The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami by Matthew Carl Strecher (review)

Academics frequently use the term “thought provoking” in evaluations and reviews, but what do we really mean by it? Is it simply another way to say that something is interesting? I ask this question because both Matthew Strecher’s book reviewed here and the subject of the book itself, the works of Murakami Haruki, are genuinely thought provoking. Murakami’s writings lead us down strange byways into wells, forests, dreams, and the unconscious, liminal spaces of the mind. History and trauma, and magical and bizarre events dance across the writer’s pages. But Murakami refuses to tie things together in a conclusive fashion. The disparate elements he loves to include do not answer all the questions they raise. Instead, they leave us inquisitive and anticipatory—in other words, provoked to keep on thinking.

Likewise, Strecher’s book takes us by many roads into what he calls the “forbidden worlds” of Murakami’s fictional and nonfictional writings. As he puts it, “it is time to explore that ‘other world’ in some detail, to examine its unique characteristics, and to determine, if possible, how it functions in the lives of the characters who access it, draw strength, knowledge, and a source of identity from it” (p. 6). Like its subject, Strecher’s book does not offer an overall master map to this world but rather presents us with a variety of intriguing ideas to ponder and to provoke us toward our own interpretations of this tantalizing, multifaceted author.

Strecher attempts to give an overall definition of these “forbidden worlds” in terms of their metaphysicality and how their presence on the “other side” of real life shapes the minds and actions of Murakami’s characters. He uses the memorable metaphor of the mind as a house, in which the metaphysical occupies two basement floors, the shallower floor being dreams and memories, the deeper one being the “collective unconscious” which also contains the core identity of the individual and its place in a larger form of Narrative. One particularly valuable notion is Strecher’s point, developed from his previous book on Murakami,¹ about how Murakami’s characters draw survival skills from the “other side” to create their own “inner narrative.” This helps them maintain their individuality against what Murakami calls “the System,” which Strecher reads as the Japanese state. Again developing a theme from his previous work, Strecher points out how this notion of the System can be a form of political critique, an important point given that critics and fellow writers, especially in Japan, have taken the author to task for shying away from political engagement. As Strecher explains, “[t]he State [throughout Murakami’s works] appeared to hold insurmountable power . . . and yet, somehow, Murakami’s loner protagonists, representing the voice of the nonconformist, the determined individualist, battled with considerable success against these superpowers” (pp. 65–66). Strecher comments on how this inner narrative of the individual changes in Murakami’s most recent works, pointing out how characters such as Okada Toru in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or the assassin heroine of 1Q84 “kick ass” in a way that would have been unimaginable in regard to the protagonist of the much earlier A Wild Sheep Chase who ends the novel weeping passively on a beach.

Strecher’s book engages with all of Murakami’s fiction from his earliest novels on but places welcome emphasis on recent and still relatively understudied works such as Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84. He also devotes an entire chapter to Murakami’s most recently translated novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. The other four chapters in the book refer to a range of Murakami works in relation to a particular thematic approach. In the introduction, entitled “The Power of the ‘Story,’” Strecher sketches a brief biographical and cultural context for the writer and also sets out his notion of Murakami’s metaphysical world mentioned above. He then links this...