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A Voice from Postmodern Japan: Haruki MurakamiAuthor(s): Yoshio IwamotoSource: World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Spring, 1993), pp. 295-300Published by: Board of Regents of the University of OklahomaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40149070 .Accessed: 15/08/2011 03:51

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A Voice from Postmodern Japan: Haruki Murakami

Forget everything you know about Japan and enter the postmodern world of Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase, where people sweat about their careers, drink too much, and drift through broken marriages, all without a kimono in sight.

A postmodern detective novel in which dreams, hallucinations and a wild imagination are more important than actual clues.

By YOSHIO IWAMOTO As these two quotes - appearing on the back cover and front page of

the paperback edition of A Wild Sheep Chase,1 the English translation of Haruki Murakami's novel Hi- tsuji o meguru boken (1982) - might suggest, the au- thor, perhaps the most popular and widely read, if not the most highly respected, among the current crop of the more "serious" Japanese writers, is frequently identified as a "postmodernist" by both Japanese and Western critics alike. The attribution somehow rings true. Still, what the term postmodern signifies exactly, and in what sense (complimentary, derisive, neutral) it is being employed, is not always made clear.

Cutting across a multitude of disciplines, discourse on postmodernism, originated by such European thinkers as Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Guat- tari, has now been a staple on the Western academic landscape for about the past two decades. Popular usage of the term has not lagged far behind. A recent issue of Time (31 August 1992), for instance, report- ing on the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow debacle, refers to the prescandal couple as having "produced the portrait of an ideal postmodern family. Unmarried, they lived apart yet loved together." Japanese scholar- critics, taking their cue from Western pronounce- ments on the subject, have been no less voluble in expatiating on the so-called postmodern condition. An effort in 1987 by a group of Western scholars to draw Japan into a larger orbit of postmodern dis- course resulted finally in a volume of essays, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, called Postmodernism and Japan,2 Representing expertise in a variety of fields, the book includes, for example, an insightful piece by the anthropologist Marilyn Ivy, who sees Japanese culture in postmodern terms by

virtue of the way knowledge is consumed, like a commodity, via its extensive high-tech information network. The essays as a whole raise a host of provoc- ative issues, among them the role Japan has played in the East- West confrontation that has contributed to the delineation of the premodern-modern-postmod- ern dialectic.

The question of the literary, artistic, and cultural manifestations of postmodernism has also received considerable attention from many scholars. Among them is Ihab Hassan, whose wide-ranging inquiries into Western postmodernism (as seen, for instance, in his collection of essays entitled The Postmodern Turn)3 include attempts, in somewhat abstract terms, to differentiate between "postmodern" and "modern" literary traits. Hassan, a frequent visitor to Japan, was moved on a recent visit to comment on the postmod- ern signs suffusing its hybrid East- West culture, spe- cifically identifying, though without any elaboration, Haruki Murakami and Yasuo Tanaka as postmod- ernist writers.4

There is little question that many contemporary Japanese artistic productions exhibit aspects of the numerous characteristics that Hassan identifies as postmodern: for example, "a diffuse self, fugitive forms, a culture open to syntagma and parataxis instead of hierarchic or generative models of organi- zation."5 Indeed, Tanaka's Nantonaku kurisutaru (Somehow Crystal; 1980) is regarded unanimously by Japanese critics as the quintessential postmodern work. Most of the novel shows, in nonlogical fashion, its characters euphorically immersed in the mood, atmosphere, and feelings generated by the brand- name goods of a consumerist society. Their attempt to forge an identity from the acquisition of these brand-name items is complemented by a section of guidebooklike notes, equal in length to the main text, that provides the reader with such information as the special qualitites of the products and where they might be purchased.6

An interesting facet of the discussion on postmod- ernism is the articulation by a number of Japanese scholars, notably Kojin Karatani,7 of the presence already in premodern Japanese culture of those ele- ments, such as hostility toward a logocentric system,

Yosmo Iwamoto is Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. The author of articles on such figures and topics as Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and proletarian literature in Japan, he has also coedited and contributed to Oe Kenzaburo bungaku: Kaigai no hydka (Ken- zaburo Oe Literature: Criticism from Abroad; 1987) and Japanese Writing 1974-1984, a special issue of The Literary Review (Winter 1987).

