference to worlding in Murakami’s depiction of Tokyo’s multiple world-passages with particular reference to his 2011 trilogy IQ84. Ultimately, this essay aims to present Japan as a (re)creator of global worlds in which the rebuilding of post-war Tokyo comprises shifting spatial boundaries pertaining to both our world totality and our capability for (re)reading infinite world spaces. Reading the spatial liminality of Murakami’s Tokyo in IQ84 while historicising the building of Tokyo as a world city aims to place transculturation and transliteration at the forefront of developing a multiple worlds perspective for our understandings of the world as a concept.

In On Literary Worlds, Eric Hayot discusses the possibility of creating a new theory about the world and its relationship to literature in a way that might reveal something different about our current understanding of the history of worldedness as a cultural phenomenon. He suggests that the ‘world’ in World literature exists as a ‘marker of scale, a figure for the relationship between the method of discovery and the breadth of its applicability’ (40). Yet, even in its most simple form, the problem of the world being the greatest possible totality in human existence has inevitable spatial implications, not least because the innumerable pieces that constitute the ‘whole’ world are themselves whole, at least to the extent that they are geographically and historically subdivided. ‘To world’, Hayot claims, ‘is to enclose, but also to exclude’ (40). He argues that the ‘world’ should be thought of as ‘a concept and synonym for totality, while connecting it to the problem of the greatest possible totality, whose other names in English are, “human existence”, “the earth”, and “the universe” ’ (85). To consider the scope and limits of spatialising the world as a concept in the attempt to put multiple worlds perspective into what Edward Said has termed the ‘worldliness’ of World Literature is, in a sense, to reach across the multiplicity of overlapping worlds according to common conceptions of space, time and language and to read them in a manner that is perhaps more abstract and less spherical, more open and less exclusive. Other literary theorists share similar seminal ideas. David Damrosch’s What Is World Literature © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

World Literature and Japan

(2003a) considers the instability of the word ‘world’ in the context of literature to argue that both the ‘world’ and ‘literature’ should be more expansive categories. World Literature, he insists, ought to be more global, because it appears different from different parts of the world, therefore, it should offer the perspective of multiple perspectives. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan’s essay ‘Why Compare?’ (2009) points to the irreducible plurality and heterogeneity of our world as a totality to argue that ‘[I]t is in the name of difference that the world as One undertakes a conversation with itself’ (454). The motivation behind Radhakrishnan’s comparatist epistemology is the will for new knowledge regarding the simultaneity of the world totality with the phenomenology of the innumerable worlds within it. Ruth Ronen’s Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (1994) examines the conceptual link between possible worlds and fictional worlds. She turns to the worldliness of fictional worlds to argue that the central function of that worldliness is to provide an inner structure and organisation to fictional worlds that cannot be provided by a single homogeneous fictional domain. In current Japanese literary theories pertaining to multiple world’s perspective the growing body of work on sekai-kei fiction, a neologism meaning world-orientated theme considers end-of-the-world crisis fiction usually associated with anime, manga and ‘light novels’ in ways that highlight the increasing isolation and confinement of individuals, usually young men. For Motoko Tanaka, characters in sekai-kei fiction bypass what she terms the middle ground (communities and societies) to forge a direct link between the foreground (the love between the male protagonist and the heroine) and the background (apocalyptic crisis). While some theorists, such as Uno Tsunehiro, argue that the sekai-kei worldview deteriorated at the turn of the 21st century, Murakami Haruki’s IQ84 (2011) certainly incorporates elements of apocalyptic crisis as depicted through clear AUM characteristics in the plot as well as aspects of romance between a young isolated male protagonist and an empowered heroine. In the case of IQ84, the addition of a metafictional aspect challenges the autonomy of the individual in sekai-kei fiction to create a literary space open to new world views in light of an end-of-the-world crisis. When the heroine Aomame climbs down the emergency stairwell on Tokyo Expressway at the beginning of Book one, for example, she enters a strange ‘new’ world with two moons that she names IQ84. It is this world located at street level in Tokyo that is representative of our world reality. This is also the same world in Fuka-Eri’s story ‘Air chrysalis’ that Tengo translates and by doing so realises that he is himself in the world of IQ84. When the parallel worlds of the two protagonists collide, it becomes possible for them to write themselves out of their real apocalyptic world and into a new reality, thus escaping an end-of-the-world-crisis such as the sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system in 1995. The metafictional and translatorial aspects in the novel thereby evidence the role of duplicity if not multiplicity of world views that alter the characters’ ability to navigate themselves through city spaces. These comprehensive albeit not exhaustive theories of ways to read world literature clearly highlight the spatial implications of theorising multiple worlds and perspectives in the world. Analysis of such spatial implications will undoubtedly benefit from linguistic considerations, not least because it is through language that we read, attach and understand meaning to our world spaces. As such, reading (re)constructions of spatial dimensions and movement within and across them alongside linguistic and literary epistemological frameworks is crucial for seeing the ‘world’ not so much as a sphere but as a concept. Inevitably there will be a conf lict of proximity where boundaries provide a measure of isolation as well as territorial and societal divisions. Interestingly, sekai-kei fiction attempts to redefine this conf lict through bypassing or altering the very middle ground where territorial boundaries exist. My aim in this essay is therefore to argue that spatialising worldedness and restructuring the boundaries between narratives forges a conceptual passageway that may join multiple world perspectives to world literature in a way that makes it more sufficiently global. My focus is on the historical grounds of Tokyo as what © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd



