The artist as a medium and the artwork as metaphor in Murakami Haruki’s fiction

Abstract

In many of Murakami Haruki’s works, the protagonist is in a profession close to the world of literature, although usually not exactly a writer. In their role as translators, advertising copywriters, journalists, or editors, Murakami’s protagonists are invested with the task of rearranging fragments of reality into narrative or artistic form, and/or of transmitting a message. This process is emotionally charged, often involving a supernatural dimension. While the process of reconstructing a narrative is largely unconscious, the narrator’s choice to act in this capacity is deliberate, and is presented as a way of fulfilling his responsibility towards others. I read this element as an expression of Murakami’s vision of the role of a writer in society. The figure of the artist-narrator takes an interesting form in Kishidanchō-Goroshi (Killing Commendatore, 2017), where the protagonist, a visual artist specialising in realistic portraits, decides to pursue a more creative approach to painting that leads him to a series of supernatural adventures. Through a close reading of the novel, this article investigates how Murakami’s portrayal of the artist as a shaman-like figure functions like a metaphor for the role of the literary author as a catalyst that enables people to connect with their inner self and with each other.

Keywords:

• Murakami Haruki
• contemporary Japanese literature
• narrative fiction
• fantastic genre
• creative process

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Notes

1 For an analysis of the portrayal of the narrator as a ‘medium’ of communication between individuals in Murakami’s fiction, see Lim (2002). In this article, however, my focus is not on media of inter-individual communication, but on communication broadly conceived as the connection between different levels of reality.

2 There is one more underlying plotline, revolving around the separation of the narrator from his wife that opens and closes the story, acting as a larger framing device. In this article, however, I will only focus on the plotlines that exemplify Murakami’s vision of the artist as a medium.

3 The prevalence of correlation over rational explanation is an important element in most of Murakami’s works; as Giorgio Amitrano notes of Dansu dansu dansu, ‘connection, not causality, is the cohesive element of the narration’ (Amitrano 1996, 29).

4 Considering Murakami’s self-declared passion for Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), which he translated into Japanese in 2006, the reference to Jay Gatsby’s purchase of his luxury mansion in the fictional village of West Egg in the Long Island area in order to be able to gaze at the ‘green light across the bay’ in the fictional village of East Egg, where the home of the woman he loves, Daisy Buchanan, is located.

5 To give just a few examples: ‘I waited in silence for him to continue’ (watashi wa damatte hanashi no tsuzuki o matta, Vol. 1, 208); ‘I waited for him to continue, without saying anything’ (watashi wa nani mo iwazu ni hanashi no tsuzuki o mattta, Vol. 2, 97); ‘I was silent’ (watashi wa damatteita, Vol. 2, 178), ‘I waited for her to go on’ (watashi wa hanashi no tsuzuki o matta, Vol. 2, 274); ‘I was silent’ (watashi wa damatteita, Vol. 2, 404).

6 The theme of spying on a stranger with a telescope is at the centre of an early short story by Murakami, entitled ‘Yakyūjō’ (baseball court), where the protagonist, a university student, spies on a girl from across a baseball court with a photo camera’s tele lens. The experience is highly disturbing for the young man, and he becomes so obsessed with the activity that he stops attending classes, and even neglects to eat or wash, and is only able to emerge from this obsessive spiral when the woman moves out of the apartment at the end of term. (Murakami 1985b, 144–162. For an analysis of the story and its connection to Murakami’s narrative strategies see Suter 2008, 121–124).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Suter

Rebecca Suter is Associate Professor and Chair of Japanese Studies at the University of Sydney; she specialises in Japanese literature and cultural studies. Her publications include The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States (Suter 2008), Holy Ghosts: The Christian Century in Modern Japanese Fiction (2015), and Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Early Novels (2020). She may be contacted at [email protected]