296 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

that Western scholars have called postmodern - a phenomenon that has facilitated the acceptance of postmodernism in Japan, without the resistance to it seen in the modern West. This observation, at the same time, confirms the view that the concept of postmodernism should not be regarded in strictly chronological terms. The assertions of the Japanese scholars accord uncannily in some respects with Ro- land Barthes's singular "reading" of Japanese culture in Uempire des signes (1970; Eng. The Empire of Signs, 1982), focusing largely on the traditional aspects (chopsticks, sukiyaki, puppet theater, Zen Buddhism, haiku) still remaining in the contemporary society, where he sees a propensity for decentering and the privileging of the signifier over the signified that tend to produce "silences" and to diffuse "meaning." In literary terms, these characteristics in turn beget such traits as fragmented structures, deemphasis on plot, delight in verbal and rhetorical playfulness, et cetera. Indeed, it might even be argued that the emergence of postmodernist literary modes in the West should help close the gap that Western readers have apparently sensed in approaching Japanese works with their episodic, nonlinear structures - say, those of Yasunari Kawabata - thus rendering them less "exotic."

*

How to situate Haruki Murakami in the scheme of postmodernist literary discourse is somewhat prob- lematic. Whence does his postmodernist penchant derive? It is easy to surmise that, as a Japanese growing up in a postindustrial, late-capitalist society already permeated with so-called postmodern proper- ties from the traditional culture, Murakami (whose parents were teachers of Japanese literature) imbibed osmotically the tendency toward postmodernist modes. Still, it would be remiss to ignore the possible Western sources. Japanese commentaries on Mu- rakami never fail to point out his love affair with Western, especially American, literature and culture.8 Born in Ashiya, near Kobe, in 1949, the author majored in drama within the Literature Department of Waseda University, where he wrote a thesis enti- tled "The Ideology of Journeys in American Films" to graduate in 1973. From 1974 to 1982 he managed a jazz bar in Tokyo, during which time he began his writing career, including translation work from American literature. His choices for translation have veered toward authors recognized as somewhat "pop- ular" and/or for their postmodernist leanings: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, John Irving, Paul Theroux, Tim O'Brien, and Truman Capote. His own work has also been com- pared with that of Jay Mclnerney, that chronicler of American yuppie life.

A Wild Sheep Chase, the third of Murakami's nov- els, displays an abundance of those postmodernist

qualities noted above.9 To begin with, the notion of dispersal and decentering can be sensed in the novel's supreme indifference to the categories of writing into which Japanese works have been habitually and rig- idly placed, as though the author were intent on collapsing hitherto sacrosanct boundaries. Is it, for instance, a tsuzoku-shosetsu (popular novel) or jun- bungaku (pure literature)?

The story concerns the first-person narrator, "I" (Boku in Japanese and so identified in the discussion that follows), the "hero" of the narrative, who is coerced by the secretary of a well-known and power- ful (but silent) right-wing figure into abandoning his part-ownership in a small advertising agency in To- kyo to go in search of a sheep with a star-shaped birthmark on its back. The sheep appears in the midst of an idyllic landscape photograph of clouds, mountains, grassy pasture, and sheep that Boku had used in advertising copy for an insurance company. The picture had been taken by an old friend of Boku nicknamed "Rat," who had suddenly disappeared several years earlier and was now apparently roaming aimlessly in Hokkaido. Thus caught in the meshes of an invisible "system," the recently divorced Boku begins a wild sheep chase to Hokkaido, his newly acquired girlfriend, an ear model, in tow. In the pursuit he encounters a motley crew of quirky, odd- ball characters and learns about the incredible tale of the spirit/soul of the sheep with the star-shaped birth- mark entering the bodies of first the Sheep Professor, then the right-wing leader, and now his lost friend Rat.