John Clammer has called a ‘world city’ in terms of its population and its cultural and economic power. As a world city that has been rebuilt twice since the turn of the 20th century, Tokyo offers limitless examples of how spatial boundaries sustain the image of Japan as a ‘whole’ world by compartmentalising it into a multiplicity of smaller worlds, all of which exist and develop alongside Hayot’s understanding of modernity as a historicised theory of worldedness. Thus by historicising Tokyo with a view to Murakami’s depiction of the multiple worlds in the Tokyo of IQ84, I aim to read Murakami as an example of an author concerned with how to read and write multiple world perspectives into world literature. The Global Worlds of Japan The mapping and understanding of boundaries had once seen Japan historically labelled as what Donald Keene famously referred to as a ‘World Within Walls’; a separate totality made up of equally separate ‘parts’ in terms of education, social class, inheritance, gender and so on that are isolated from each other as well as the totality itself being isolated from the entirety of the ‘outside’ world. Of course, the walls that surround Japan as a world-in-itself are constantly moving in the sense that Japan is an island that borders an ocean that has been home to myth and legend throughout human existence. Beyond these symbolic ocean walls, there once lay a vastly blank oceanic world that distanced Japan spatially and epistemologically from all ‘other’ and ‘foreign’ cultures and peoples. However, Henry D. Smith II, among many others, points to the misleading nature of Keene’s use of the word ‘walls’ in relation to Japan in his attempt to map the internal dynamics of change within the Japanese culture with the aim of painting a ‘whole’ picture of Japan’s worldedness. Through the studying of the panoramic views of early modern Tokyo as depicted by the print artist Kuwagata Keisai (1764–1824), Smith argues that the spatial boundary between Keisai’s ‘pictures’ and ‘maps’ were blurred linguistically through the overlapping use of the Japanese e, which tended to mean a ‘picture’, and the Sino-Japanese zu, which could refer to either, while the coupling of the two meant that e-zu signified ‘map’, while zu-e indicated topographical ‘pictures’ (4). The print that Smith draws upon is one that presents the entire nation of Japan ‘in one homogenous vision as a work of landscape art’ while simultaneously representing ‘a region of the earth’s surface too large to comprehend in ordinary vision’ (4–5). Viewers must observe the small worlds within the picture while orienteering themselves through the greater totality of the picture-map as a whole (Figs 1 and 2). Essentially,

Figure 1. ‘A Picture of the Famous places of Japan’. Signed, ‘Painted by Keisai shōshin of Edo’. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd



Figure 2. Detail of ‘A Picture of the Famous places of Japan’, showing the area of present Hyōgo, Tottori and Okayama prefectures.

these picture-maps must be viewed both as a picture and a map as well as a totality in itself. Unsurprisingly, Smith entitles his study of Keisai, ‘World Without Walls’. Japan as a ‘world within walls’ was attributed to the now widely researched and highly contested Tokugawa shogunate or ‘Closed period’ (1603–1868). Most importantly for this essay, it was during this period that Japan’s cartographic visions of the world changed inalterably alongside the arrival of the first world maps that Japan had ever encountered. Between 1584 and 1608, Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1619) devised the maps and separated the world totality into four oceans and six continents. The four oceans he named ‘include the two Eastern Seas and their western analogues: the “Large Western Sea,” which corresponds to the present-day Atlantic Ocean, and the “Small Western Sea”, which roughly corresponds to the Indian Ocean’ (Yonemoto 177). The six continents were North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and ‘Mekaranika’ which is now known as Antarctica. According to Marcia Yonemoto, the metaphoricity of the Japanese cartographic vision of a Small Eastern Sea came to symbolise the regional mentality as ‘one that ref lected Japan’s ambivalent relationship with its surrounding oceans and the ways they simultaneously connected and divided Japan and the outside world’ (177). In order to attempt to navigate these previously unseen global oceanic passageways, the Japanese employed landmarks as directional markers. Essentially then, mapping domestic sea routes practically ignored the sea itself, focusing instead on towns, settlements, mountains, waterfalls and topographical markers like forests on the hillside (Yonemoto 173) (Fig. 3). By focusing on mapping the interior of the land rather than the ‘exterior’ routes between ‘outside’ worlds, the mapmakers of the Tokugawa period pushed ‘the seafaring world to the margins of their worldview’, thereby ‘surrendering the seas to the realm of the imagination’ (178). For Yonemoto, this shows that ‘[T]he sea-route map was by its nature a localized form of cartographic discourse that fused land to water, known to unknown’ (176). As such, the symbolic nature of the ocean as a space between worlds and as a space that conceals and reveals worlds is historically related to the realm of the imagination, and it is in this way that the ocean can be metaphorically likened to the unmapped realms of the human mind. What is fascinating about this is that the myths of Japan’s seas as unrevealed worlds are still being hunted today. Just two years ago (2012), Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera of Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science led a team of experts almost 1000 metres down into the Twilight Zone, an area located east of the volcanic subtropical Okasawara islands 1000 km south of Tokyo, in search of one of the earth’s great enigmas; the Giant Squid. This legendary and mythical creature was feared for © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd



Figure 3. Detail from ‘(Urabe junran) Tōkaidō no zu’ (1842) The sea constitutes the lower third of the map; dots along the coastline indicate shallows. Rectangular labels name coastal towns, and small triangular ‘pointers’ at the top indicate notable landmarks, such as the mountains and waterfall at the top. Shrines are depicted by the torii symbol. Notice the directional symbols at the lower left; these indicate sailing directions that cannot be precisely depicted in scroll format (Yonemoto 174).

