KODAI ABE

ABSTRACT This ar­ti­cle shows how Murakami Haruki’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chron-icle (1994–95) con­structs a his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive to over­come the vic­tim/per­pe­tra­tordi­chot­omy and de­mands eth­i­cal re­sponse from read­ers. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’sterm postmemory, the au­thor an­a­lyzes the novel as a postmemory gen­er­a­tion’s strug­gle over the ques­tion of how postmemory gen­er­a­tions of a for­mer per­pe­tra­tor coun­try
would be ­able to eth­i­cally re­spond to a tem­po­rally dis­tanced, shame­ful, and trau­matic
past. Murakami’s postmemory pro­tag­o­nist ar­chives scattered pieces of the war­timeand post­war pasts nar­rated by di­rectly trau­ma­tized oth­ers and con­structs a his­tor­i­
cal nar­ra­tive to crit­i­cally over­come the vic­tim/per­pe­tra­tor di­chot­omy that reg­u­lates
the dis­course surrounding war­time Japan’s vi­o­lent his­to­ry. By hav­ing his non­vi­o­lent
pro­tag­o­nist as­sume a vi­o­lent as­pect and turn into a per­pe­tra­tor, the au­thor ar­gues,
Murakami de­mands an eth­ic­ al re­sponse from con­tem­po­rary read­ers, that is, not sim­ply
un­der­stand­ing his­tor­i­cal vi­o­lence as a past to be crit­i­cized but imag­in­ing it as “our”
own, on­go­ing prob­lem.
KEYWORDS Jap­a­nese his­to­ry, war crimes, postwar responsibility, memory studies,

The Wind-Up Bird ChronicleI

n 2020 Murakami Haruki sur­prised his read­ers by pub­lish­ing a per­sonal mem­oir,
Abandoning a Cat: Memories of My Father (Neko o suteru: Chichioya ni tsuite katarutoki). In this slim piece, the world-fa­mous Jap­a­nese nov­el­ist known for his ret­ic­ encere­gard­ing his fam­ily his­to­ry, now in his sev­en­ties, fi­nally broke his si­lence. As many
had conjectured, Murakami was at odds with his fa­ther, Chiaki, whose death in 2008
prompted him to em­bark on an in­ves­ti­ga­tion into the fa­ther’s past. And yet Murakami
found him­self un­able to set his mind to it. What prevented him from delv­ing into his
fa­ther’s his­tory was that Chiaki, as Murakami re­mem­bered, had served in the Twentieth Infantry Regiment dur­ing the Asia-Pacific War. This reg­im­ ent, at­tached to the
Sixteenth Division of the Jap­a­nese Imperial Army, was no­to­ri­ous for lead­ing the Battleof Nanjing—a bat­tle now known as the Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing—in
which Jap­a­nese sol­diers slaughtered Chi­nese ci­vil­ians and un­armed com­bat­ants. It
took five years for the nov­el­ist to over­come his re­luc­tance and dis­cover that Chiaki,
con­trary to Murakami’s mem­o­ry, was conscripted into the Sixteenth Logistics Regiment of the same di­vi­sion in 1938, not the Twentieth Infantry Regiment that led the 1937mas­sa­cre. “Knowing this,” Murakami (2020: 40) writes, “I got a feel­ing that a weight

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DOI: 10.1215/00219118-10687337 © 2023 Association for Asian Studies

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Murakami Haruki’s Postmemoryof the Asia-Pacific War

Abe • Murakami Haruki’s Postmemory of the Asia-Pacific War

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had been lifted from my heart.” This mem­oir, how­ev­er, is not sim­ply a story about how
a mem­ory is proven wrong much to the au­thor’s relief. Soon af­ter this quoted pas­sage,
Murakami stresses Chiaki’s mem­ory of the beheading of a Chi­nese cap­tive; though
the fa­ther re­counts that the reg­i­ment did it, Murakami seems to be­lieve, judg­ing fromthe his­tor­i­cal ev­i­dence, that Chiaki was di­rectly in­volved. Murakami char­ac­ter­izes thiswork as an at­tempt to “in­her­it” his­tory that is per­sonal as well as col­lec­tive. Beginningwith an ep­i­sode of abandoning a cat that mag­i­cally makes its way back home fasterthan Murakami and Chiaki on bi­cy­cles, it is a story about some­thing that is im­pos­si­ble to aban­don, a his­to­ry/mem­ory that keeps returning home. For Murakami, thismeans the Jap­a­nese his­tor­i­cal vi­o­lence dur­ing the Asia-Pacific War per­pe­trated by hisfa­ther’s gen­er­a­tion.
Six years ear­li­er, when asked to com­ment on the Asia-Pacific War’s approachingsev­en­ti­eth an­ni­ver­sa­ry, Murakami (2014) re­ferred to “avoid­ance of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty”(sekinin kaihi) as struc­tur­ing the post­war Jap­a­nese men­tal­ity as seen in the af­ter­
math of the war and, more re­cent­ly, the 2011 earth­quake and nu­clear di­sas­ter inFukushima. “Basically,” he stat­ed, “Jap­a­nese lack per­pe­tra­tor con­scious­ness” (kagaisha demo atta toiu hassō). They are used to re­gard­ing them­selves as vic­tims, and “theten­dency is only in­creas­ing,” which, he be­lieves, “should ex­as­per­ate Chi­nese andKo­rean peo­ple.” Though the fact that it was a ce­leb­rity of the stat­ure of Murakami
who expressed this crit­i­cal stance against Jap­a­nese at­ti­tudes to­ward the past madethis news­wor­thy to some ex­tent, his re­marks them­selves do not go be­yond lib­eral
clichés.1 Yet what he calls the “avoid­ance of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty” here was the very thingthat the nov­el­ist found within him­self and strug­gled to con­front while liv­ing in the
United States dur­ing the early 1990s. Murakami fa­mously char­ac­ter­ized this “turn”
as one from “de­tach­ment” (detatchimento) to “com­mit­ment” (komittomento), which
he clar­i­fied in a con­ver­sa­tion with the psy­chol­o­gist Kawai Hayao (Murakami and
Kawai 1999). In his early ca­reer, re­calls Murakami, he “just wanted to flee, flee, andflee” from any so­cial re­la­tion­ship and “was writ­ing nov­els all­by my­self ” (de­tach­ment) (14–15). Yet dur­ing his four-and-a-half years as a vis­it­ing scholar at Princeton
University, he grad­u­ally be­gan to feel the need for com­mit­ment, which he para­phrases as “con­nec­tion” or “so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty” (71–72). Throughout the 1995 di­a­logue, Murakami had in mind a spe­cific nov­el, one that he had just com­plet­ed: The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95).2 In the nov­el, he tried to ex­press his com­mit­ment
by “reconsidering [arai naosu] the Asia-Pacific War that re­sides within my­self [jibunno naka no]”—a vi­o­lent his­tory and mem­ory un­der­ly­ing the Jap­a­nese avoid­ance ofre­spon­si­bil­i­ty.
Murakami’s “turn” had a his­tor­i­cal con­text. The 1980s and 1990s were a time whenmem­o­ries of Jap­a­nese war­time crimes resurfaced on a global scale, ow­ing in partto Amer­i­can re­dress ac­tiv­ism, even as Japan witnessed the rise of neo-na­tion­al­ism.
China crit­i­cized Jap­a­nese re­vi­sion­ism af­t er in­ter­na­tional his­tory text­book con­tro­ver­sies erupted in 1982 and 1987; Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro paid his firstof­fi­cial visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, where the spir­its of war crim­i­nals are enshrined,
in 1985; the Nanjing Memorial Hall was built in China the same year; Emperor Hirohito died in 1989; for­mer Ko­rean “com­fort wom­en” tes­ti­fied and filed a law­suit inTokyo court in 1991; his­tor­i­cal ev­i­dence of the Jap­a­nese gov­ern­ment’s sys­tem­aticin­volve­ment in the “com­fort sys­tem” was revealed in 1992; the fif­ti­eth an­ni­ver­sary of622 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES • 82:4 • No­vem­ber 2023