The elements of fantasy, mystery, adventure, and detective story, all presented with suspense and humor in a smooth, sophisticated style, nudge the novel in the direction of the "popular." There is enough of the "pure" and "serious" about the work, however, to have held critics back from dismissing it merely as popular stuff - enough, it might be said, of the adversarial role against established norms of all sorts that the distinguished writer Kenzaburo Oe sees as the defining feature of "pure literature."10 In other words, it seems to register a concern, albeit in a playfully oblique manner, over the human condition in the contemporary world.

Postmodernist too is A Wild Sheep Chase's frag- mented, discontinuous structure. It is paratactic, ag- glutinative, and cavalierly unfaithful to the rules of cause and effect that might be expected in a narrative that carries a detective- or mystery-story line. For instance, part 1, chapter 1 (titled "Prelude: Wednes- day Afternoon Picnic" in the translation, "25 Novem- ber 1970" in the original) bears no organic relation- ship to the story of the sheep chase, which is loosely launched in chapter 2 that begins part 2 ("July, Eight Years Later" in the translation, "July 1978" in the original). This beginning episode recalls Boku's rela- tionship with a woman who has just died and whose funeral he attends - a relationship that took place in

IWAMOTO 297

the late 1960s and early 1970s during his university days, when she was still a free-spirited, teenage flower child. At most, what the chapter contributes is a sense of Boku's nature and tastes. He records: "Those were the days of the Doors, the Stones, the Byrds, Deep Purple, and the Moody Blues. The air was alive, even as everything seemed poised on the verge of collapse, waiting for a push" (4). The chapter closes with Boku's indifferent response to the news of Yukio Mi- shima's suicide on 25 November 1970, an event wide- ly seen by critics as a marker for the end of the politically tumultuous 1960s and the beginning of the politically apathetic, economically prosperous 1970s.

Boku may well be viewed as an exemplar of the diffusion of the ego, the dispersal of the self, the death of the subject, that are an integral part of postmodern discourse. Fredric Jameson, who enunci- ates such features as the "technological sublime" and "high tech paranoia" as symptoms of the postmod- ernist mode, puts it in the following way:

Such terms [the alienation and fragmentation of the self] inevitably recall one of the more fashionable themes in contemporary theory - that of the "death" of the subject itself = the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual - and the accompanying stress, whether as some new moral ideal or as empirical description, on the decentring of that formerly centred subject or psyche. (Of the two possible formulations of this notion - the historicist one, that a once-existing centred subject, in the period of classical capitalism and the nuclear family, has today in the world of organiza- tional bureaucracy dissolved; and the more radical post- structuralist position for which such a subject never existed in the first place but constituted something like an ideological mirage - I obviously incline towards the former; the latter must in any case take into account something like a 'reality of the appearance'.)11

In Japan the issue has been taken up as a problem of shutaisei, a word not readily defined that came into existence in the pre- World War II period to deal with the Western idea of individualism which entered the country in the nineteenth century, when its modern- ization process began. No doubt in the same lineage with terms like the novelist Soseki Natsume's kojin- shugi (individualism) and the critic Hideo Kobaya- shi's shakaika-sareta watakushi (socialized self), shu- taisei is a compound made up of three characters - shu (subject, subjective, sovereign, main), tax (body, sub- stance, situation), and sei (quality, feature) - which Japanese-English dictionaries define as "subjectivity; subjecthood; independence; identity." Masao Miyo- shi in his book Off Center notes that "the word means inclusively the agent of action, the subject of specula- tion or speech act, the identity of existence, and the rule of individualism," while elsewhere glossing the term variously as "confidence," "autonomy," et cet- era.12 He concludes that the establishment of shutaisei in Japan is especially difficult because of, among other reasons, the cultural and social forces of con- formism and communalism that envelop the individ-

ual. Others have observed that the formation of shu- taisei is immeasurably hampered in a language where the subject (or, for that matter, the object) need not be explicitly stated so long as it is implied and/or understood.