centuries after claims that they could sink whole ships and wage war with whales, but it was not until last year that this particular legend of the unknown was bought out of its mythical depths and into human reality. Perhaps then, our discursive placement of the ocean at the ‘edge of the world’ is yet another boundary pertaining to space and language that separates the known from the unknown, the real from the imaginary and the internal from the external. Yet, it is not just the boundaries of the oceanic world that Japan is traversing. Japan now leads the way in alternative modes of revealing global worlds pertaining to nature and the imagination within Japan as a ‘whole’ world. In the years leading up to and during Japan’s bubble economy (1986–1991), Japan’s engineers began to manufacture nature itself as a controllable, safe and predictable leisure activity in what is called the pleasure-domes. Tokyo Disneyland, Sea Gaia at Miyazaki in Kyushu and La Port Ski Dome in Funabashi City all ensure an entirely reconstructed environment; the beaches at Sea Gaia, for example, are made of ‘crushed marble and wave-making machines while the artificial snow slopes of La Port are always at a temperature of minus two’ (Myers 68). In these pleasure-domes, Japan is essentially managing nature within the artificial atmosphere of its own manufactured worlds of entertainment. It has separated the sea and the mountains from nature and enclosed them within their own circular ceilings, thereby creating new global spaces from the inside out. David Myers views this as a form of domesticated international tourism where ‘Japanese engineers recreate the iconic tourism attractions of the outside world inside Japan…[Japanese tourists] can enjoy a sanitised, micro-cosmic version of the famous international tourism attractions abroad while enjoying the comfort and security of staying within Japan’ (69). But yet again, Japanese worlding does not stop at reproducing nature; it also recreates history and fiction. The Gluck Kingdom in Hokkaido, for example, recreates the settings of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. There is also a recreated Russian village in Niigata, Venice known as Garasu-no-sato in Hiroshima, Spanish Costa Del Sol in Kure near Hiroshima, as well as Shima Spanish village in Mei prefecture and Canadian World at Ashibetsu in Hokkaido. It comes as little surprise then that it was the Japanese who invented sliding doors and sliding walls as they clearly have an ancient history in moving beyond the f luctuating barriers © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd



and boundaries of natural, imagined and global worlds. In no way, then, can Japan be seen today as a ‘World Within Walls’. Instead, it may be viewed as an innovative creator and re-creator of global worlds and as a country that is leading the way in the exploration of contemporary worlding both in reality and in contemporary fiction Murakami’s Worlding Boundaries The practice of linguistically, symbolically and creatively breaking down the walls of small whole worlds and using the imagination to map the cognitive blank oceanic space of inner (psyche) and outer (environment) worlds to envisage a different view of Japan as a whole world is evident across Murakami’s literary career. Most of his novels and short stories are set in Japan’s large urban areas, namely Takamatsu, Kobe and Tokyo, where his characters explore a multiplicity of ever-complicating and isolating worlds. Descriptions of these cities are ripe with cultural references to Western culture both high and low, which has led critics and readers to both praise and criticise the cultural plurality of his work. Geographical locations that are peripheral to many of Murakami’s novels, such as the mountains above Kyoto and the sea town of Chikura, are often those where characters with psychological instability, physical illness and old age reside. In other words, the unknown territory of the human mind and body and the ancient philosophical questions of life and death are placed alongside the uncontrollable natural territory of the mountains and the ocean. On the other hand, the complexity in form and structure of Murakami’s sprawling urban areas results in an image of the cities being divided and sub-divided while still remaining whole, intricate yet mobile, expansive yet small in much the same way that his characters’ lives are divided according to the city’s spaces. Tokyo, for example, is comprised of 23 wards, each of which is governed as an individual city causing it to be referred to as a metropolitan prefecture rather than simply a city. Tokyo in particular therefore acquires infinite possibilities for the perceptual habits of the millions of people who pass through the streets consciously and subconsciously reading the cities symbols, images, poetics and spatial liminality. For the American urban planner Kevin Lynch, the primary role of a metropolis like Tokyo is to ‘invite its viewers to explore the world’ (119) in light of its historical and natural setting as well as its complexity of social functioning and movement. In Murakami’s fiction, historical and geographical areas and patterns in nature can easily manipulate perceptions of the urban environment in ways that encourage its viewers to explore previously unnoticed spatial worlds. As previously noted, Aomame enters a world located beneath the commotion of rush hour traffic by climbing down an emergency stairwell. Not only is this reality concealed beneath modern transportation systems, but the way this new world is perceived from within is further obscured by artificial light and city signs. For example, it is in a playground on a cold winter’s night that Ushikawa, a private investigator in pursuit of the protagonist, realises the existence of a second moon and thus declares ‘This isn’t the world I came from’ (Book three, 244). This late discovery is due to the claim that ‘Koenji, Suginami Ward, Tokyo was not the best place to observe the night sky. Neon signs and lights along the street dyed the whole sky a weird color’ (Book three, 242). Before the world can be explored and altered, Murakami argues that it first has to be revealed by dissecting the layers of modern society that overshadow the historical and natural setting of Tokyo itself. Interestingly for the nature of worlding, the quantity and linearity of boundaries in Murakami’s Tokyo constitute examples of Lynch’s study of edges in the city. Rather than being considered as path-makers, Lynch views edges as ‘boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity…barriers [that are] more or less penetrable, which close one region off from another; or they may be seams, lines along which two regions are related and joined together’ (48). For Murakami, such regions include, but are not limited to, geography and topography, and © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd



