Out of the (B)earth canal: the mythic journey in Murakami Haruki

Abstract

From the start of his writing career Murakami Haruki has sent his hero on underground quests. While all, or nearly all, of his heroes accomplish their most immediate missions in the Underworld, however, few return to the everyday world truly fulfilled. This essay explores the Murakami quest in terms of myth and sacred ritual, paying special attention to ritual initiation as a form of symbolic death and rebirth. It focuses chiefly on the 2017 novel Kishidanchō-Goroshi (translated 2018 as Killing Commendatore), but also explores other Murakami fiction written since the year 2000 such as Umibe no Kafuka (2002; Kafka On the Shore) and 1Q84 (2009–10; 1Q84), in which the author began to experiment with heroes who possess sacred qualities, yet need to awaken to and accept these qualities, as well as the responsibilities that accompany them. Such heroes, I argue, possess the potential to be successfully initiated into the mysteries of the Underworld, and thus not only to succeed in their missions underground, but to achieve the rebirth and reconstitution offered the triumphant mythic hero. As a wider theme, the essay argues that, in this modern age of rationalism, fiction centered on the theme of the mythic hero is one of the venues in which the sacred and the mythical remain a living reality, offering readers an opportunity to connect with the mythic roots of their archaic past.

Keywords:

• underworld
• initiation
• myth
• rebirth
• Kishidanchō-Goroshi

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Notes

1 Anyone who doubts this has only to note the recent trend among American leaders and the American media in referring to all American war veterans as ‘heroes’, feeding the myth of the American professional soldier as a ‘warrior’ participating in conflicts that are always ‘just’ and ‘righteous’. Such designations would not have been possible during the Vietnam War, and demonstrate that the American political community has learned its PR lessons well since the 1970s.

2 Borges’ heroes venture into unsettling dreamscapes, there to confront themselves. In the case of Shin’s (2012) Please look after mom (2012; orig. pub. 2008 as Eommareul butakhae), the title character, missing from the beginning of the story, narrates a significant portion of the text after her death. Kadaré’s (2010) novel The accident (2010; orig. pub. as Aksidenti) appears to question the finality of death itself. One might add works like Umberto Eco’s Baudolino (Eco 2002; orig. pub. 2000), the final portions of which could be read as quasi-fantasy or a really bad trip on high-grade hashish.

3 These stages of myth follow Campbell’s ‘hero steps’ as elucidated in The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

4 This is by no means to suggest that initiation is reserved for males; initiatory rites for females, however, are often quite different – and considerably more painful – for female initiates. See Brown (1963, 1971), Power and Watts (1997), Werbner (2009), etc.

5 The examples of such journeys are simply too numerous to list here. Readers interested in such matters are directed to Eliade’s A History of Religious Ideas, translated by Willard Trask, 2 vols. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978 and 1982). Other useful examples may be found in Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960).

6 As an interesting contemporary example, readers of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series may recall that, in Book Five (Rowling 2003), Harry is surprised to discover that he can now see ‘thestrals’, the winged, horse-like creatures that pull carriages at Hogwarts. He later learns that this ability comes only to those who have witnessed death, as Harry does at the end of Book Four when his godfather is killed.

7 As has been my practice with past articles and monographs, I have elected in this article to use my own translations of all Murakami texts in order to maintain stylistic cohesion with the body text. Relevant page numbers from the translated versions of these texts are also included for readers working from them. In all cases, the first reference is to the original text.

8 Such journeys are by no means unique to Kishidanchō-Goroshi in Murakami fiction. Watanabe Tōru’s journey following the death of Naoko in Norwegian Wood, the treks of Tamura Kafka and Mr. Nakata in Kafka On the Shore, and Tazaki Tsukuru’s travels to Nagoya and Finland in Colorless Tazaki Tsukuru might all be viewed as either journeys of self-discovery, of cleansing/healing, or both.

9 While one is hesitant to be too clever with wordplay, it is worth noting that watashi, after sketching the ‘White Subaru Forester Man’, describes his image as miira-ka, or ‘mummified’ (Murakami 2017, Vol. 1, 359); is this a not-so-subtle play on the word mirā (mirror)?

10 Throughout this essay I employ the term idéa, rather than the ‘Idea’ from the translated version, to differentiate the term from the more common English word ‘idea’. This is to reflect Murakami’s phoneticization of the word as イデア (pronounced ‘ee-day-ah’ rather than the conventional アイディア (pronounced ‘eye-dee-ah’). In so doing, Murakami hints that the term bears more meaning than usual. In my reading, it represents something closer to ‘ideal’ or ‘form’ in the Platonic sense.

11 This, too, is a recurring motif in Murakami fiction, but normally appears as a sense of ‘balance’ between the physical and metaphysical worlds. It is perhaps best expressed in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in which Okada Tōru is told that he cannot exist in the same world with Wataya Noboru; it cannot contain them both. Such a conflict is neatly symbolized in that work through the narrative of the mute boy ‘Cinnamon’, who dreams one night of struggling with an exact replica of himself in bed, presumably to see who would be permitted to remain in ‘this world’.

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Matthew C. Strecher

Matthew C. Strecher is professor of Japanese literature at Sophia University, Tokyo. He is author of Dances with sheep: the quest for identity in the fiction of Murakami Haruki (2002), and The forbidden worlds of Haruki Murakami (2014), among other books and essays. He may be contacted at [email protected]