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Article Excerpt
This essay explores the use of animals in Haruki Murakami's fiction, where animals serve as the emblem of selfhood, where human-animal hybrids manifest the fragmented self, and where becoming-animal inspires a creative process in which humans can fare better.
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The couple ... were able to open a cosy little establishment in a western suburb of Tokyo in 1974. They called it "Peter Cat" after an old pet of Haruki's--Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words.
This essay attempts to fill the gap in the criticism on Haruki Murakami by exploring the use of animals in his major fiction. While it will critique and expand the critical works on the author, especially those by Matthew Strecher and Jay Rubin, it will also expose insufficiencies in the established concepts regarding animals in the postmodern arts, specifically those of Steve Baker. As such, the essay aims to enrich the already abundant criticism on the author, and open new directions in conceptualizing animal imagery in contemporary literature.
Haruki Murakami's fiction first appeared in the 1970s. Yoshio Iwamoto notes that Murakami's characters are often haunted by "a sense of loss," the content of which "is never spelled out" ("Voice" 297); while they avoid confronting other people, whom they view as functional objects, they pay "fetishistic attention" to consumer goods and trivial things, which furnish them with "a grip on a recalcitrant reality" (297-98). As Celeste Loughman argues, Murakami believes that neither materialism itself, nor the preference for Western popular culture, is the root of current problems, but "that's all there is." The confused or lost identity, caused by an absence of "idealism" or any source of self-fulfilment, is further severed by a loss of connection with the past, including the nation's cultural past ("No" 90). (1) Such is true not only of Murakami's many nameless protagonists, but of the named ones in his most conventional novel, Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no mori): the protagonists aim at being different from other people, yet are not "truly unique and individualistic" (Okada 65-66). Eager to do away with social obligations, they are nonetheless very much conditioned by Japanese group-oriented mentality (72-73).
Steve Baker, in The Postmodern Animal, quotes Nina Lykke's "Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science," claiming that modernity was a "repressive process of purification" that worked to ensure that any monster or hybrid that threatened to transgress the border between human and non-human was reclassified to either the human or the non-human sphere. In the cyborg world of post-industrial and postmodern society, however, such creatures or creations are becoming increasingly common, and their repression, less and less successful ("Leopards" 99). Citing Margrit Shildrick's "Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body," he argues that the proliferation of animals and the embrace of impurity, hybridity, even monstrosity in the postmodern arts could be a positive and creative trend, and that the "humanist politics of norms and identity" might give way to "a politics of hybrids" (100). In the vein of Deleuze and Guattari, Baker stresses that "becoming-animal," which provides a creative escape from a repressive society and other conservative forces, is not equivalent to "resembling, imitating or identifying with" an animal, nor does it happen in the imagination, dreams or fantasies, or necessarily entail a bodily metamorphosis (120-21). While Deleuze and Guattari claim in A Thousand Plauteaus, "becoming-animal produces nothing other than itself. What is real is the becoming itself" (Baker 121), Baker defines "becoming-animal" as "human being's creative opportunity to think themselves other-than-in-identity," hence the precise relationship between the human and the animal as one of "alliance" (125-26). Therefore, in contrast to recent theoretical works on cyborgs, hybrids, and monsters, there is no dissolution of bodily identity: "separate bodies enter into alliances in order to do things," but neither is "undone" by the process (132-33).
Baker's conceptualization naturally brings up the other extreme, envisioned by science fiction writers from H.G. Wells to Octavia Butler and David Icke, who dramatize dystopic threats represented by alien figures of human-animal hybrids and use their works as allegories for political concerns such as the explosion of biotechnology. We are also reminded of the hybrid characters in the works of many contemporary artists, and the rock paintings and carvings from the dawn of time that have been discovered and widely reported all over the world. Interestingly, "Becoming animal" is the title of a recent exhibition at Mass MoCa, a museum of contemporary art in Western Massachusetts, showing works by twelve internationally-renowned artists to demonstrate the boundaries and interactions, hostilities and resonances between humans and animals. Indeed, "becoming-animal" and human-animal hybrids constitute a key feature and recurrent theme both in primitive and in postmodern art; as such, to see it as wholly creative or destructive would not be a very productive approach in literary enquiry.
It is close to impossible not to read Murakami's animals in a meaningful way. "The Kangaroo Communique" ("Kangaru Tsushin"), for instance, turns the life of the kangaroo into an analogy for the protagonist's stranded and monotonous existence. Nonetheless, Baker's conceptualization has more value in those cases where animals are more subtle and find a more intertextualized existence in Murakami's works. A good example is the elephant, which is briefly mentioned in Hear the Wind Sing (Kaze no uta o kike) (6). It evolves into the "elephants' graveyard" in Pinball, 1973 (1973-nen no pinboru), a parallel for the timeless warehouse of pinball machines and a label for the depths of the unconscious (155). The "elephant factory" in The Dancing Dwarf (Odoru kobito) describes the manufacture of genuine elephants (245-46), associating the elephant with "a creative process, the power of the imagination" (Rubin, Haruki 107). These are followed by the Professor's remark in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Sekai no owari to hadoboirudo wandarando), which compares the inner mind, or core consciousness, with the "great unexplored 'elephant graveyard,'" which he quickly corrects to the "elephant factory," stating that it is not only a burial ground for collected dead memories, but a place where "you sort through countless memories and bits of knowledge,[...] and finally make up a cognitive system" (256).
The association between the elephant and the core consciousness, memories, and imagination is not as arbitrary as it might seem, as the animal conjures such positive qualities as strength, stability, and gracefulness. It would sound reductionist to put too much emphasis on the elephant's association with Buddhism and Shintoism, yet the author, by using an animal that has strong religious meaning to symbolize the human mind, does seem to suggests that the belief in one's selfhood is as important as traditional religion in the contemporary world, if not taking its place altogether.
Compared with the elephant, the unicorn plays an even more pivotal role in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is made up of dual, interlocking narratives. In "Hard-boiled Wonderland," the unnamed male inhabitant is enmeshed in a deadly information war between the "System," a government-business hybrid, and the "Factory," a shadowy organization seeking to...
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