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the end of the war was me­mo­ri­al­ized in 1995; and the re­vi­sion­ist Jap­a­nese Society for
History Textbook Reform was or­ga­nized in 1996. It was in this so­cio­his­tor­i­cal con­text that Murakami felt the need to re­con­sider the Asia-Pacific War. Yet at the sametime, as he confesses to Kawai, a ther­a­pist old enough to be his fa­ther, he did notknow how to re­spond to a war that predated his birth. The so­cio­his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tion
called for a com­mit­ment to Jap­a­nese war­time his­to­ry, which meant, though he does
not say so in the di­a­logue, confronting his fa­ther’s pos­si­ble par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Nanjing Massacre. Referring to the dif­fi­culty of com­mit­ment, he identifies it as not just aper­sonal pre­dic­a­ment but one fac­ing the Jap­a­nese as a whole (Murakami and Kawai
1999: 19). In discussing his turn in lit­er­ary style, he also talks as a post­war-gen­er­a­tion
writer about how to con­front and cri­tique the Jap­a­nese avoid­ance of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.
In stark con­trast to En­glish-lan­guage ac­a­dem­ics’ se­ri­ous en­gage­ment with
Mur­akami, this nov­el­ist of de­tach­ment has long annoyed and been cas­ti­gated byJap­a­nese crit­ics—in­clud­ing such prominent fig­ures as Karatani Kōjin ([1990] 1995),
Hasumi Shigehiko (1995), Watanabe Na­omi (1998), and Komori Yōichi (2006),
among many oth­ers—for his ahis­tor­i­cal, ir­re­spon­si­ble style. This crit­i­cism onlyin­ten­si­fied af­t er the pub­li­ca­tion of the ex­plic­itly his­tor­i­cal novel Wind-Up Bird be­cause, as Hasumi (1995) al­le­ges, “it to­tally lacks his­tory [issai fuzai].”3 In ar­gu­ing
against this long-stand­ing crit­i­cal con­sen­sus, Azuma Hiroki (2019), a youn­gergen­er­a­tion Jap­a­nese crit­ic, re­con­sid­ers Wind-Up Bird in a re­cent ar­ti­cle. This novel
is re­mark­able, Azuma ar­gues, not be­cause it marks Murakami’s first se­ri­ous at­tempt
to con­front, per­haps in­ad­e­quate­ly, Jap­a­nese war­time his­to­ry; its sig­nif­i­cance lies in­stead in its crit­i­cal ex­plo­ra­tion of “how to pass on per­pe­tra­tor mem­ory to fu­turegen­er­a­tions” when it has al­ready been for­got­ten (61, 66). Murakami resorted to amag­ic­ al de­vice, the well, through which the pro­tag­o­nist is ­able to retrace and re­trieve
Japan’s evil his­to­ry, to imag­ine what it means to be per­pe­tra­tor rather than vic­tim.
To bet­ter ar­tic­u­late the sig­nif­i­cance of Murakami’s his­tor­i­cal nov­el, I want to un­pack
Azuma’s read­ing with re­course to mem­ory stud­ies, es­pe­cially what Marianne Hirsch(1997: 22) terms “postmemory,” which “char­ac­ter­izes the ex­pe­ri­ence of those whogrow up dom­i­nated by nar­ra­tives that pre­ceded their birth.” While Hirsch fo­cusedon the chil­dren of Holocaust sur­vi­vors, her the­ory also of­fers in­sights for discussing
nar­ra­tives pro­duced by post­war gen­er­a­tions in a per­pe­tra­tor coun­try. “Postmemory
is a pow­er­ful and very par­tic­u­lar form of mem­o­ry,” Hirsch ex­plains, “pre­cisely be­cause its con­nec­tion to its ob­ject or source is me­di­ated not through rec­ol­lec­tion but
through an imag­i­na­tive in­vest­ment and cre­a­tion” (22). In a coun­try like Japan, where
the avoid­ance of re­spon­si­bil­ity and will­ful obliv­i­ous­ness concerning the shame­ful
past are the de­fault po­si­tions, post­war gen­er­a­tions’ en­gage­ment with lived his­tory
via imag­i­na­tion would as­sume “a pow­er­ful and very par­tic­u­lar” as­pect be­cause of,
not de­spite, its “me­di­at­ed” relationality to vi­o­lent his­to­ry.
This ar­ti­cle shows how Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle con­structs a his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive in an at­tempt to over­come the vic­tim/per­pe­tra­tor di­chot­omy andde­mand eth­i­cal re­spon­sive­ness from read­ers. The novel asks: how should postmemory gen­er­a­tions of a for­mer per­pe­tra­tor coun­try eth­i­cally re­spond to a tem­po­rally
dis­tanced, shame­ful, and trau­matic past? In con­sid­er­ing this ques­tion, I be­gin byof­fer­ing his­tor­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal con­text, while bridg­ing Jap­a­nese- and En­glishlan­guage ac­a­demic con­ver­sa­tions about war mem­ory and trau­ma. Next, I an­a­lyzeAbe • Murakami Haruki’s Postmemory of the Asia-Pacific War

623

TRAUMA AND (POST)MEMORY OF A PERPETRATOR COUNTRY
Since the “mem­ory boom” that erupted around 1990 in the con­text of the impending
dis­ap­pear­ance of World War II sur­vi­vors, there has been an out­pour­ing of mem­ory
stud­ies schol­ar­ship concerning how to ar­chive and in­herit the tes­ti­mo­nies of first­
hand witnesses. This crit­i­cal vogue was con­cur­rent with the boom in trauma the­o­ry, and most mem­ory stud­ies schol­ars were en­gaged with trau­matic events like the
Holocaust and the spa­tio­tem­po­ral dis­tance from the orig­i­nal event. In char­ac­ter­iz­ing
her sem­i­nal idea of postmemory, Hirsch (1997: 22) em­pha­sizes the de­gree of me­di­a­tion: “Postmemory is dis­tin­guished from mem­ory by gen­er­a­tional dis­tance andfrom his­to­ry.” To ar­tic­u­late what she de­scribes as the “pow­er­ful and very par­tic­u­lar”
po­ten­tial of postmemory gen­er­a­tions’ en­gage­ment with trau­matic his­to­ry, revisiting
Sigmund Freud’s clas­sic def­i­ni­tion of trauma proves in­sight­ful. As Freud the­o­rizes it([1914] 1958: 152), trauma dif­fers from or­di­nary “mem­o­ry” in that it is in­ac­ces­si­ble.
When it comes to trau­ma, it is not that a pa­tient is re­luc­tant to re­call a pain­ful ex­pe­
ri­ence: “[he] can­not re­mem­ber the whole of what is re­pressed in him,” and all­one
can do is to com­pul­sively re­peat (“act out”) the re­pressed mem­ory with­out know­ingthat he or she is re­peat­ing it ([1920] 1989: 18). This is where psy­cho­an­a­lysts, who are
doc­tors, come into play; they can in­ter­vene in the path­o­log­i­cal pro­cess pre­cisely be­cause they are out­sid­ers to the trau­matic event. They are not trau­ma­tized, of course,
and there­fore are ­able to help the pa­tient “find the cour­age to di­rect his at­ten­tion to
the phe­nom­ena of his ill­ness.” Psychoanalysts are pro­fes­sional out­sid­ers, so to speak,
who can help their pa­tients bring trauma into con­scious­ness. Those who be­lat­edlyen­gage with trau­matic his­tory like Murakami, I sug­gest, can oc­cupy an anal­o­gous
po­si­tion from which to fa­cil­i­tate ac­cess to lived trau­matic his­to­ries, pre­cisely be­cause of their out­sid­er­ness to such events that the di­rectly trau­ma­tized gen­er­a­tion
has been un­will­ing or un­able to con­sti­tute and re­mem­ber. Postmemory can gaindis­cur­sive power be­cause, par­a­dox­i­cal­ly, of its out­sid­er­ness and be­lat­ed­ness.
In con­sid­er­ing the case of post­war Japan, the Holocaust-mem­ory scholar Gab­
riele Schwab’s Haunting Legacies (2010: 71) mer­its at­ten­tion for its addressing of
postmemory prob­lem­at­ics from the per­spec­tive of Germany, “a na­tion of defeatedper­pe­tra­tors.” In such fraught cases, peo­ple are prevented from mourn­ing ei­ther
Jew­ish vic­tims or Ger­man vic­tim­iz­ers. “How,” Schwab asks, “can one mourn the lossof a few lives in one’s own fam­ily if your peo­ple were guilty of try­ing to ex­ter­mi­nate

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ep­i­sodes re­lated to Manchuria and sex­u­al­ized vi­o­lence nar­rated in the first per­son
by sev­eral char­ac­ters in the nov­el, which to­gether tes­tify to the con­tin­uum be­tween
Japan’s war­time ideologies and its post­war so­cial, cul­tur­al, and po­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion.
Murakami’s postmemory pro­tag­o­nist, Tōru, ar­chives scattered pieces of the war­timeand post­war pasts nar­rated by di­rectly trau­ma­tized oth­ers and con­structs an al­ter­na­tive his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive to over­come the vic­tim/per­pe­tra­tor di­chot­omy that dom­i­na­
tes the dis­course surrounding war­time Japan’s vi­o­lent his­to­ry. Finally, I dis­cuss how
Tōru man­ages to imag­ine and con­sti­tute his own means of his­tor­i­cal en­gage­ment.
By show­ing how his non­vi­o­lent pro­tag­o­nist be­comes vi­o­lent and trans­forms into aper­pe­tra­tor, I con­clude, Murakami de­mands an eth­i­cal re­sponse from his con­tem­po­rary read­ers, one that in­volves not sim­ply un­der­stand­ing his­tor­i­cal vi­o­lence as apast to be crit­ic­ ized but also imag­in­ing it as “our” own, on­go­ing prob­lem.