Does Boku of A Wild Sheep Chase possess shutaisei? In a recorded conversation (taiwa) among three con- temporary Japanese critics concerning Murakami where the question is repeatedly raised of whether or not the author and by extension his characters are empowered with shutaisei, the answer is ambiguous and inconclusive.13 Boku, thirty years old, is in many respects an average middle-class citizen who, free from excessive financial worries, enjoys the kind of independence his station bestows. A product of the 1960s, he takes endless pleasure in smoking, drink- ing, and eating, in bars, coffeehouses, and restaurants. He dresses with casual chic and frequents the movies regularly. His tastes in music and reading materials, though predominantly popular, are disarmingly eclectic - from the Beatles to Mozart, from Sherlock Holmes to Nietzsche - in the postmodern way of leveling elite/popular boundaries. Boku is far from gregarious, yet by no means a true loner; he is by all counts a likable, easygoing fellow, devoid of malice and an overbearing aggressiveness. Indeed, endowed with a sense of humor and self-irony, he is engaging in his displays of sensitivity and tenderness, possesses a wry and ready wit, and evinces a bemused air.

Significantly, however, Boku is a member of the advertising world, that symbol of media-dominated and consumer-oriented contemporary Japanese cul- ture, which is revealed to be under the thumb of the right-wing leader by virtue of his financial holdings; it is this man who indirectly draws Boku into the maelstrom of the sheep chase and robs him of his independence. No wonder, then, that there is no core, only vacuity, to Boku's being. He is literally without a past14 (or a future, for that matter). Victims of erasure, neither his family nor his divorced wife, for instance, impinges much on his consciousness. Para- doxically, he is often filled with a sense of loss, though the content of that loss is not clearly spelled out. There are, at most, references to the style and climate of the 1960s (as noted earlier), a past that Boku tends to estheticize into an indulgent, wistful nostalgia.

The thinness of Boku's shutaisei is exposed by the absence of an interiority and in his relations with other people. If, as Jean-Paul Sartre claims, true identity is forged in the crucible of the dialectic between self and other,15 Boku fails the test. The "other" is a problematic force for the subjective "I" or self, because it too, unlike inanimate objects, is endowed with a consciousness and subjectivity that often clash with those of the self. Consciously or unconsciously, Boku tries to escape the self-other confrontation by viewing others as objects, no doubt because his own subjective self is wanting in depth.

298 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

A case in point is his relationship with his former wife. The divorce effectively takes place early on in the novel, in chapter 2, when Boku returns to their apartment after attending his old girlfriend's funeral to find his wife ready to move out for the final time. The conversation between the two skirts everything that might be thought of as essential for an under- standing of their situation. At one point Boku re- marks, "I'm not explaining. I'm just making conver- sation" (16) - summing up the tenor of their relationship. Boku is dejected over and saddened by the failed marriage; but there is no reflection what- soever on what might have gone wrong, and the matter is soon erased from his consciousness.

The relationship with his new girlfriend is carried out on no firmer ground than that with his former wife. First attracted to her by her beautiful ears glimpsed in a photograph, Boku regards her, perhaps unknowingly, as an object (her ears), thus depriving her of a subjectivity. It is not that Boku is inten- tionally mean and insensitive, only that he is funda- mentally more comfortable with exteriors and avert- ing the deep probe. Indeed, he is fully adept at displaying affection of the surface variety - a candle- light dinner in the romantic setting of a posh French restaurant, for instance. The chitchat they engage in, often bordering on the ridiculous, produces a delight- ful humor; but in the end it signifies nothing more than the postmodernist "noisy silence." Most telling is his reaction to her sudden disappearance toward the end of the novel. They have finally reached the site in the mountains of Hokkaido where the picture of the grazing sheep had been taken. As Boku naps in the villa, formerly the property of the Sheep Professor and now owned by Rat's family, she mysteriously vanishes. (The reader is informed shortly thereafter that the Sheep Man, who turns out to be the ghost of the now-dead Rat, had urged her to leave.)

