An Allegory of Return: Murakami Haruki's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Murakami Haruki (1949-) has made no secret of his fascination with the West and his admiration for Western things. His fiction abounds in references to jazz, rock and roll, European authors, and American brand names. For ten years, he lived abroad, first in Greece and Italy, and then in the United States. He even claims to have developed his distinctive style by writing first in English, and then translating into Japanese. ¹ His deadpan fantasies, with their parodic echoes of American authors such as Raymond Chandler, have earned him considerable success in the West; he is, for example, one of the few foreign contributors to the New Yorker.

But in 1995, Murakami decided to return to Japan, and to judge from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Nejimakidori kuronikuru, 1994-1995; tr. 1997), his return coincided with a new direction in his career. ² For the first time, Murakami has written a novel that deals explicitly with Japanese history and culture. The novel's protagonist, a rootless man with tastes and habits like Murakami's own, descends into a dry well in Tokyo; there, he enters a parallel world where he must do battle with the demons of Japan's recent history--the horrors of the war in China, and the corruption of the modern state. This descent can be seen as an allegory of Murakami's own return to Japan, of his attempt to understand and re-enter the world he left behind.

This brief outline suggests that Murakami's career resembles that of many modern Japanese writers: after studying and admiring Western things from afar, he went to live in the West; when disillusion set in, he returned home in order to re-discover and embrace his own tradition. But closer inspection reveals that his relationship with the West is rather more complicated.

To the Japanese writers of earlier generations, the West represented modernity--with all the promise of individual freedom and release from tradition that modernity once seemed to hold. But for a writer of Murakami's generation, modernity is no longer the exclusive property of the West, nor is it so attractive a condition. In order to understand Murakami's relationship to the West, it is necessary to consider him a writer of the postmodern world, of a world in which the "West" and "Japan" are problematic entities, and in which the objects and cultural practices that once defined the West can also be found in Japan. A second complication derives from tensions within Murakami's work. Murakami's early fiction is indeed pervaded by references to Western things and even by Western literary styles; one critic has called it "American fiction translated into Japanese." ³ It is nonetheless fiction about Japan, set in Japan, with Japanese protagonists, and even occasional allusions to Japanese myth and history.

Moreover, can we assume that Murakami's decision to return to Japan was motivated by disillusion? Murakami's references to Western things have from the outset been tinged with irony, and irony is the great solvent of illusion. Of course, someone who knows his subject so well--Murakami's knowledge of jazz and American popular fiction and pop music is encyclopedic--is doubtless half in love with it, but it would be a disservice to Murakami to assume that he thought the West would be somehow better, more magical, more liberating that it actually was.

And what are we to make of the turn to Japan in Murakami's recent writings? First, it is not so radical a change of direction: many themes he explores in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are also present in his earlier "American" fiction. Moreover, Murakami's return to Japan has not initiated a phase of homage to an idealized, traditional Japan. On the contrary, he seems determined to examine the darkest aspects of recent Japanese history. In this paper, I examine Murakami's relationship to the...