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a whole other peo­ple?” (75). In Japan, in­deed, this ques­tion was a cen­tral is­sue in theso-called de­bate on his­tor­i­cal sub­jects (rekishi shutai ronsō), a heated con­tro­versy
that broke out in 1995 be­tween the lit­er­ary critic Katō Norihiro and the French phi­los­o­phy scholar Takahashi Tetsuya. In re­sponse to Katō’s (2015: 84) as­ser­tion that
the Jap­a­nese need to es­tab­lish their own sub­jec­tiv­ity by prop­erly mourn­ing fallen
Jap­a­nese sol­diers (eirei) be­fore mov­ing on to take re­spon­si­bil­ity for their war crimes
and mourn Asian vic­tims, Takahashi ([1999] 2005: 147–77) condemned Katō’s ar­gu­
ment as a de­spi­ca­ble ex­pres­sion of neo­con­ser­va­tism and insisted that the mourn­ingof Asian vic­tims must come first. While their dis­pute should not be re­duced to thissin­gle is­sue, it sub­se­quently be­came a kind of po­lit­i­cal lit­mus test re­gard­ing whether
to pri­or­i­tize Asian vic­tims (lib­er­al) or Jap­a­nese sol­diers (con­ser­va­tive). More thanhalf a cen­tury af­ter the end of the war, how­ev­er, the se­quen­tial or­der of mourn­ing, it
seems to me, should no lon­ger be the fo­cal point for dis­cus­sion; such a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion could even dis­tract our at­ten­tion from the more fun­da­men­tal in­abil­ity to prop­
erly mourn at all­. Schwab (2010: 82) writes: “We have ar­rived at a place in his­tory
where we can no lon­ger af­ford to deal with the his­to­ries of vic­tims and per­pe­tra­tors
in iso­la­tion.” Murakami, work­ing on his postmemory novel dur­ing the same years as
this de­bate, would surely have agreed. His gen­er­a­tional dis­tance—a spa­tio­tem­po­ral,psy­cho­log­i­cal, and po­lit­i­cal one—from the orig­i­nal events en­abled him to removehim­self from the my­o­pic view of Jap­a­nese his­tor­i­cal (ir)re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.
When it comes to the ques­tion of mem­o­ry, Murakami’s pro­tag­o­nists are “no­to­ri­ously for­get­ful” (Treat 2013: 94). In Wind-Up Bird, which marks Murakami’s turnto­ward his­tor­ic­ al and eth­i­cal com­mit­ment, how­ev­er, he did not sim­ply do away with
the iconic plot and char­ac­ter­iza­tion of his ear­lier de­tached style; in­stead, he selfcrit­i­cally re­cast them in the ser­vice of se­ri­ous his­tor­i­cal in­qui­ry. In the typ­i­cal
Murakami sto­ry, a young male pro­tag­o­nist’s wife or girl­friend dis­ap­pears for noap­par­ent rea­son while he plays it cool. In Wind-Up Bird, the pro­tag­o­nist Tōru’s wife,
Kumiko, also vanishes (as does their cat). This time, how­ev­er, Tōru se­ri­ously en­gages
in try­ing to find her, dur­ing which pro­cess he grad­u­ally re­al­izes that her mys­te­ri­ous
dis­ap­pear­ance is ul­ti­mately rooted in Japan’s fail­ure to fully ad­dress its his­tor­i­cal vi­o­lence in the Asia-Pacific War. While inheriting the Murakamiesque tra­di­tion, Tōru,re­peat­edly ob­serv­ing that he tries to re­call but cannot, ini­tially embodies post­war
Japan’s his­tor­i­cal obliv­i­ous­ness. Wind-Up Bird marks the nov­el­ist’s his­tor­i­cal turn inre­cast­ing such de­tached traits as symp­toms of Japan’s col­lec­tive avoid­ance of re­spon­si­bil­ity and questioning how an obliv­i­ous, de­tached Jap­a­nese pro­tag­o­nist might
move to­ward com­mit­ment. While awak­en­ing to the na­tion’s his­tor­i­cal re­spon­si­bil­ity
and the need to com­mit him­self to it, Tōru, mirroring Murakami’s pre­dic­a­ment,
strug­gles to find a prac­ti­cal way in which to con­cret­ize his re­spon­si­bil­ity as a postmemory sub­ject. What are the con­di­tions and cri­te­ria of later gen­er­a­tions’ eth­i­calre­spon­si­bil­ity to­ward dis­tant his­to­ries of vi­o­lence in which they did not par­tic­i­pate?
In seek­ing to an­swer this ques­tion, Wind-Up Bird im­plic­itly draws on Jap­a­nese lit­er­ary pre­ce­dents.
While dis­tanc­ing him­self from Jap­a­nese lit­er­ary cir­cles (bundan), Murakami
has al­ways paid at­ten­tion to the work of Ōe Kenzaburō, the most prominent wargen­er­a­tion nov­el­ist and po­lit­i­cally com­mit­ted in­tel­lec­tu­al. Though Ōe is known as aharsh critic of early Murakami—he once asserted that Murakami’s style was noth­ing

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more than a mim­icry of Amer­i­can nov­el­ists—Wind-Up Bird, in fact, can be read asa po­lit­i­co-lit­er­ary re­sponse to Ōe’s 1964 (1969) novel A Personal Matter from a postmemory per­spec­tive. The lat­ter’s pro­tag­o­nist, Bird, is strug­gling with the ques­tionof whether to let his de­formed new­born baby live or die. This an­guish, which corresponded to Ōe’s own pre­dic­a­ment re­gard­ing his con­gen­i­tally dis­abled child, iswhat the nov­el’s ti­tle re­fers to. It is “lim­ited to me,” the pro­tag­o­nist de­clares of his
eth­i­cal bind; “it’s en­tirely a per­sonal mat­ter.” Bird con­tin­ues, “What I’m ex­pe­ri­enc­
ing per­son­ally now is like dig­ging a ver­ti­cal mine shaft in iso­la­tion; it goes straight
down to a hope­less depth and never opens on any­body else’s world” (120). Thus Ōe
thematizes the in­abil­ity to share such a per­sonal mat­ter with oth­ers, though Birdeven­tu­ally man­ages to find “a side tun­nel” connected to “ev­ery­one.” What hap­pensin Wind-Up Bird is quite the re­verse. Tōru has no per­sonal mat­ter that he hopes toshare with oth­ers; trau­ma­tized oth­ers feel com­pelled to share their per­sonal mat­ters with him. Tōru’s com­mit­ment is grad­u­ally con­sti­tuted through re­la­tional net­work­ing with in­di­vid­u­als whose (post)war per­sonal mat­ters are iden­ti­fied vaguely
as “some­thing” (nanika, al­ways with the em­pha­sis dot in Jap­a­nese) through­out thenov­el. This some­thing can be read as the Jap­a­nese war­time psy­cho-his­tor­i­cal com­plex that was not ad­e­quately addressed af­ter the war and keeps giv­ing rise to var­i­ous
symp­toms such as vi­o­lence, numb­ness, and in­cur­able dis­ease; it is a ge­neric term
for unconstituted Jap­a­nese col­lec­tive his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry. To lo­cate side tun­nels connected to ev­ery­one, Tōru goes down to the bot­tom of a dry well—Murakami’s ver­sion of a ver­ti­cal mine shaft—into which oth­ers’ per­sonal mat­ters flow. Tōru, whosename means “pass through” in Jap­a­nese, func­tions as a me­dium through which trau­
ma­tized sub­jects’ fragmented mem­o­ries can be re­col­lected to form an in­her­it­ablenar­ra­tive. Murakami’s work is an ar­chive, as Jon­a­than Boulter (2011: 16) ob­serves,that keeps displaced trau­mas imag­i­na­tively re­cur­ring. Wind-Up Bird is a story about
a postmemory pro­tag­o­nist whose per­sonal trauma is not in­ter­wo­ven into the fab­ricof Jap­a­nese col­lec­tive mem­o­ry. As a post­war-gen­er­a­tion nov­el­ist, Murakami an­swers
Ōe’s crit­i­cism for lacking so­cio­po­lit­i­cal com­mit­ment by revamping his pre­de­ces­sor’s
meth­od­ol­ogy as a means of accessing Japan’s dis­tanced his­to­ry.
Reassessing the broadly ac­cepted view of Murakami as an ahis­tor­i­cal nov­el­ist
par­al­lels mem­ory stud­ies’ ef­forts to crit­i­cally re­con­sider the sup­posed hi­er­ar­chi­calre­la­tion­ship be­tween the mem­ory gen­er­a­tion’s pur­ported au­then­tic­ity and later gen­er­a­tions’ in­au­then­tic­ity in tell­ing war stories, a bi­nary that tends to gen­er­ate dis­re­spect to­ward post­war gen­er­a­tions’ strug­gles to en­gage with his­to­ry. As Jay Rubin([2002] 2012: 213) rightly ob­serves, Tōru has no re­la­tion to Jap­a­nese war­time his­
tory “ex­cept that he is Jap­a­nese.” This fact can serve both as a pre­text to deny one’s
re­spon­si­bil­ity to­ward war crimes and as an im­ped­i­ment to one’s will­ing his­tor­i­cal
en­gage­ment, and Murakami’s novel thematizes the lat­ter. For postmemory gen­er­a­tions, even if they man­age to ar­rive at a de­ci­sion to as­sume re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, it is fromthis pre­car­i­ous con­nec­tion to the past that they must fig­ure out how to be­gin tocom­mit them­selves to dis­tanced his­to­ry. If the avoid­ance of re­spon­si­bil­ity per­me­ates
post­war Jap­a­nese so­ci­e­ty, then we have to not only cri­tique ir­re­spon­si­bil­ity but alsocon­sider how such ir­re­spon­si­ble sub­jects would be ­able to change their minds. Thisques­tion has broader im­pli­ca­tions rang­ing be­yond Japan. Every his­tor­i­cal event willeven­tu­ally be bequeathed to its post-event, postmemory gen­er­a­tions, so we need to626 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES • 82:4 • No­vem­ber 2023