I could not accept the fact of her disappearance. I was barely awake, but even if I were totally lucid, this - and everything that was happening to me - was far beyond my realm of comprehension. There was almost nothing one could do except let things take their course. (244)

Far from chasing after her, Boku proceeds to prepare his dinner - stew, bread, an apple, and wine - which he consumes while listening to a record of the Percy Faith Orchestra playing "Perfidia." The extent of his reflection runs as follows, laying bare his penchant for estheticizing and romanticizing even the very recent past: "I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off" (246).

Boku's attitude toward "others" is perhaps most basically reflected in his aversion to referring to them by their proper names (which are never revealed), as if denying them their independent, subjective identi-

ties. (Since Boku ["I"] himself is not assigned a name, the proclivity in turn mirrors that of the author, who in fact has littered his oeuvre with nameless charac- ters.)16 Thus, Boku's wife is merely "the wife," his girlfriend "the girlfriend with the beautiful ears," and, like the "secretary," the "business partner," and the "hotel clerk," who also inhabit the novel's world, they are reduced to their functional categories. What- ever names do appear are nicknames, such as Rat and Sheep Professor, perhaps suggesting these characters' less-than-human capacities.

The antipathy toward naming is no accident. The topic is taken up within the novel itself and given a comic turn. When Boku is forced to leave Tokyo in search of the special sheep, in a funny scene of reverse bullying, he insists that the right-wing leader's secre- tary care for his aged cat. Sent to pick up the feline, the secretary's chauffeur asks its name.

"Nice kitty-kitty," said the chauffeur, hand not out- stretched. "What's his name?"

"He doesn't have a name." "So what do you call the fella?" "I don't call it," I said. "It's just there." "But he's not a lump just sitting there. He moves

about by his own will, no? Seems mighty strange that something that moves by its own will doesn't have a name." (152)

The conversation continues with an amusing give- and-take on why some things (like ships) are accord- ed names whereas others are not (like airplanes). The problem goes unresolved, even as the conversants consider the "act of conscious identification with living things" and "non-interchangeability" as possi- ble bases for naming (154).

A symptom of Boku's exteriority is his almost fetishistic attention to trivia, to "things." It is as if a careful tracking of "things" furnishes him with a handle and a grip on a recalcitrant reality. He notes the exact number of steps from the elevator to the door of his apartment, the amount of coffee and cigarettes he consumes, or the time that a particular song was in vogue; he becomes obsessively curious about a whale's penis on display at an aquarium he visits. Even something so intimate as sex turns into a "thing." Concerning his own sexual affairs, about which he is surprisingly reticent, at one point he records perfunctorily, "We returned to the hotel and had intercourse. I like that word intercourse. It poses only a limited range of possibilities" (172). Sex, it would seem, offers him not much more than the sensual gratification he derives from the consump- tion of "things," like gourmet foods.

Boku's perception of and response to people and things leans heavily on the side of the immediate, the physical, the sensual, mixed with not a little affecta- tion. Riding in the limousine driven by the chauf- feur, he comments, "Compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle I'd bought off a friend, [it] was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing

IWAMOTO 299

earplugs" (65). He reacts to his girlfriend's ears in the following way:

She'd show me her ears on occasion; mostly on sexual occasions. Sex with her with her ears exposed was an experience Pd never known. When it was raining, the smell of the rain came through crystal clear. When birds were singing, their song was a thing of sheer clarity. I'm at a loss for words, but that's what it was like. (39)

Anything requiring sustained thought, spiritual in- put, or a committed stance bores him, perhaps even frightens him. What he finds hard to handle or bothersome, he dismisses with slick, flippant aphor- isms, something he remarks Russians are prey to: "Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up" (96). Here he is on the matter of sex:

To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there's sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there's sex as pastime.

