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2. The Racial Other and Violent Manhood in Murakami Haruki’s Writings about China
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59 CHAPTER 2 The Racial Other and Violent Manhood in Murakami Haruki’s Writings about China One of the biggest misunderstandings between the Chinese and Japanese is the common belief that their shared cultural sphere allows an immediacy of communication and mutual comprehension. When Japanese travel in China, they think they can make some sense of the Chinese words they see because of the proximity of meaning between the two languages. Chinese tourists in Japan may also hold a similar view. In the late nineteenth century, a Japanese sojourner named Hibino Teruhiro, sailing to Shanghai after the Tokugawa restriction on foreign travels had been lifted, described his encounters with the Chinese. Although he did not speak the language, he who knew literary Chinese could negotiate with Shanghai merchants by writing in kanbun:1 “[W]hen I would go to a market, I could not communicate orally there. Replacing the tongue with the brush, though, enabled rapid communication. Let me give a few examples. If I wrote [in kanbun], ‘How much is this ink?’ [The proprietor ] might respond, ‘One yuan.’ If I wrote, ‘You’re overcharging me,’ he might respond, ‘That’s the genuine, true price’ or ‘That’s the real price, none other’” (qtd. in Fogel 1995: 81). In suggesting a special cultural and linguistic link between Japan and China, Hibino, however, fails to consider that it is always the nature of businessmen to talk prices with their potential customers regardless of their ethnic, cultural, or linguistic background. As long as capital is allowed to flow, language is by no means a barrier to circulation and exchange. But the belief in cultural commonality does motivate individuals to act accordingly. Such imagined understanding of the other perpetuates throughout the convoluted modern history of China and Japan in the Asian system of the global order. The relation of these two Asian neighbors historically bears competitive and violent dimensions, and their paths to become modern nation-states are tied to their 60 Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions self-positioning in the structure of Asia, which is never purely Asian but determined by a global totality dominated by the West that irreversibly differentiates geopolitical units into unequal status. Their consciousness of their self-identity, constructed through a certain imaginary projection of the other, could have strong repercussions on the changing idea of Asia. But the apprehension of what Asia means cannot be established through a direct pairing of the two parties within a shared field. The sum of their ideas will not constitute a notion of Asian identity. On the contrary, if we were to separate one from the other by focusing upon each at its purest we can find a rupture within it that carves out a space for the inclusion of the other. In this chapter I examine how Murakami Haruki—Japan’s most internationally celebrated living novelist abroad, whose books are often full of Western literary and pop-cultural references and icons—deals with issues of masculinity and national character in contrast to an entity that is not Western but Asian (or Chinese, to be more precise). Masculinity and race in Murakami’s works are articulated as the ultimate horizon of meaning in a world where the belief in the plenitude of being no longer holds. Focusing on Murakami’s writings about China and Chinese characters in relation to his construction of manliness and Japaneseness, I argue that gendered and ethnic beings, that nowadays may have replaced the so-called universal being or the whole of being to constitute the subject’s core, are fundamentally performative without having any substance. There is no preordained conception of masculinity or a prefigured understanding of ethnicity in his works. Their incompleteness, which defies any attempt to grasp their full content, is actually the guarantee of their identity. In Murakami’s literary representations of inter-Asian encounters, the external ethnic object, which is something superfluous but disturbing, to be described and reflected upon is always inherent in the conscious self. What has been assumed to come from outside—the bodily property of a particular racial or gendered group—is something that has always been inside the self and is constitutive of the interior subject. That which is supposed to be within the self and (re)discovered through an inner journey, however, cannot emerge without an external traumatic encounter with the other that knocks the subject off balance. Such a disturbing encounter that may never take place in reality but be reinvented prepares the...