MANCHURIA EPISODES: BEYOND VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS
Tōru is in­tro­duced to Jap­a­nese war­time his­tory and mem­ory through lis­ten­ing toand read­ing a se­ries of first­hand ac­counts of Manchuria, where the Jap­a­nese em­pire
established a pup­pet state called Manchukuo across Northeast China and Inner
Mongolia in 1932. Until its dis­so­lu­tion in 1945, Manchukuo op­er­ated as a geo­po­lit­i­cal pivot for Jap­a­nese co­lo­nial ex­pan­sion across the con­ti­nent for thir­teen years.
Mr. Honda, a nearly deaf vet­er­an, pro­vi­des the first Manchurian ep­i­sode in thenov­el. He served in the Jap­a­nese Imperial Army as a cor­po­ral dur­ing the Nomonhan in­ci­dent, an armed con­flict fought along the bor­der be­tween Manchuria (un­derJap­a­nese con­trol) and Outer Mongolia (un­der the Soviet Union’s con­trol) in 1939.
The Nomonhan in­ci­dent ex­posed the back­ward­ness of the Jap­a­nese Imperial Armyvis-à-vis the Soviet Union’s mod­ern­ized mil­i­tary forces. Learning noth­ing from thisde­ba­cle, Japan went on to re­peat the same ab­sur­dity against the United States, which
is why the in­ci­dent is of­ten char­ac­ter­ized as a pre­lude to the Asia-Pacific War. Yet
not only does Manchuria en­cap­su­late a prin­ci­ple that governed war­time Japan; theleg­a­cies of this ephem­eral state en­dured well into the post­war era. For ex­am­ple, theindicted class A war crim­i­nal Kishi Nobusuke was ­able to be­come prime min­is­ter
in 1957, as his­to­rian Yamamuro Shin’ichi ([2006] 2009: 285) notes, thanks to his“per­sonal con­nec­tions and cap­i­tal re­sources from Manchuria.” Beyond this par­tic­u­lar case, “the plu­to­cratic es­sence of po­lit­i­cal parties in Japan to this day owes its
or­i­gin to [Manchukuo].” This is why Murakami has Honda tell his story in 1978, six
years be­fore the con­tem­po­rary pres­ent of the main plot, a year that the spir­its (eirei)
of four­teen convicted class A war crim­i­nals were enshrined in Yasukuni.4 Amid thesurge of neo-na­tion­al­ism in Japan in the early 1990s, Murakami chose Manchuria
as a venue to ap­proach the whole struc­ture of war­time and post­war Jap­a­nese his­tor­i­cal ir­re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.
Honda’s war stories, which sound “like fairy tales” to Tōru, in­creas­ingly as­sume
postmemory sig­nif­i­cance when Lieutenant Mamiya takes the stage. After the 2020
pub­li­ca­tion of his mem­oir, it be­came ap­par­ent that Murakami mod­eled this char­ac­ter on his fa­ther (both were prevented from be­com­ing teach­ers ow­ing to con­
scrip­tion). Tōru re­ceives a let­ter an­nounc­ing Honda’s death from Mamiya, who has
un­der­taken to dis­trib­ute his keep­sa­kes. He brings the last one to Tōru, a fancy giftbox of whis­key, which turns out to be emp­ty. Honda and Mamiya to­gether par­tic­i­pated in a se­cret mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion be­fore the Nomonhan in­ci­dent, and the lat­ter’sac­count, in a sec­tion of the novel ti­tled “Lieutenant Mamiya’s Long Story,” re­veals
that the two vet­er­ans shared a trau­matic ex­pe­ri­ence that Honda, de­spite his post­
war talk­a­tive­ness, never men­tioned. Thus Honda’s in­ten­tion seems to have been
to bring the two to­gether so that Tōru could in­herit their shared trau­matic mem­o­ry: “Having man­aged at long last . . . ​to pass my story on to you [yōyaku hikiwata-

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talk about the eth­ics of those who come af­ter, those who might ap­pear “ahis­tor­i­cal”
to older gen­er­a­tions. Tracing how Tōru changes through­out the nar­ra­tive and ex­am­
in­ing how Murakami in­vites read­ers to self-crit­i­cally re­flect on our re­sponse to­ward
Tōru’s trans­for­ma­tion, I seek to con­trib­ute to the con­ver­sa­tion surrounding mem­ory
stud­ies and Japan’s post­war re­spon­si­bil­ity by articulating the postmemory gen­er­a­tions’ po­ten­tial for cre­at­ing their own vi­a­ble forms of his­tor­i­cal en­gage­ment.

Abe • Murakami Haruki’s Postmemory of the Asia-Pacific War

627

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seta],” Mamiya later tells Tōru, “I will be a­ ble to dis­ap­pear with some small de­gree
of con­tent­ment” (564). During the se­cret mis­sion, Mamiya and Honda wit­ness anun­iden­ti­fied man named Yamamoto, seem­ingly a se­cret ser­vice agent, be­ing skinned
alive by a Mon­go­lian sol­dier un­der the com­mand of a Rus­sian of­fi­cer. “For both ofus,” Mamiya ex­plains, “it had sim­ply been too enor­mous an ex­pe­ri­ence. We sharedit by not talking about it” (170). This en­coun­ter in­volves the transgenerational in­her­i­tance of there­to­fore unuttered trau­matic war mem­o­ry, which Tōru grad­u­ally draws
on to con­sti­tute his ste­reo­scopic vi­sion of Jap­a­nese his­to­ry. Though this ep­i­sodeseems to be about Russo-Mon­go­lian vi­o­lence against Japan, this is of course a con­se­quence of the Jap­a­nese in­va­sion and col­o­ni­za­tion of this re­gion, a fact that Mamiya
un­der­scores while talking about Rus­sian atrocities: “I felt the same way about what
we Jap­a­nese had done in Manchuria. I’m sure you can’t imag­ine the num­ber of Chi­nese la­bor­ers killed in the course of constructing the se­cret base at Hailar” (539),
a for­tress built in the 1930s. In the 1990s, Mamiya in­ti­mates to Tōru that, to quote
Schwab again, they “can no lon­ger af­ford to deal with the his­to­ries of vic­tims andper­pe­tra­tors in iso­la­tion.”
In book 3, Akasaka Nutmeg and her son, Cinnamon, fore­ground the vic­tim/per­pe­tra­tor com­plex by fur­ther push­ing it into the realm of postmemory. Nutmeg has
a su­per­nat­u­ral power that she, as a pro­fes­sional heal­er, uti­lizes to al­le­vi­ate “some­thing” that lurks in Jap­a­nese wom­en’s psyches. When she comes across Tōru, she
im­me­di­ately re­al­izes that she had found her “suc­ces­sor” (kōkeisha), be­cause he has
a mark on his cheek iden­ti­cal to that of her fa­ther. On a trans­port ship that re­pa­tri­
ates her from Manchuria to Japan in Au­gust 1945, Nutmeg as a girl “witnesses” herfa­ther’s ex­pe­ri­ence in Manchuria via her mag­i­cal clair­voy­ance. While recounting
such stories, she en­ters what trauma the­o­rists call an al­tered state of con­scious­ness,a state of mind un­der which trau­ma­tized sub­jects act out re­pressed mem­ory with­outknow­ing it. Her sto­ry, in which her vet­er­i­nar­ian fa­ther is in­volved as a by­stand­er,
is ti­tled “A Clumsy Massacre” (“Yōryō no warui gyakusatsu”). She be­comes trau­
ma­tized through witnessing her fa­ther’s witnessing; Tōru again in­her­its Jap­a­nesewar­time trau­matic mem­ory in a highly me­di­ated form, that is, as postmemory.
Moreover, the young Nutmeg witnesses her fa­ther’s ex­pe­ri­ence in Manchuria while
the Jap­a­nese trans­port ship is be­ing confronted by a US sub­ma­rine. Despite be­ing
in­formed that the ves­sel is un­armed and car­ry­ing five hun­dred ci­vil­ians, the Amer­i­cans de­clare that they will sink it in ex­actly ten min­utes, aiming their can­nons at
the de­fense­less ves­sel. Immediately be­fore fir­ing, how­ev­er, the sub­ma­rine re­ceives
the news of Japan’s sur­ren­der and sub­merges. The fol­low­ing day, Au­gust 16, Nutmeg
lands at Sasebo, a port city in Nagasaki Prefecture, which has just been oblit­er­atedseven days ear­lier by the sec­ond atomic bomb that the United States dropped on
Jap­a­nese soil (though un­spec­i­fied, she is a sec­ond­ary hibakusha, an atomic bomb
sur­vi­vor who was not di­rectly in­jured in the blast). Thus Nutmeg witnesses Jap­a­nese co­lo­nial vi­o­lence against China in jux­ta­po­si­tion to Amer­i­can nu­clear vi­o­lenceagainst Japan on the thresh­old be­tween war and post­war.
Nutmeg’s story serves as a pre­lude to a se­quel com­posed by her mute son, inthe sec­tion of the novel ti­tled “A Second Clumsy Massacre.” As a boy, Cinnamon
had lost his voice through a dream­like trau­ma­tiz­ing in­ci­dent as­so­ci­ated with his
fa­ther’s bru­tal mur­der and de­cap­i­ta­tion, and Tōru reads the story that Cinnamon