There's sex for self-improvement start to finish and

Haruki Murakami

^

there's sex for killing time straight through; sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as nothing-better- to-do, and vice versa. Our human sex life - how shall I put it? - differs fundamentally from the sex life of the whale. (25)

It bears reiteration that Boku is by no means a despicable man, out to perpetrate evil. Neither is he coldly indifferent toward those around him - his for- mer wife, his girlfriend, or J the bar owner. He seems genuinely fond of his friend Rat in particular, carry- ing out with good cheer the curious favors the latter requests. In fact, Rat appears in many ways to be the alter ego of Boku himself - Rat's letters to Boku have the same mannerisms and tone as Boku's speech. Ultimately, however, Boku avoids engagement and commitment, those qualities Sartre deemed so essen- tial in human relations. Short in attention span, he is constitutionally incapable of giving fully of himself to anything. All is surface.

Some Japanese critics have expressed dissatisfac- tion with Murakami, complaining that his works lack a deep-seated sociopolitico-historical awareness, as if such an awareness were a sine qua non for a fully developed shutaisei. There is no denying that Boku, who apparently dodged the turbulent student riots of the 1960s, is mostly uninterested in such matters. However, to assert that Murakami is oblivious to sociopolitical concerns seems extreme. There is enough in A Wild Sheep Chase to prove otherwise. What troubles the critics, perhaps, is the teasing, playful, oblique, and incomplete manner - a post- modernist manner - with which they are treated, never allowing them to become central to the narra- tive. There is, for instance, the matter of the socio- politico-historical implications of the sheep. A third of the way into the novel, the right-wing leader's secretary furnishes a ponderous summary of the his- tory of sheep in Japan, an animal alien to Japanese soil. The importation of sheep from America began in earnest in the Meiji period (1868-1912), parallel- ing the country's modernization process. Why, it is logical to ask, is the spirit of the sheep with the star- shaped birthmark made to lodge in the brain of a right-wing nationalist who comes to control politics and the advertising and information industries? And why is it made to find, just before the leader's death, a new host in Rat, who commits suicide in order to kill the sheep? What does the sheep "mean"?

Not a few Japanese critics have taken up the task of sorting out the puzzle of the sheep. To mention but two examples: Kazuo Kuroki, briefly put, interprets the sheep chase as a sentimental journey on Boku's part in search of his lost youth;17 Mitsuo Sekii sees the sheep as a symbol of Christian, Western society, which Japan tried to emulate in its course of modern- ization, and its death at the end signifies the demise of modernity.18 None of the analyses, however, ac- counts convincingly for, for example, the connection

300 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY

between the sheep and the right-wing leader. Mura- kami himself has admitted that the sheep as a "key word" was used primarily in the spirit of a game, without any deep significance.19 There is the tempta- tion to take Murakami at his word, for the "clues" lead nowhere, leaving unanswered what at first looked like a serious historical query about Japanese- Western relations. In the end the novel appears to argue for the postmodern position of decentering and dispersal. The ghost of Rat explains to Boku his reason for murdering the sheep. The sheep, he says, was lusting after "a realm of total conceptual anarchy. A scheme in which all opposites would be resolved into unity. With me and the sheep at the center" (284).

That A Wild Sheep Chase found an immense read- ership in Japan is no surprise. It deftly combines equal measures of hard-boiled realism and beguiling lyricism, of humor and seriousness. It is easy to conjecture that countless readers see mirrored in Boku's breezy, go-with-the-flow attitude their own approach to living in a glossy world dominated by high technology and consumerism. Much more diffi- cult to assess is Murakami's disposition toward Boku and his noncommittal moral posture, or toward the kind of cultural condition that produced him. To be noted, however, is a more openly critical stance dis- cernible in, for example, Murakami's recent collec- tion of short stories called TV piipuru (TV People; 1990).

Indiana University

1 Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, Alfred Birnbaum, tr., New York, Penguin/Plume Books, 1990. Page references appearing in the body of this paper will be to this edition. The English translation was first published in 1989 by Kodansha International and was reviewed in WLT 64:4 (Autumn 1990), p. 701.