they are often symbolic of conscious and unconscious realms that can be entered, navigated and exited in much the same way that one navigates the borders of a town, the internal structure of a building or the external structure of the streets and roads. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Wonderland from here on, 1985) is one of Murakami’s less complex fictional examples of how walls can be read as barriers that close one region off from another. The story follows a newcomer named Boku, the informal Japanese for ‘I,’ who is required to leave his shadow outside the wall bordering a strange town before entering the subterranean world of the sewers. The shadow is human in form and functions as a symbol for the self throughout Murakami’s literary career. The shadow/self is also symbolic of the unknown and unmapped depths of the human psyche as it is destined to die from the separation, the act of which would deprive Boku of his mind. The clarity of a town’s barrier-walls and unknown tunnels as modes of partitioning the internal from the external both geographically and psychologically is developed in Dance Dance Dance (1988), when the unnamed protagonist, whom we might assume is also named Boku given that the novel contiguously follows on from A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) and Wonderland, is compelled to return to The Dolphin Hotel. The Dolphin Hotel, however, has been bought and refurbished by a multinational company, and it is only by entering the hotel lift and travelling through the infrastructure of the building that structurally symbolises different levels of consciousness that the nameless protagonist is able to get out on a f loor that exists between the other f loors. In doing so, he manoeuvres himself through the hotel-corridor interior of his mind where he meets a nameless woman from his past and the mysterious Sheep Man. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), it is an empty well that provides the character Toru with the means to tunnel downwards into both Japan’s history and his own unconscious, the process of which sees him enter Jacques Lacan’s mirror-stage, wherein searching for his lost wife, his cat and his personal and national history equates to a quest for self-identification. With a view to sekai-kei and IQ84, Murakami exercises the possibility of writing one’s self into a new future, and therefore world, by (re)viewing the modern world as functioning above and below Lynch’s penetrable barriers. It is the creative space between these boundaries that constitutes the societal middle ground that is so often absent in Tanaka’s reading of sekai-kei fiction. Thus, IQ84, written a decade after the boom of sekai-kei fiction, can be read as mediating between an end-of-the-world crisis and love, in order to question the role of autonomy in creating and viewing our world/s. These brief examples evidence the symbolic relevance of space, edges and spatial liminality across Murakami’s literary career, and they highlight the ways in which modernity alters and creates world-views. Given the complexity of worlding and the sheer length of IQ84, modernity and urban living can be read as vastly increasing the quality and quantity of symbolic space and the edges of space, giving rise to a more detailed experimentation of symbolically breaking down Lynch’s penetrable small-world-barriers and Keene’s walls. The remainder of this essay is therefore to historicise the building of Tokyo as a world city that is home to Murakami’s spatial liminality. Building A World City-Body Commentators of the great metropolises of the modern world have repeatedly drawn upon the sense of continuity and mobility that turns each metropolis into ‘a dynamic and living object that orchestrates a variety of compelling rhythms…creating a vivid bridge between the physical world and the signifying, textual world’ (Highmore xiii). While traditional western conceptions like this one portray the city as a living body, often regarding it from above by mapping the metaphorical veins and arteries as they intersect around the country’s heart, post-war Tokyo requires a more grounded reading. Reading Tokyo as a living body that conceals and reveals © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd



multiple worlds must begin from deep within the ruins of what are now seen as the city-body’s metaphorical circulatory systems and respiratory apparatus, systems that urban rhythm analysts like Ben Highmore, and indeed authors like Murakami, now relate to modern roads, pavements, traffic lights and parks. Despite now being the world’s third largest economic power, Japan has been reduced to a city of ghosts twice over the last century, and Professor of Urban Policy at Meiji University in Tokyo, Ichikawa Hiroo, documents how ‘[T]he loss of close to half of the entire city and the destruction of all the efforts put into constructing the city after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 was nothing new to Tokyo’ (50). He comments on the rapid Westernization and development of Tokyo City during the Taisho period that was entirely destroyed by the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 that measured 7.9 on the Richter scale and killed over 140,000 people (Fig. 4). Just over two decades later, in 1944–1945, Tokyo was the first of six designated urban industrial areas1 to be virtually destroyed by the strategic air raids that were instigated by U.S. B-29 bombers as they navigated their way through the urban sprawl of buildings before razing them to the ground. The buildings, newly constructed since the earthquake, were made from hinoki, a type of cypress tree, and mud plaster. The highly f lammable Tatami, straw mats and amado, sliding shutters, with which the buildings were furnished, meant that Japanese cities were considered more attractive targets for incendiary attacks than Germany cities. During WWII, it was reported that Japanese cities have a ‘greater inf lammability of residential construction; greater congestions; proximity of factories and military objectives to residential construction; and the concentration of war industry in a few major cities’ (Dower 177). As such, major and medium-sized cities and towns were targeted primarily for their combustibility, and on March 9, 1945, B-29, crews initiated their first radar-guided night-time incendiary raid that burned though the heart of Tokyo, destroying 56 square miles, over half of the entire metropolis. The major industrial areas at the front of Japan, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe were hit between March 9 and 19, equating to the total destruction of 105 square miles of the targeted 257 square miles by mid-June 1945 (Dower 179–184). One must also remember the hundreds of thousands of people2 who were killed by the uranium bomb nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ that was later dropped over Hiroshima on August 6, obliterating 4.4 square miles (Fig. 5) and the bomb ‘Fat Man’ that was dropped over Nagasaki three days later, pulverising 1.8 square miles of civilization (Dower 198–199). Survivors nicknamed the Hiroshima bomb ‘Pika-don’ in reference to the f lash of intense light (pika) and the sound of the blast (don); A name that Murakami

Figure 4. Aftermath of the great Kantō earthquake, 1923. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd



Figure 5. After the firebombing of Tokyo in March 10, 1945.