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inherited orally from Nutmeg. When it be­comes clear that there is no hope for Japanto de­fend Manchukuo’s cap­i­tal, Hsin-ching, from the Soviet Union’s in­va­sion at theend of the war, Jap­a­nese sol­diers—led by a lieutenant and a cor­po­ral, rem­i­nis­cent of
Lieutenant Mamiya and Corporal Honda—are or­dered to shoot to death all­the dan­ger­ous zoo an­im­ als that might at­tack peo­ple if they es­caped amid the cha­os. This is
the first “mas­sa­cre” that Nutmeg nar­rates, one in which her vet­er­i­nar­ian fa­ther wasforced to be in­volved. On the fol­low­ing day, how­ev­er, the Jap­a­nese sol­diers returnto the zoo with four cap­tives and four dead bod­ies, all­Chi­nese, and the sec­ondmas­sa­cre be­gins—echo­ing the one com­mit­ted on a much larger scale in Nanjingeight years pri­or. These Chi­nese are “ca­dets in the Manchukuo Army of­fi­cer can­di­date school,” the lieutenant ex­plains: “They re­fused to par­tic­i­pate in the de­fense of
Hsin-ching. They killed two of their Jap­a­nese in­struc­tors last night and tried to runaway” (517). The lieutenant is or­dered to slaugh­ter all­the remaining pris­on­ers, andthe leader of the re­volt must be killed with the same base­ball bat—a sym­bol of theUnited States—that he used to kill his Jap­a­nese in­struc­tors. It is im­por­tant that there
are two “clumsy mas­sa­cres” so that the reader can jux­ta­pose these two in­ci­dents; incon­trast to the US sub­ma­rine’s call­ing off the at­tack on Au­gust 15, the Jap­a­nese armyin Manchuria car­ries out these ex­e­cu­tions on the fol­low­ing day, that is, af­ter the endof the war. Postwar Japan has stra­te­gi­cally deployed Hiroshima and Nagasaki as ameans of foregrounding col­lec­tive Jap­a­nese vic­tim­hood and thereby ob­scur­ing its
own war crimes. In paralleling Amer­i­can and Jap­a­nese vi­o­lence, the Akasakas’ mas­sa­cre stories com­pel the pro­tag­o­nist and read­ers to con­sider the per­pe­tra­tor/vic­tim
prob­lem­at­ics within the con­text of the post­war Japan–United States re­la­tion­ship.
These Manchuria ep­i­sodes share a sig­nif­i­cant struc­ture that is rep­li­cated in thenovel time and again. There is an orig­i­nal event that is or was too trau­matic for
its im­me­di­ate par­tic­i­pant to gain ac­cess to, which is even­tu­ally con­veyed to postmemory gen­er­a­tions via tem­po­ral, geo­graph­ic, and emo­tional me­di­a­tions. Eachper­sonal mem­ory is too frag­men­tary and some­times one-sided for later gen­er­a­tions to “un­der­stand” the na­ture of the war, but the chain of events that are moreor less con­tig­u­ous with each other grad­u­ally be­gin to con­sti­tute in Tōru’s and theread­ers’ minds a mul­ti­di­men­sional ma­trix of what tran­spired dur­ing the con­flict.
These in­di­vid­ual stories as­sume his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance when jux­ta­posed to otherin­ter­re­lated ones, thereby forming a spec­trum from vic­tim­hood to per­pe­tra­tion,or from the in­sid­er’s over­whelm­ing ex­pe­ri­ence (per­sonal trau­ma) to postmemorygen­er­a­tions’ me­di­at­ed, be­lat­ed, and some­times mod­i­fied ver­sion of witnessing. In
shifting trauma stud­ies’ an­a­lyt­i­cal fo­cus from sur­vi­vors to re­cip­i­ents of trau­maticmem­o­ries, Thomas Trezise’s (2013: 3) aptly ti­tled Witnessing Witnessing em­pha­sizes“the de­gree to which re­cep­tion de­pends on how well lis­ten­ers hear them­selves.” Theef­fec­tive­ness of the transgenerational trans­mit­tance of his­tor­i­cal trauma hinges on
the way in which postmemory gen­er­a­tions in­herit and en­gage it. Throughout thenov­el, Tōru per­forms the role of good lis­ten­er—he is like a screen on which ev­ery­body around him wants to pro­ject their own trauma sto­r y. This ar­chi­val prac­tice
emerged when the war gen­er­a­tion felt an urge to pass their mem­o­ries on to sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions; in the case of Jap­a­nese war­time his­to­r y, it was the early 1990s
that cre­ated the ini­tial, ur­gent im­pe­tus to do so. From a postmemory view­point inwhich no one “can no lon­ger af­ford to deal with the his­to­ries of vic­tims and per­pe­

Abe • Murakami Haruki’s Postmemory of the Asia-Pacific War

629“PAIN IS QUITE AN UNFAIR THING”:
JAPANESE MILITARISM AND SEXUALIZED VIOLENCE
Murakami’s works al­most al­ways viv­idly por­tray sex­ual in­ter­course, and this ten­den­cy, which of­ten seems to verge on in­dul­gent male fan­ta­sy, has long offended
crit­ics, fem­in­ ist and oth­er­wise. In the case of Wind-Up Bird, how­ev­er, sex mer­its
at­ten­tion in its own right be­cause it is un­mis­tak­ably in­formed by Jap­a­nese mil­i­ta­rism and its re­sil­ient afterlives in the post­war era. Murakami was writ­ing thenovel amid the in­tense global at­ten­tion on the com­fort women is­sue af­ter threeKo­rean women filed a law­suit and tes­ti­fied at Tokyo District Court in De­cem­ber
1991. Though the is­sue had not been en­tirely un­known, the en­su­ing in­ter­na­tional
problematization of “the com­fort sys­tem” was the first oc­ca­sion when Jap­a­nese war
crimes were viewed in the frame­work of sex­u­al­ized vi­o­lence. As Ueno Chizuko([1998] 2004: 82–91) for­mu­lates, it took the epis­te­mo­log­ic­ al shift from “the pros­ti­tu­tion par­a­digm” to “the mil­i­tary sex­ual slav­ery par­a­digm” to rec­og­nize the com­fort
women is­sue as a mat­ter of co­er­cive sex­ual vi­o­lence rather than that of free will andchoice, a shift brought about in the wake of the Vienna Conference of Human Rights
in 1993 and the Coomaraswamy Report in 1996. While in­ter­na­tional fem­i­nist dis­course did cast a new light on war-re­lated vi­o­lence, we also have to in­ter­ro­gate how
the dis­course itself was formed un­der the de­ci­sive in­flu­ence of the United States and,as Laura Hyung Yi Kang (2020) dem­on­strates, ul­ti­mately failed to fully ac­knowl­edge
the vi­o­lence. The com­fort women is­sue has been “largely si­lenced in high­brow fic­tional lit­er­a­ture,” as Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt (2020: 836) ob­serves, but Jap­a­nese“high­brow” lit­er­a­ture, in­clud­ing Murakami, tends to deal with it in an al­le­gor­ic­ alfash­ion.5 Thematizing sex­ual vi­o­lence as a kind of post­war re­in­car­na­tion of the com­
fort women is­sue, Wind-Up Bird cap­tures how the chronic struc­ture of avoid­ance ofre­spon­si­bil­ity con­tin­ues to give rise to com­pa­ra­ble vi­o­lence in sex­u­al­ized form, andthat Jap­a­nese war­time vi­o­lence was stra­te­gi­cally ob­scured by the mas­ter nar­ra­tive ofJap­a­nese-US in­ter-im­pe­rial he­ge­mo­ny.
It is Kumiko’s older broth­er, Wataya Noboru, Tōru’s nem­e­sis, who in­her­its andembodies im­pe­rial Japan’s sex­u­al­ized vi­o­lence in the pres­ent. Later in the nov­el,Tōru learns that Noboru’s un­cle Yoshitaka, a war­time tech­no­crat and lo­gis­tics spe­cial­ist, was dis­patched to Manchukuo in 1932 to as­sess the re­gion. During his ser­vice there, he be­came acquainted with Ishiwara Kanji, the his­tor­i­cal ini­ti­a­tor of
the Manchurian Incident as a high-rank­ing of­fi­cer of the Kwantung Army. Since
its es­tab­lish­ment in 1919, this ar­my, which ini­tially un­der­took the guarding of
the Manchurian rail­way, grad­u­ally came to seize po­lit­i­cal con­trol of this area (the“clumsy mas­sa­cres” were per­pe­trated by them). Yoshitaka’s post­war ca­reer rep­li­cates Prime Minister Kishi’s tra­jec­to­r y: “Yoshitaka Wataya had been purged fromhold­ing pub­lic of­fi ce by MacArthur’s Occupation af­ter the war and for a time had
lived in se­clu­sion in his na­tive Niigata,” a pre­fec­ture known as a ma­jor con­stit­ue­ ncy
base for the con­ser­va­tive Liberal Democratic Party, “but he had been per­suaded by
the Conservative party to run for of­fi ce af­ter the purge was lifted and served two

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tra­tors in iso­la­tion,” Murakami’s novel crit­i­cally over­comes the bi­fur­cated dis­coursethat lim­its its dis­cus­sion to ei­ther/or re­gard­ing vic­tim­hood/per­pe­tra­tion and tobe­fore/af­t er re­gard­ing mourn­ing.

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terms in the Upper House be­fore chang­ing to the Lower House” (497). Murakami’sin­ten­tion here is clear: Jap­a­nese war­time spirit sur­vived the de­feat—“Now his po­lit­i­cal con­stit­u­ency had been inherited by his neph­ew, Noboru Wataya” (497). Manchurian his­tory el­o­quently testifies to the long-stand­ing en­tan­gle­ment of Jap­a­nesemil­i­ta­rism and sex­u­al­ized vi­o­lence. As his­to­rian Yoshimi Yoshiaki ([1995] 2002:47) re­ports, it was young Jap­a­nese fe­male sex work­ers conscripted and sent abroad,the karayuki-san, who were first set­tled in this area en masse in the 1880s, and thefirst documented mil­i­tary com­fort sta­tion was built in March 1933 in Pingquan tohouse thir­ty-five Ko­rean and three Jap­a­nese wom­en. This was just “the tip of theice­berg” (47), sug­gests Yoshimi. The in­vis­i­ble sub­struc­ture of this ice­berg remainedun­dis­solved thanks to the pol­i­cies of the US oc­cu­pa­tion force, whose troops were­able to enjoy anal­o­gous “com­fort fa­cil­i­ties” set up by Jap­a­nese au­thor­i­ties (Dower
1999: 124–25). What Noboru in­her­its from his un­cle is not just his “po­lit­i­cal con­stit­u­en­cy”; he symptomatizes the pres­er­va­tion and per­pet­u­a­tion of Jap­a­nese war­time
sex­u­al­ized vi­o­lence.
There are three women vic­tim­ized by Noboru: his (and Kumiko’s) de­ceased sis­ter; Kanō Creta; and Kumiko. Creta is sex­u­ally assaulted by Noboru, though it was“not rape in the or­di­nary sense of the word” (211). After her failed sui­cide at­tempt at
the age of twen­ty, she de­cides to be­come a sex work­er, and her last cus­tomer is Noboru.
Ordering her to lie face down, he in­spects her body for a long while, and then be­gins
to touch her. “His ten fin­gers moved down my body . . . ​in search of some­thing,” Cretare­counts. “His fin­gers moved over my body with the ut­most care, as if trac­ing a routeon a map” (299). Then he in­serts some­thing in­side Creta from be­hind, which is not
his pe­nis, and “with an ir­re­sist­ible force” he “drag[s] out the jel­lied con­tents” of Creta’s “mem­o­ry” (301). Obviously, Noboru’s vi­o­lence is not merely sex­ual in na­ture. He
has the clear in­ten­tion of dispossessing Creta of some­thing, and be­fore that he care­fully stud­ies her body like a lo­gis­ti­cian pre­par­ing for an in­va­sion of a for­eign land. His
pe­cu­liar kind of vi­o­lence seems to be decoupled from sex­ual lust, yet we need to notethat “rapes in war­time,” as Joshua S. Goldstein (2001: 363) ob­serves, are “not driven bysex­ual de­sire”; the sex­u­al­ized vi­o­lence inflicted on the fe­male body is “an in­stru­mentof ter­ri­to­rial con­trol and dom­in­ a­tion.” Toward the end, Tōru de­tects the his­tor­i­cal rootof Noboru’s vi­o­lence: “It’s a tre­men­dously dan­ger­ous thing, this thing that he is try­
ing to draw out: it’s fa­tally [shukumeiteki ni] smeared with vi­o­lence and blood, and it’sdi­rectly connected to the darkest depths of his­to­ry, be­cause its fi­nal ef­fect is to de­stroy
and oblit­er­ate peo­ple on a mas­sive scale” (579). The some­thing in Creta—which has
al­ways been in­side her as “some­thing of which [she] had no knowl­edge” (301)—is themem­o­ry, or rather the postmemory of Jap­a­nese mil­i­ta­rism em­bed­ded in the realm of
the Jap­a­nese col­lec­tive his­tor­i­cal un­con­scious. This is what Noboru tries to take con­trol of and abuse for his po­lit­i­cal pur­poses.
Though Kumiko was led to be­lieve that her older sis­ter died of food poi­son­
ing, she in fact com­mit­ted sui­cide, which, pre­dict­ably, was caused by Noboru. Twoyears af­ter the death of this un­named sis­ter, Kumiko catches Noboru mas­tur­bat­ing
while smell­ing her sis­ter’s clothes. “I’m not even sure he had a sex­ual in­ter­est in her,”
Kumiko tells Tōru, “but he cer­tainly had some­thing, and I sus­pect he’s never been­able to get away from that some­thing” (124). Again, the form Noboru’s de­sire takes isun­mis­tak­ably sex­ual (mas­tur­ba­tion), in this case in­ces­tu­ous, but there is some­thingAbe • Murakami Haruki’s Postmemory of the Asia-Pacific War