2 Postmodernism and Japan, Masao Miyoshi & H. D. Harootu- nian, eds., Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1989. Reviewed in WLT 64:2 (Spring 1990), p. 364.

3 Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1987.

4 Ihab Hassan, "The Burden of Mutual Perceptions: Japan and the United States," lecture presented at the International House of Japan on 15 May 1989. The lecture appears in the International House of Japan Bulletin, 10:1 (Winter 1990), and is reproduced in Salmagundi, 85/86 (Winter- Spring 1990), pp. 71-86.

5 Ihab Hassan, "Parabiography: The Varieties of Critical Experi- ence," in The Postmodern Turn, p. 160.

6 There is an interesting analysis of this work by Norma Field in Postmodernism and Japan.

7 Karatani Kojin, Hihyo to posuto modan (Criticism and the Postmodern), Tokyo, Fukutake Shoten, 1985, pp. 9^9. (In origi- nal-language references the names are given in Japanese sequence, surname first.)

8 Two examples are: Matsuzawa Masahiro, Haruki, Banana, Gen'ichiro (the given names of three contemporary Japanese writ- ers), Tokyo, Aoyumisha, 1989; and Sengoku Hideyo, Airon o kakeru seinen: Murakami Haruki to Amerika (A Young Man Who Does Ironing: Haruki Murakami and America), Tokyo, Sairyusha, 1991.

9 Besides A Wild Sheep Chase, there is one other Murakami novel in English translation available to American readers: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Alfred Birnbaum, tr., New York, Kodansha International, 1991), a work that was originally published in Japanese under the title Sekai no owari to hddo-boirudo wandd rando. Other Murakami novels in English translation, avail- able in Japan, are not sold in the United States.

10 See Kenzaburo Oe, "Japan's Dual Identity: A Writer's Dilem- ma," WLT 62:3 (Summer 1988), pp. 359-69. In this article Oe denies that Murakami's work constitutes "pure literature."

11 Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, no. 146 (July- August 1984), pp. 53-92.

12 Masao Miyoshi, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations Be- tween Japan and the United States, Cambridge, Ma., Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1991, p. 98.

13 Kasai Kiyoshi, Kato Ten'yo, & Takeda Seishi, Murakami Haruki o meguru boken (Haruki Murakami's Adventures), Tokyo, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1991. It is often difficult to fathom the real meaning of the sound-bite-size utterances issuing from the participants in a taiwa, where little is discussed in a sustained way.

14 A Wild Sheep Chase is regarded as the last volume in a trilogy that began with Kaze no uta o kike (Listen to the Wind Song; 1979) and was followed by 7976 nopinboru (Pinball in 1976; 1980); but in these two previous works too not a great deal is revealed about Boku's past.

15 See the section entitled "Being-for-Others" in Jean-Paul Sar- tre, Being and Nothingness, New York, Washington Square Press, 1966.

16 Kojin Karatani offers a complicated, philosophically oriented explanation for Murakami's avoidance of names and like matters. See the chapter entitled "Murakami Haruki no 'fukei'" (Haruki Murakami's "Landscape"), in his Shuen o megutte (Concerning the End), Tokyo, Fukutake Shoten, 1990.

17 Kuroki Kazuo, Murakami Haruki: Za rosuto wdrudo (Haruki Murakami: The Lost World), Tokyo, Rokko Shuppan, 1989, p. 71.

18 Sekii Mitsuo, "

'Hitsuji' wa doko e kieta ka" (Where Did the "Sheep" Disappear?), Kokubungaku Kaishaku to Kyozai no Kenkyu, 30:3 (March 1985), p. 124.

19 Quoted in Hisai Tsubaki & Kuwa Masato, Zo ga heigen ni kaette hi (The Day the Elephant Returned to the Plains), Tokyo, Shinchosha, 1991, pp. 183-84.