Takashi (no relation) claims ‘symbolizes the visual, aural, and other sensory imprints made on the Japanese psyche’ (6). Following Emperor Hirohito’s official surrender three months later, Japan faced the enormous feat of building on the skeletal remains and ruins of hundreds of thousands of bodies and buildings in Tokyo alone. This is the very same ground that Ichikawa describes as being the ‘foundation on which modern Tokyo was built – both on the surface and below it’ (50). This alone gains greater historical significance when we recognise that ‘[R]econstruction of a devastated city most often consists of the rebuilding and repair of the pre-existing infrastructure’ (Ichikawa 51). To turn again at this point to Lynch’s reading of linear breaks throughout modern cities and the shadow-worlds that they create is to comment on how the metaphoricity of dark worlds existing in the space between the edges of modern-day Tokyo indicates the existence and significance of ruins and ghosts beneath the commotion of the modern city as a living body. In his essay ‘The Philosophy of Landscape’ (1910), Georg Simmel draws attention to the spatial and temporal significance of ruins and of architecture, which he interprets as both striving upwards and sinking below in a way that exhibits the patterns of human design against nature. Although his theories on modern urban living are often based on his experience of the Berlin metropolis, a city that has also been reconstructed over the WWII bones of humans and infrastructure, David Frisby has noted that Simmel’s preoccupation with individuality and the domineering force of urban society has ‘come to live a life of its own divorced from its original context’ (101). This allows for an extenuation of his investigation into urban modernity whereby the relevance of architectural ruin, whether by nature or human nature, can be applied to modern day Tokyo. For Simmel, ruins not only encompass the spatial dimension of architecture, but also the temporal dimension of the past and present where ‘the fact that life with its wealth and its changes once dwelled here constitutes an immediate perceived presence’ (qtd. in Frisby 118–119). However, unlike the preserved ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and the restored Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, there are only a handful of direct reminders in the forms of ruins and memorials in Tokyo and the surrounding urban areas, two of the few examples being Hiroshima’s Peace Centre with its A-Bomb Dome and the highly controversial Yasukuni shrine.3 Tokyo in particular may not have any such concrete physical ruins that force the past into the lived present in the way that Simmel suggests, but © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd



its recent history is one of repeated spatial destruction and reconstruction wherein the collective drive for a rapid re-building of space and place results in people orientating themselves according to the rate of architectural re-development. In this sense, building the city’s infrastructure over, above and below the skeleton of its ruins means that Tokyo’s ruins come to encompass a symbolic arena rather than a tangible one, and as such, they undeniably demand a significant presence in the space accorded to memory and imagination. It is in this way that the symbolic notion of rebuilt ruins and their significance are placed within the human psyche rather than within the city, thereby allowing authors like Murakami to use literature as a means to explore the relationship between the multiple layers of perception and memory alongside those of modernity as a theory of worldedness. Of course, relationships between space, memory, ruins and cultural identity are not simply a post-war phenomenon in Japan, and as Simmel’s philosophy of ruins and architecture reveals, ruins themselves have been historically accorded to nature as much as they are now accorded to humankind. What is fascinating about Japanese literature that documents ruined capital cities is that humankind has an ancient history in searching for its origins in the city’s ruins whether caused by nature or human nature. In Hōjōki4 (An Account of my hut, 1212), the Japanese author Kamo no Chōmei (1153–1216) laments the finitude of man and his dwellings in the world in his account of a series of ‘terrible sights’ caused by nature’s four elements. In this short story, the narrator recalls the movement downstream of the entire capital city of Kyoto5: ‘Houses were dismantled and f loated down the Yodo River, and the capital turned into empty fields before one’s eyes’ (191). During a whirlwind in 1180, ‘[E]very house, great or small, was destroyed within the area engulfed by the wind’ (190). The destruction caused by an earthquake in 1185 rendered it ‘needless to speak of the damage throughout the capital – not a single mansion, pagoda, or shrine was left whole’ (195). The great fire of 1177 reduced one-third of the capital to ashes and led the narrator to exclaim that ‘[O]f all the follies of human endeavour, none is more pointless than expending treasures and spirit to build houses in so dangerous a place as the capital’ (190). It would seem that Japan’s urban planners of the late 17th century shared a similar sentiment as Kyoto is no longer Japan’s capital but is instead Japan’s seventh largest city, and one of the only ones whose ‘downtown streets are still laid out according to the original eighth century plan’ (Rubin 13). Interestingly, the numerous shrines and temples that remain in Kyoto now bring millions of tourists a year in search of ‘the ancient roots that seem to have been obliterated from Japan’s contemporary capital, Tokyo’ (Rubin 13). Unsurprisingly perhaps, authors living and writing during the rebuilding of Tokyo at the turn of the 20th century have worked the shift from natural disaster to that of mankind into their city narratives, often repeating Kamo no Chōmei’s isolation in questioning the location of memories when landmarks and transport systems are removed. For example, Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) describes the rebuilding of Tokyo after the Kantō earthquake and mournfully remarks, ‘[T]he Takeya Ferry is gone, and so it the Makurabashi Ferry. Where am I to search for relics over which to lament my youth?’ (A Strange Tale from East of the River 133). On recognising the change in styles and attitudes among people whose surroundings were dismantled and rebuilt along with their memories of the old city and their old selves, the narrator practices remodelling himself and seems surprised that ‘the change required no great effort. A striped shirt, collar open, no necktie; a coat carried in one hand; no hat;…No shoes, in their place sandals with the rear clog worn away. Only the cheapest cigarettes. And so on and so on’ (141). On doing so he concludes that, ‘You can abandon yourself to the consciousness of dwelling in a rebuilt city’ (141). It is, of course, this style of abandonment of the self as one knows it that results in authors like Murakami writing isolation and the fight for individuation into their depictions of Tokyo as a rebuilt world city representative of the collective consciousness that built it. As such, re-building and re-developing Tokyo as a world city inevitably meant creating more spaces in which the self and the past can be restructured and reorganised. As the Japanese idiom © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd