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more to it; he must have raped his sis­ter, too, in some way, and it is a symp­tom ofdeeper and broader psy­cho­path­o­log­i­cal vi­o­lence that takes sex­ual form in this scene.
Yet it is no co­in­ci­dence that his vic­tims tend to be wom­en; when Creta as­serts that“pain is quite an un­fair thing [hijō ni fukōhei na mono]” (92; trans­la­tion mod­i­fied),
she implies gen­der in­equal­ity in the dis­tri­bu­tion of vi­o­lence. Kumiko had to leave
Tōru not only be­cause Noboru needed her “to play the role [their] sis­ter had once
played for him” but also be­cause she sensed that her “blood” was tainted with some­thing, “some kind of dark se­cret” (579–78). In her case, this some­thing—which shechar­ac­ter­izes as “an in­cur­able dis­ease” (489)—man­i­fests, in one in­stance, as sex­ual
fri­gid­i­ty. As she con­fides in a con­fes­sional let­ter to Tōru, she had never ex­pe­ri­enced
any plea­sure dur­ing sex with him, but she was pos­sessed by an “un­rea­son­able [rifujinna] lust” (276) af­ter she left him. Her fri­gid­ity is one of the re­cur­rent symp­toms ofnumb­ness from which most char­ac­ters in the novel suf­fer—it is rooted in the same
his­tor­i­cal obliv­i­ous­ness of post­war Japan, the struc­ture of avoid­ance of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, and an in­abil­ity of his­tor­i­cal com­mit­ment. Tōru and the reader hear her ap­peal at
the be­gin­ning of the novel when the pro­tag­o­nist re­ceives a phone call from an anon­y­mous woman who tempts him to have phone sex with her. “You must have somekind of blind spot [shikaku] in your mem­o­ry” (129), warns this mys­te­ri­ous wom­an,
who turns out to be Kumiko. Tōru hangs up.
Paradoxically enough, the per­son who can in­ter­vene in this his­tor­i­cal numb­ness
is Noboru him­self. This is attested to by Creta, who embodies Kumiko’s vac­il­la­tion
be­tween numb­ness and hy­per­sen­si­tiv­ity in a more ex­treme form. Her body, “a vir­tual sam­ple book of pain” (92), as she calls it, had been suf­fer­ing from hyperalgesia,
and for this rea­son she de­cides to ter­mi­nate her life. After her sui­cide at­tempt, how­ev­er, she finds all­her sen­sory feel­ings are gone, and it is Noboru’s rape, his stim­u­la­tion and ma­nip­u­la­tion of the there­to­fore dor­mant some­thing in­side her, that re­vives
her phys­i­cal pain and sex­ual plea­sure at the same time: “I was writh­ing as much inplea­sure as in pain.” And Noboru’s am­biv­a­lent vi­o­lence, by arous­ing “fa­tal” (shukumei teki) and “un­rea­son­able” (rifujin na) pain, has the power to remold her iden­tity
by disintegrating her body: “Things both tan­gi­ble and in­tan­gi­ble turned to liq­uid
and flowed out through my flesh,” Creta re­counts. “It seemed as if all­my mem­o­ries,
all­my con­scious­ness, had just slipped away. . . . ​And when I regained con­scious­ness,
I was a dif­fer­ent per­son” (301–2). In post­war Japan, as epit­o­mized by the war­time
term kokutai, which des­ig­na­tes the em­peror sys­tem and lit­er­ally means the “na­tional
body,” the body has served as a met­a­phor for the na­tion and has been as­so­ci­ated withnos­tal­gia for em­pire. “The dis­cur­sively constructed body be­comes the cen­tral site
for the reconfiguration of Japan’s na­tional im­age,” as Yoshikuni Igarashi (2000: 13)ar­gues. “Bodily im­ages,” according to him, “at­test to the dual pro­cess of the ex­pres­sion and re­pres­sion of the past in post­war cul­tural dis­course. The healthy body of thena­tion was dis­mem­bered as im­pe­rial Japan ex­pe­ri­enced a rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion,and these dis­mem­bered bodily im­ages were as­sem­bled again in the post­war pe­riodin or­der to ar­tic­u­late the new na­tion­hood” (14). Though he fails to ac­com­plish hisgoal with Creta, Noboru’s rape is a sex­u­al­ized in­stance of post­war Japan’s at­tempt toregain and re­con­sti­tute im­pe­rial Japan’s “healthy” kokutai through vi­o­lently disintegrating and rearranging vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple’s bod­ies and iden­ti­ties. Yet the post­war
Jap­a­nese body itself is in­deed suf­fer­ing from a dis­ease caused by some­thing, and a

632 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES • 82:4 • No­vem­ber 2023

“THIS IS MY WAR”: TŌŌ RU’S POSTMEMORY AND COMMITMENT
After Kumiko’s dis­ap­pear­ance, Tōru goes down into the bot­tom of a dry well in his
neigh­bor­hood to re­flect on his past, in­clud­ing how he came to know and marry
Kumiko. They ini­tially meet in a hos­pi­tal where Kumiko’s mother is un­der treat­ment, and Tōru, a law­yer’s as­sis­tant at the time, goes “to see a wealthy cli­ent concerning the in­her­i­tance of his prop­er­ty” (223), who de­mands that his will be re­vised
again and again. Thus the two en­coun­ter one an­other against the sym­bolic back­ground of the impending deaths of the war gen­er­a­tion and the dif­fi­culty of in­her­i­tance. On their first date, Kumiko sug­gests go­ing to an aquar­ium in Ueno Zoo(where an­im­ als were ac­tu­ally slaughtered in 1943 [Ueno Zoological Gardens 2021]),
which is hold­ing a spe­cial ex­hibit on jel­ly­fish. While Kumiko loves jel­ly­fish, Tōru
har­bors a kind of in­stinc­tive ab­hor­rence (daikirai) of them. He of­fers the fol­low­ing
child­hood mem­o­r y:

I had of­ten been stung by jel­ly­fish while swim­ming in the ocean as a boy. Once,
when swim­ming far out by my­self, I wan­dered into a whole school of them. . . . ​In the cen­ter of that whirl­pool of jel­ly­fish, an im­mense ter­ror over­took me, as if
I had been dragged into a bot­tom­less dark­ness. I wasn’t stung, for some rea­son,
but in my panic I gulped a lot of ocean wa­ter. Which is why I would have liked
to skip the jel­ly­fish dis­play if pos­si­ble and go to see some or­di­nary fish, like tunaor floun­der. (224)
When Tōru gets dizzy and col­lapses on a bench out­side, Kumiko ex­plains: “Thereal world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is oc­cu­piedby jel­ly­fish and things [kurage mitaina mono]. We just hap­pen to for­get all­that”(226). This se­quence res­o­nates with the “jel­lied con­tents” that Noboru drags out of
Creta’s body. The realm of jel­ly­fish is connected to disavowed Jap­a­nese war­time his­to­ry, a met­a­phor freighted with his­tor­i­cal im­pli­ca­tion: Emperor Hirohito is known
for his out­stand­ing achieve­ments in jel­ly­fish re­search. Tōru’s in­ex­pli­ca­ble ter­ror isrooted not in his per­sonal trauma but in what mem­ory schol­ars call col­lec­tive mem­o­ry. As Maurice Halbwachs ([1952] 1992: 38) writes in his foun­da­tional text, “Thereis no point in seek­ing where [col­lec­tive mem­o­ries] are pre­served in my brain . . . ​forthey are recalled to me ex­ter­nal­ly, and the groups of which I am a part at any time
give me the means to re­con­struct them.” In the nov­el, jel­ly­fish that pro­voke ter­ror in
the postmemory gen­er­a­tions’ mind rep­re­sent the disavowed col­lec­tive mem­ory ofim­pe­rial Japan, which some char­ac­ters “hap­pen to for­get.”
After ex­tended med­i­ta­tion in the well, Tōru dis­cov­ers a mark on his face sim­i­larto the one Nutmeg’s fa­ther had. Soon, to raise money to buy the deserted land where
the well is lo­cat­ed, he be­gins to work at Nutmeg’s of­fi ce as a pe­cu­liar kind of pros­ti­tute. After he is instructed to put on blinding gog­gles, a fe­male cus­tomer comes into
the room to ca­ress and then lick the mark on his cheek, which makes him ejac­u­late.
This is “amaz­ingly sim­i­lar to the work of Creta Kano had done as a call girl” (372), here­al­izes on the fol­low­ing day. Nutmeg had been work­ing as a psy­chic healer for seven

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cure needs to be found lest Noboru take fa­tal ad­van­tage of it. As Tōru de­scends into
the dark realm of his­tor­i­cal un­con­scious, his bodily dis­in­te­gra­tion dem­on­strates anal­ter­na­tive way of reconstructing post­war Jap­a­nese iden­ti­ty.