tei o nasu implies, to be organised is ‘to achieve a body’ (lit. translation), and in this case, it is the post-WWII rebuilding of Tokyo that (re)organises the city into one of Highmore’s dynamic and living city-bodies. This meant widening and straightening the roads that come to represent the city’s circulatory system, employing new cohorts of architects and implementing new subway systems to cater for the steady f low of migration from rural areas into what was proposed as the new political, economic and cultural heart of the country. For sociologist Ōsawa Masachi, these formative years begin what he terms risō no jidai, ‘the idealistic age’ (1945–1969), wherein meta-narratives such as political ideologies were still functioning within society. It was not long before reconstruction projects failed to keep up with the vastly increasing population, which grew from 3.44 million in 1946 to 3.82 million in 1947 alone, and progress slowed significantly, especially following the implementation of the austerity budget in 1949 (Hiroo). Building on the remains of war-damaged areas was soon limited to the areas directly in front of the railway stations, and after much deliberation, it was the private property owners who rebuilt much of the original skeleton of pre-war Tokyo. No doubt these areas were the most convenient places to turn into animated economic spaces, considering the nearby transport system and port cities. This resulted in what is currently referred to as the over-centralization of Tokyo as Japan’s heart (McCargo 67), a heart that Ichikawa denounces as ‘the visual chaos of the contemporary huge city’ (56). Interestingly, by the time Tokyo became one of Highmore’s city-bodies, Ōsawa claims that the idealistic age had shifted to kyokō no jidai (1970–1995), ‘the fictional age’, wherein the meta-narratives of the real world became sterile, and instead, ideals were sought after in fiction. After the apocalyptic year of 1995 however, he argues that Japan entered Fukanōsei no jidai, ‘the age of impossibility’, wherein there lies a desire to ‘escape into reality’ (Tanaka). Given that the in-between fictional world as written by Tengo in IQ84 takes place in the imagined middle ground of sekai-kei fiction, the emergency exit through which Aomame reaches the new world can be read as an example of Ōsawa’s escape into, and indeed out of, another reality. One of the best visual conceptualisations of the collective drive for an economic heart in the city-body in these early post-war years is the avant-guard artist Ay-O’s (b. 1931) work ‘Pastoral’ (1956) in which oversimplified pneumatic torsos create a vivid evocation of automated society (Fig. 6). The homogenising and dehumanising stampede depicted by Ay-O risks trampling over the viewer in the force of their march towards prosperity in the Orwellian brave new world,

Figure 6. ‘Pastoral’ by Ay-O. 1956. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd



where individuality and subjectivity become collateral damage on the road to supermodernity. Mainstream scholars regard this collective attitude as evidence that Japan is ‘engaged in a process of modernization and convergence with Western models’, whereas the cultural analysts argue that such ordered behaviour ref lects longstanding cultural norms and mores (McCargo 59). There is some truth to both, as while the former Prime Minister Hosokawa proposed a future of a ‘united states of Japan’ (McCargo 67), core Japanese values such as collectivism, which puts emphasis on the family, the village, the company and/or the nation, rather than on the individual, is a longstanding cultural norm evident in the post-war effort. Problematizing the survival of the individual against this overbearing collective consciousness of society is one of the primary themes in Murakami’s fiction, where lonely isolated characters convey a sense of Orwellian pessimism in much the same way that ‘Pastoral’ does. Not forgetting here that IQ84 is Murakami’s version of 1984, only looking backwards rather than forwards as Orwell did. The novel is not simply set in 1984, but the phonology of the Japanese number 9, ku/kyū, is almost indecipherable from the English pronunciation of the letter ‘Q’. Linguistically then, the Japanese tendency to interiorize and indirectly imply meaning is indeed translatable in the ambiguity of the title, and to borrow Bernard Crick’s phrasing, looking back on the world imagined by the ‘gloomy, prophet-pessimist of nineteen-eighty-four’ (284) shows that the world we have created is one that warrants questioning. Consequently, the re-building of the visual chaos of 21st century Tokyo requires a re-reading of place, space and their effect on the individual and vice versa, not least because the characteristics of a supermodernity-in-the-making marks a shift in each of their meanings that more often than not equates to a shift in perception. Conclusion This essay has attempted to (re)view Murakami’s post-war Tokyo as a world city with a complex combination of geographical, historical and literary world spaces that have, over time, reconstructed the multiple layers of modernity over, below and around the grounds of its world history. In doing so, I have argued that Murakami succeeds in breaking down and traversing the multiples boundaries between fiction and reality, as well as those historical and geopolitical boundaries that once separated Japan from what was deemed the ‘outside’ world. Therefore, I have argued that the scope and limits for spatial worlding is greater in Murakami’s Tokyo than it might otherwise be in previous fictional depictions of the world’s cities and metropolis. As a result, Murakami’s experimentation with transculturation and transliteration as crucial modes of literary inquiry better ref lect the transformative nature of the period we currently live in, a period that Patricia Waugh rightly argues is increasingly ‘uncertain, insecure, self-questioning and culturally pluralistic’ (44). Short Biography Rachel Silver is a PhD candidate who recently graduated from her MA in English (Criticism and Theory) with distinction at the University of Exeter. Her research centers on AngloJapanese Global Modernisms with particular reference to historicising the modes of literary inquiry between Japan and the West. Her research focuses largely on literary analyses of what it means to be human in our rapidly globalising world, the primary aim of which is to create a new space for literary inquiry that will help shape future understanding of the ways we read, write and analyse World Literature as a literary category. Current interdisciplinary research entitled ‘Sleep, Death, and Infinity: Retrieving Japan’s lost women’ (forthcoming, 2014) seeks to reveal how Japanese literary and artistic representations of women have and have not inf luenced each other from 1950 to the present. Other primary areas of research include the reception and circulation of, and most importantly Japan’s literary experimentation with, Western conventions © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd



of individuation and individualism in Japan’s rapidly globalising post-war world spaces, with particular focus on the implications of loneliness and isolation in contemporary Japanese literature. She has given papers at a variety of postgraduate conferences, including the University of Exeter, Oxford Brooks University and the University of Durham. She also holds a first class degree in Spanish with TESOL from the University of Exeter. Notes * Correspondence: University of Exeter. Email: [email protected] 1 These areas included Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama and Kawasaki, which were listed in the final version of ‘Japan, Incendiary Attack Data’ that was submitted to the U.S. high command in September 1944. The number of profitable aviation targets increased to 22 by October 1944 (Dower 175–184). 2 Considering the 67 air raids on Japan’s cities, the two nuclear bombs and the devastating fires that swept across Japan, the actual death toll is more likely in its millions. The reported census data for Japan in February 1944 puts the population at 78 million. By late 1945, it reports 72 million. 3 The Yasukuni shrine lists over two million souls of men, women and children, who were the victims of war from the Boshin War of 1867 up until the Second World War. The inclusion of the names of convicted criminals continues to cause political tension with China and South Korea who accuse Japan of denying any wrongdoing during WWII. 4 Also translated as ‘A Ten foot square hut’. 5 Kyoto, which translates as ‘Capital City’, was the capital between 794–1869 before moving to Tokyo.

Works Cited Crick, Bernard. ‘Orwell and biography.’ Biography 10.4 (1987): 283–300. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Woodstock: Princeton UP, 2003a. Dower, John W. Cultures of War: Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima, 9–11, Iraq. New York: W.W. Norton: New Press, 2010. Frisby, David. Cityscapes of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. Highmore, Ben. Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Ichikawa, Hiroo. ‘Reconstructing Tokyo: the attempt to transform a metropolis.’ Rebuilding Urban Japan After 1945. Eds. Carola Hein, Jeffry M. Diefendorf, and Ishida Yorifusa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 50–67. ——Kamo no Chōmei.“HōjōKi” (An Account of my hut). Anthology of Japanese Literature to the Nineteenth Century. introduced and compiled by Donald Keene. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. 189–203. Keene, Donald. 5 Modern Japanese Novelists. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, Mass: London, M.I.T. UP, 1960. ——. ‘Some references to orientation.’ Image and the Environment. Eds. Roger M. Downs, and David Stea. Illinois: Aldine Publishing Company, 1973. 300–315. McCargo, Duncan. Contemporary Japan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Murakami, Haruki. Dance Dance Dance. Trans. Alfred Birnbaum. London: Vintage, 2003. ——. IQ84 Books One and Two. Trans. Jay Rubin. London: HarvillSeckler, 2010. ——. IQ84 Book Three. Trans. Philip Gabriel. London: HarvillSeckler, 2011. Murakami, Takashi. Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Nagai, Kafū. A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories. Tokyo: C. E. Tuttle Co., 1972. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954. Radhakrishnan, R. ‘Why compare?’ New Literary History 40.3 (2009): 453–471. Ronen, Ruth. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Rubin, Jay. Murakami and the Music of Words. London: Vintage, 2005. Said, Edward W. ‘The worldliness of world literature.’ The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012. 117–125. Web. 1 June 2013. Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings. Ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago; London: Chicago UP, 1971. Smith II, Henry D. ‘World without walls: Kuwagata Keisai’s panoramic vision of Japan.’ Japan and the World: Essays on Japanese History and Politics in Honour of Ishida Takeshi. Eds. Gail Lee Bernstein, and Haruhiro Fukui. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. 3–19. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd


World Literature and Japan Tanaka, Motoko. ‘Trends in fiction in 2000s Japanese pop culture.’ Ejcjs 14.2 (2014). www.japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/ vol14/iss2/tanaka.html