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Despite these ef­forts, my body be­gan to lose its den­sity and weight, like sandgrad­u­ally be­ing washed away by flowing wa­ter. . . . ​The thought struck me thatmy own body was a mere pro­vi­sional husk that had been pre­pared for my mind
by a rearrangement of the signs known as chro­mo­somes. If the signs were rearranged yet again, I would find my­self in­side a wholly dif­fer­ent body than be­fore.
“Prostitute of the mind,” Creta Kano had called her­self. I no lon­ger had any
trou­ble accepting the phrase. (231)

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years, and the cus­tom­ers she “fit­ted”—karinui in Jap­a­nese, a nee­dle­work met­a­phorthat in­di­cates the stop­gap na­ture of her treat­ment—were all­women around whom“lin­gered that spe­cial smell pro­duced by the com­bi­na­tion of power and mon­ey”(456). Though their pri­vacy is strictly protected, this em­pha­sis on their el­e­vated so­cial sta­tus sug­gests that they are the wives of po­lit­i­cally and eco­nom­i­cally pow­er­ful
fam­i­lies like the Watayas—they are fe­male vic­tims like Kumiko, who has been liv­ing
un­der Noboru’s bale­ful in­flu­ence. “Over the years, [Nutmeg] went on ‘fit­ting’ the‘some­thing’ that each of her cli­ents car­ried with­in,” but she be­gan to feel pow­er­lessbe­cause “all­that her cu­ra­tive pow­ers could do was re­duce their ac­tiv­ity some­what
for a time” (458). The sig­nif­i­cance of Tōru’s inheriting her prac­tice is explained by
the ref­er­ence to its sim­i­lar­ity to Creta’s sex work. After be­ing raped by Noboru, shebe­comes “a pros­ti­tute of the mind” in or­der to re­cov­er: “Things pass through me”(Watashi ha tsūka sareru mono nanodesu) (212), Creta says. Tōru now be­comes theone to be passed through (tōru), thereby in­cor­po­rat­ing frag­ments of the some­thing,in this case fe­male vic­tim­hood, into his own psyche and soma for oth­ers’ healing
pur­poses. This is a pro­cess of learn­ing what the some­thing is and re­al­iz­ing that it
has al­ways lurked within him­self as well, as the vi­su­al­ized mark on his face now el­o­quently testifies.
In the well, Tōru’s con­scious­ness, in “some kind of some­thing that hap­pened
to take the form of a dream” (241), floats into an imag­i­nary ho­tel. In this mag­i­cal dreamscape connected to the Jap­a­nese his­tor­i­cal un­con­scious, the pro­tag­o­nistfi­nally con­fronts Noboru in room 208, where the as-yet un­iden­ti­fied phone-sex
op­er­a­tor, Kumiko, has been imprisoned. “What it all­boils down to,” Tōru says as here­ca­pit­u­lates the com­pli­cated plot, “is that you [Kumiko] have gone over from myworld to the world of Noboru Wataya” (578). This imag­i­nary world/ho­tel is dom­i­nated by Noboru—who is tak­ing con­trol of Jap­a­nese col­lec­tive mem­o­ry—and Tōru
has to bring Kumiko back to his side. Identifying Murakami as a writer seek­ing
Jap­a­nese post­war iden­ti­ty, Mat­thew Carl Strecher (2002: 100–107) reads Wind-Up
Bird as a story of Tōru re­stor­ing wom­en’s “core iden­ti­ty,” which for Strecher equals
the some­thing re­moved or destroyed by “purely evil” Noboru. True, Tōru trains asa heal­er, and the nov­el’s cli­max is the con­fron­ta­tion be­tween the good Tōru and theevil Noboru. Yet the pri­mary con­cern of this nov­el, I ar­gue, lies in cri­tiqu­ing thisvery Man­i­chaean bi­na­ry, a bi­nary con­so­nant with the vic­tim/per­pe­tra­tor di­chot­o­my; it is the pro­tag­o­nist him­self who has to re­con­sti­tute his post­war iden­tity byin­cor­po­rat­ing his, and Japan’s, disavowed vi­o­lent self that Noboru embodies. In thewell, he undergoes a pro­cess of bodily dis­in­te­gra­tion sim­i­lar to that of Creta, a dis­in­te­gra­tion and rearrangement of the self in the pro­cess of re­mak­ing one’s iden­ti­ty:

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Unlike Creta’s case, a new “sign” that is in­cor­po­rated or dis­cov­ered within him­
self through this re­mak­ing pro­cess is an­ger and vi­o­lence, two el­em­ ents that foundno place for ex­pres­sion in Murakami’s ear­lier de­tached style. One day, back in thereal world, Tōru is assailed by an anon­y­mous man with a bat and fights back re­flex­
ively in ter­ror, which soon turns to “un­mis­tak­able an­ger,” and he nearly kills him.
“Never in my life had I been in­volved in a fist­fight,” he re­flects, “but now hit­ting was
all I could do.” He adds, “There were two of me now, I re­al­ized. I had split in two, but
this me had lost the power to stop the other me” (335–36). Tōru’s en­emy is not only
the evil other but also his own vi­o­lent self; Noboru is a dou­ble of Tōru. He there­af­ter
de­vel­ops a habit of bring­ing the bat into the well as a kind of tal­is­man. The well had
belonged to “a real su­per­elite of­fi­cer” of the Jap­a­nese Imperial Army and a for­mer
war crim­i­nal who, in North China, is said to have ex­e­cuted “five hun­dred POWs,
forc­ing tens of thou­sands of farm­ers to work for them un­til half of them dropped
dead” (117). It is with this bat, the same weapon with which the lieutenant mas­sa­cred
the Chi­nese cap­tives in Manchuria, that Tōru fi­nally en­vi­sions bludgeoning Noboru
to death in the dream­like room 208.
This in­ci­dent dis­cour­ages us from sim­pli­fy­ing the en­su­ing imag­i­nary bat­tle
be­tween Tōru and Noboru as purely Man­i­che­an. According to Murakami, the En­glish
trans­la­tor Jay Rubin objected to depicting Tōru’s ex­treme vi­o­lence (Murakami and
Kawai 1999: 193). Since read­ers sym­pa­thize with the nice pro­tag­o­nist, Rubin be­lieved,
they would feel betrayed by his bru­tal mur­der of Noboru, no mat­ter how evil Noboru was. Yet this sym­pa­thy is the very thing that Wind-Up Bird aims to un­set­tle. For
Jap­a­nese—and for Amer­i­cans for that mat­ter—it is a dan­ger­ous as­sump­tion that
one is al­ways on the side of nice peo­ple and is allowed to safely sym­pa­thize with thegood pro­tag­o­nist vis-à-vis the evil oth­er. Orchestrating the International Military
Tribunal for the Far East, the United States ex­e­cuted mil­i­ta­rists like Tōjō Hideki asre­spon­si­ble for de­ceiv­ing the na­tion, in­clud­ing the em­per­or, thereby constructing anar­ra­tive of suc­cess­ful de­moc­ra­ti­za­tion and de­mil­i­tar­iza­tion. In turn, post­war Japanwas ­able to dis­avow its war crimes through this scapegoating, and “or­di­nary” Jap­a­nese lost a sense of con­nec­tion to their own coun­try’s his­tor­i­cal mis­deeds; it wasthose evil ex­trem­ists who did it. Regarding his nem­e­sis, Tōru be­lieved that “there
was no com­mon ground be­tween us” (78) and de­clared, “I don’t sim­ply dis­like him:
I can­not ac­cept the fact of his very ex­is­tence” (434). The crit­i­cal im­pli­ca­tion here isthat the pro­tag­o­nist as­sumes a vi­o­lent as­pect, as if he were re­mem­ber­ing the an­ger
and vi­o­lence long re­pressed in his un­con­scious. The in­abil­ity to imag­ine com­mit­ting vi­o­lence as one’s own po­ten­ti­al­i­ty, or the lack of per­pe­tra­tor con­scious­ness, isthe struc­tural ba­sis for what Murakami calls the avoid­ance of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. The
evil fig­ure that Tōru fights in his dreamscape is his, Japan’s, re­pressed and for­got­tenvi­o­lent self that as­sumes the shape of Wataya Noboru. “This is my war” (582; trans­la­tion mod­i­fied), he de­clares, and it is one he even­tu­ally wins. But he does not sim­plyde­feat and deny Noboru’s evil world; he also psy­chi­cally in­cor­po­rates it as an in­te­gralpart of Jap­a­nese his­to­ry. To re­con­sti­tute the post­war Jap­a­nese iden­ti­ty, Tōru must
learn not only how vic­tims suf­fer but also what it is like to be a per­pe­tra­tor. Postmemory gen­er­a­tions can no lon­ger ad­dress the his­to­ries of vic­tims and per­pe­tra­tors
in iso­la­tion. They need to go through both to re­con­sti­tute their own iden­ti­ties.