Further Reading Akiyama, Shun. ”The Simple Life”. New Writing in Japan. Eds. Yukio Mishima, and Geoffrey Bownas. Middlesex: Penguin, 1972. 182–201. Akiyama, Nobuo, and Carol Akiyama. Japanese Idioms. New York: Barrons, 1996. Appleyard, Donald. ‘Notes on urban perception and knowledge.’ Image and the Environment. Eds. Roger M. Downs, and David Stea. Illinois: Aldine Publishing Company, 1973. 109–114. Asahi Shimbun. ‘The great Tokyo air raid and the bombing of civilians in World War II.’ The Asia-Pacific Journal 11-2-10 (2010). www.japanfocus.org Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995. Beasley, William Gerald. The Rise of Modern Japan. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990. Bird, Lawrence. ‘States of emergency: urban space and the robotic body in the metropolis tales.’ Mechademia 3(2008): 127–148. Buell, Lawrence. ‘World literature and US American literature.’ The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Eds. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012. 444–453. Web. 19 December 2012. Chan, Red. ‘World literature and east Asian literature.’ The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Eds. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012. 464–473. Web. 19 December 2012. Chilton, Myles. ‘Realist magic and the invented Tokyos of Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana.’ Journal of Narrative Theory 39.3 (2009): 391–415. Chozick, Matthew Richard. ‘De-exoticizingHaruki Murakami’s reception.’ Comparative Literature Studies 45.1 (2008): 62–73. Clarke, H. D. B., and Motoko Hamamura. Colloquial Japanese. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Damrosch, David. ‘World literature, national contexts.’ Modern Philology 100.4 (2003b): 512–531. ——. How to Read World Literature? Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Downs, Roger M., and David Stea. Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping. New York: London: Harper and Row, 1977. Fisher, Susan. ‘An allegory of return: Murakami Haruki’s the wind-Up bird chronicle.’ Comparative Literature Studies 37. 2 (2000): 155–170. Friedman, Susan Stanford. ‘World modernisms, world literature, and comparability.’ The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 499–525. Gould, Peter R. ‘On mental maps.’ Image and the Environment. Eds. Roger M. Downs, and David Stea. Illinois: Aldine Publishing Company, 1973. 182–220. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Harootunian, Harry, and Sakai, Naoki. ‘Dialogue: Japan studies and cultural studies. Harry Harootunian and Naoki Sakai.’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 7.2 (1999): 593–647. Hein, Carola. ‘Rebuilding Japanese cities after 1945.’ Rebuilding Urban Japan After 1945. Eds. Carola Hein, Jeffry M. Diefendorf, and Ishida Yorifusa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 1–16. Hellyer, Robert I. Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640–1868. Vol. 326. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2009. Print. Hibbett, Howard. The Floating World in Japanese Fiction. London: Oxford UP, 1959. Hidetoshi, Katō. ‘The significance of the period of national seclusion reconsidered.’ Journal of Japanese Studies 7.1 (1981): 85–109. Iida, Yumiko. ‘Between the technique of living an endless routine and the madness of absolute degree zero: Japanese identity and the crisis of modernity in the 1990s.’ East Asia Cultures critique 8.2. (2000): 423–464. Ishiguro, Kazuo, and Ōe Kenzaburō. ‘The novelist in today’s world: a conversation.’ Boundary 2, 18.3. Japan in the World (1991): 109–122. Japan at the Crossroads: Hot Issues for the 21st Century. Eds. David Myers, and Kotaku Ishido. Tokyo: Seibundo, 1998. Kaplan, Stephen. ‘Cognitive maps in perception and thought.’ Image and the Environment. Eds. Roger M. Downs, and David Stea. Illinois: Aldine Publishing Company, 1973. 63–78. Karatani, Kojinand Seiji M. Lippit. ‘The discursive space of modern Japan.’ Boundary 218.3, Japan in the World (1991): 191–219. Koshimaa, Raine. Rev. of possible worlds in literary theory by Ruth Ronen. Poetics Today 20.1 (1999): 133–138. Koshiro, Kazutoshi. A Fifty Year History of Industry and Labor in Postwar Japan. Ed. Charles Weathers. Tokyo: Japan Institute of Labour, 2000. Matsuoka, Naomi. ‘Murakami Haruki and Raymond Carver: the American scene.’ Comparative Literature Studies, East–west Issue 30.4 (1993): 423–438. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd


World Literature and Japan Moretti, Franco. ‘World-systems analysis, evolutionary theory, “Weltliteratur”’. Review (Fernand BraudelCenter) 28.3 (2005): 217–228. Morris, M. ‘Japan’. The Oxford Guide to Contemporary World Literature. Ed. John Sturrock. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. 268–283. Morris, Martin N. ‘From the ground up: the reconstruction of Japanese historic buildings from excavated archaeological data.’ Japan Review 11 (1999): 3–30. Murakami, Haruki. Sputnik Sweetheart. Trans. Philip Gabriel. London: Vintage, 2002. ——. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Trans. Alfred Birnbaum. London: Vintage, 2003. ——. After the Quake. Trans. Jay Rubin. London: Vintage, 2003. ——. Underground. London: Vintage, 2003. ——. Blind Woman, Sleeping Willow. London: Vintage, 2007. ——. After Dark. Trans. Jay Rubin. London: Vintage, 2008. Nish, Ian Hill. Contemporary European Writing on Japan: Scholarly Views from Eastern and Western Europe. Ed. Ian Nish. Woodchurch: Norbury, 1988. Orleans, Peter. ‘Differential cognition of urban residents: effects of social scale on mapping.’ Image and the Environment. Eds. Roger M. Downs, and David Stea. Illinois: Aldine Publishing Company, 1973. 115–130. Oxford Handbook of Global modernisms. Eds. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Powell, Irena. Writers and Society in Modern Japan. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1983. Ronen, Ruth. ‘Space in fiction.’ Poetics Today 7.3 Poetics in Fiction (1986): 421–438. Ronen, Ruth, and Efrat Biberman. ‘The truth about narrative, or: how does narrative matter?’ Philosophy and Literature 30. 1 (2006): 118–139. Seats, Michael Robert. Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture (Studies of Modern Japan). Virginia: Lexington Books, 2006. Strecher, Matthew C. ‘Magical realism and the search for identity in the fiction of Murakami Haruki.’ Journal of Japanese Studies 25.2 (1999): 263–298. Takagi, Chiaki. ‘Is the “post-”postwar the “post-” in postmodern?: rethinking Japan’s modernity in works of Murakami Haruki.’ The Virginia Review of Asian Studies. Literature and Culture (2010): 39–65. www.virginiareviewofasianstudies.com

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