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CONCLUSION: HISTORY, FICTION, AND ETHICS
Toward the end of the nov­el, Tōru finds Cinnamon’s com­puter screen glowing in
the dark­ness. Someone, no doubt Cinnamon, seems to have re­motely booted up thepro­gram ti­tled “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” which in­vites Tōru to choose oneof six­teen texts. The one he chooses, num­ber 8, turns out to be “A Second Clumsy
Massacre.” There is no doubt that these stories are told by Cinnamon, but, Tōru
won­ders, “was ev­ery bit of it Cinnamon’s cre­a­tion, or were parts of it based on ac­tual
events?” (524). He does not know, but at least he be­lieves he can see what Cinnamon
is try­ing to do. “He was en­gaged in a se­ri­ous search for the mean­ing of his own ex­is­
tence [sonzai riyū]. And he was hoping to find it by looking into the events that had
pre­ceded his birth” (525). Cinnamon’s “Wind-Up” is do­ing some­thing quite sim­i­lar
to Murakami’s nov­el; he is an­other char­ac­ter strug­gling to (re)con­struct his post­war
iden­tity through ar­chiv­ing other peo­ple’s trau­mat­ic, his­tor­i­cal ep­i­sodes. Tōru con­tin­ues to ru­mi­nate on the his­to­ric­ity of Cinnamon’s work:

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Though Tōru’s war is waged in his dreamscape, it brings about con­se­quencesin the real world; Noboru col­lapses due to ce­re­bral hem­or­rhage, and it seems that
he will not re­cov­er. “Was there any link be­tween what had hap­pened there and thisre­al­i­ty?” (587), our pro­tag­o­nist won­ders. This ques­tion fore­grounds and problematizes the re­la­tion­ship be­tween fic­tion and re­al­ity as well as the eth­ics of the for­mer.
In his es­says on Murakami, Christopher Weinberger the­o­rizes eth­ics in Murakami’s
fic­tion in terms of reader re­sponse. Both in En­glish-lan­guage and Jap­a­nese schol­ar­ship, according to Weinberger, lit­er­ary crit­ics have based their eth­i­cal judg­ment
on the mi­metic ca­pac­ity of the novel and how our em­pa­thetic im­mer­sion in the fic­tional world can sub­se­quently serve for our real life, a con­ven­tion that has prevented
us from rec­og­niz­ing the eth­ics in­her­ent in Murakami’s ex­plic­itly meta­fic­tion­al, fan­tas­tic style. “Murakami calls at­ten­tion to the eth­ics of our re­sponses to the genre
and rep­re­sen­ta­tional struc­tures of the novel itself ” (2016: 410), that is, the fic­tional
world in which “phys­i­cal ac­tion pro­duces the kinds of cog­ni­tive and af­fec­tive trans­for­ma­tion that it ap­pears to sym­bol­ize, be­cause re­al­ity itself is al­ready man­i­festly
sym­bol­ic” (2015: 106). This un­sta­ble mi­lieu, Weinberger ar­gues, de­mands that bothchar­ac­ters and read­ers “con­tin­u­ally adapt their value sys­tems and modes of re­sponseto ac­com­mo­date the dif­fer­ent forms of sur­face con­tact [as op­posed to em­pa­thetic
im­mer­sion] with alterity that the novel ex­pe­ri­ence makes avail­­able” (2016: 425–26).
Building on this in­sight, I ar­gue that Wind-Up Bird ini­tially in­vites read­ers, mostly
those al­ready fa­mil­iar with Murakami’s works, to iden­ti­fy, em­pa­thize, or sym­pa­thizewith Tōru and then sur­prises us through “con­tact with alterity,” that is, the pos­si­bil­
ity of its de­tached pro­tag­o­nist be­com­ing a per­pe­tra­tor. Murakami’s eth­ics lies not insim­ply cri­tiqu­ing war­time Japan’s vi­o­lent his­tory but also in presenting it as a con­tem­po­rary, on­go­ing is­sue; it is not they but we who could be­come per­pe­tra­tors in
the fu­ture. When we sim­ply re­pu­di­ate Tōru’s vi­o­lence as non-sympathizable alterity,
whether Jap­a­nese or not, we are re­peat­ing and reinforcing what Murakami called the
avoid­ance of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. Our re­spon­si­bil­ity as read­ers hinges on whether we canbe re­spon­sive to the pro­tag­o­nist’s change—this is not an en­dorse­ment of vi­o­lence
but a crit­i­cal con­sid­er­ation of its im­pli­ca­tions and a self-crit­i­cal re­flec­tion on ourown im­pli­ca­tion in it.

636 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES • 82:4 • No­vem­ber 2023

This pas­sage ech­oes his­to­rian Hayden White’s ar­gu­ment about the interpenetrative
re­la­tion­ship be­tween fic­tion and his­to­ry, here from a fic­tion writ­er’s per­spec­tive. In
his book Tropics of Discourse, White fa­mously ar­gued that pro­fes­sional his­to­ri­ans’ his­to­ri­og­ra­phy is noth­ing other than constructed, se­lec­tive ver­sions of the past. “A his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive,” he (1978: 51) writes, “is thus nec­es­sar­ily a mix­ture of ad­e­quately andin­ad­e­quately explained events, a con­ge­ries of established and in­ferred facts, at once a
rep­re­sen­ta­tion that is an in­ter­pre­ta­tion and an in­ter­pre­ta­tion that passes for an ex­pla­na­tion of the whole pro­cess mir­rored in the nar­ra­tive.” In a more re­cent book, White(2014) di­rectly re­lates this ar­gu­ment to the ques­tion of eth­ics. “Insofar as I turn to ‘thepast’ at all­for aid in de­cid­ing ‘What should I do?’ here, now, in this pres­ent sit­u­a­tion,”he states, “it is a past which I (or com­mu­nity with which I iden­ti­fy) be­lieve to be mostrel­e­vant to my in­qui­ries” (76). As op­posed to “the his­tor­i­cal past,” he calls it “the prac­ti­cal past,” one that is de­lib­er­ately bur­ied “not least by his­to­ri­ans who limit them­selvesto the recounting of the fact of the mat­ter” (24). Featuring Michel de Certeau’s maxim“Fiction is the re­pressed other of his­to­ry,” White be­lieves that the his­to­ri­og­ra­phy writ­ten by his­to­ri­ans who be­lieve they can ex­clude all­ fic­tion­al, imag­i­na­tive, and lit­er­aryel­e­ments (which is im­pos­si­ble) tells us noth­ing about what we should do, and fic­tion
is an open venue for us to ac­cess that re­pressed his­tory which crit­i­cally in­forms ourpres­ent sit­u­a­tion. Fiction con­nects his­tory to eth­ics. And, I would add, this pro­cess ofconnecting his­tory to eth­ics can­not be ac­com­plished with­out read­ers. In constructing
fic­tion­al-his­tor­i­cal stories, Cinnamon is en­gag­ing in “a se­ri­ous search for the mean­ingof his own ex­is­tence”—he is mak­ing the past prac­ti­cal. And by giv­ing Tōru ac­cess to it,
he is not only guid­ing the pro­tag­o­nist to­ward sav­ing Kumiko but also de­mand­ing thereader of his “Wind-Up” to share the eth­i­cal ques­tion of what we should do—and sodoes Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Postmemory sto­ry­tell­ers need re­spon­siveand re­spon­si­ble read­ers, and our read­erly eth­ics de­pends on our per­sonal and col­lec­tive com­mit­ment to it.
NOTES

1. For the con­struc­tion of post­war Japan’s “vic­tim nar­ra­tive,” see Berger (2012: 123–74).
2. The novel con­sists of three books: book 1 was se­ri­al­ized in Shinchō mag­a­zine from 1992
to 1993, and books 1 and 2 appeared in book form in 1994. Murakami de­cided to add book
3 af­ter returning to Japan, which came out in 1995. Since the pres­ent ar­ti­cle’s meth­od­ol­ogy
ne­ces­si­tates a sub­stan­tial num­ber of quo­ta­tions from the nov­el, I cite the En­glish trans­la­tion,
while re­fer­ring to the orig­i­nal lan­guage where nec­es­sary.
3. Nathen Clerici (2016: 266) doc­u­ments well how “the per­spec­tive of an elite cul­turaland lit­er­ary crit­ic” in Japan has failed to take Murakami’s works se­ri­ous­ly.
4. For the out­pour­ing of Jap­a­nese vet­er­ans’ au­to­bio­graph­i­cal stories, see Yoshida (2005:
216–21).

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To do that, Cinnamon had to fill in those blank spots [kūhaku] in the past thathe could not reach with his own hands. By us­ing those hands to make a sto­ry, he
was try­ing to sup­ply the miss­ing links. From the stories he had heard re­peat­edly
from his moth­er, he de­rived fur­ther stories in an at­tempt to re-cre­ate the enig­
matic fig­ure of his grand­fa­ther in a new set­ting. He inherited from his moth­er’s
stories the fun­da­men­tal style he used, un­al­tered, in his own stories: name­ly, theas­sump­tion that fact [jijitsu] may not be truth [shinjitsu], and truth may not be
fac­tu­al. (525)Abe • Murakami Haruki’s Postmemory of the Asia-Pacific War

637

5. See, for ex­am­ple, Da­vid C. Stahl’s (2018) al­le­gor­i­cal read­ing of Kawabata Yasunari’s
novel Sleeping Beauties.

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