turned transparent, I put a hand on the table and watched it as I turned it over a few times.” The second time that Tōru checks the existence of his hand to confirm his existence is when he is in the well. “There were my hands and my cheeks. I couldn’t see them in the dark, but they were still here: my body still existed.” The darkness of the well swallows visibility of one’s body and therefore swallows one’s grip on existence. Tōru describes how strange it is to confirm something’s existence without being able to see it: “It was the strangest thing not to be able to see my own body with my own eyes, thought I knew it must be there. Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I existed.” Another reference to looking at his hands comes after being in the well for a night, completely shut in (which is May Kasahara’s doing). Tōru experiences the supernatural in which he passes through the walls of the well into a labyrinthine hotel. After this experience, he finds that he has a purple mark on his cheek that seems to pulse with a life of its own. This mark on his face is the first visible sign of the subconscious that can be seen in the conscious realm; for Murakami, the subconscious is something organic and alive. Days after the incident, Tōru states: “I seemed to be growing more distant from myself with each day that went by. If I stared at my hand for a while, I would begin to feel that I was looking through it.” Tateno Hideo suggests that it is through pain that these characters try to reassure themselves of their existence. His strongest example of this is when early on in the novel, Tōru goes to Hokkaido on a business trip. On the phone Kumiko tells him that she has had an abortion, the decision hers alone. The news upsets Tōru; he goes into a bar to try
distinction. On the contrary, he believes that the essence of a person is always there within a person’s subconscious – it is simply up to the individual to unveil it. III. Lack of Identity This doubt of one’s existence stems from the fact that Tōru and the Japanese of his generation are lacking a concrete identity. At first Tōru does not fully understand the concept of an ‘identity’ and is disappointed that he has no external characteristic that distinguishes himself from anyone else. In the beginning of the novel, Tōru believes that having an identity is equal to having external uniqueness and does not comprehend that one’s ultimate source of self comes from within. However, Malta Kano, the medium, is able to identify Tōru immediately when they first meet in a café despite the fact that he is not wearing the polka dot tie that he told her he would be wearing. This indicates that although Tōru is not aware of his own identity yet, Malta Kano sees the potential of an identity forming within him; essentially, identity is something that exists mainly in the internal world. This concept of identity as being something that is developed internally rather than externally continues with the death of Mr. Honda, a type of medium that Kumiko and Tōru visit at the wish of her parents. Upon his death, Mr. Honda specifically leaves Tōru an empty box, which is delivered by Lieutenant Mamiya, who served in the war with Honda. “It was absolutely empty. All that Mr. Honda had left me was an empty box,” Tōru states. He is not sure what to make of the box at first. But it becomes clearer as the novel unfolds that the box represents Tōru’s identity: it is empty because he has
One day in a bar, Tōru sees a man that he saw years ago, a time when Kumiko was becoming more distant and aloof towards Tōru because of her abortion. For little reason other than a spark of interest, he begins to follow this man to an apartment house. When Tōru follows him into the apartment house, the man, out of self-defense, attacks him with a baseball bat. Tōru at first begins to fight the man in counter self-defense. However, his initial feeling of terror turns into anger, and then “something close to intense hatred.” Even with the man defenseless and on the ground, Tōru cannot stop but to continue beating the man senselessly: “I couldn’t seem to stop…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. An intense chill ran through my body.” This division of the individual suggests that when one part – the conscious or the subconscious – dominates, one’s core identity is violated. When the conscious part of a person dominates, the whole self is not there because it ignores the subconscious; on the other hand, when the subconscious dominates, a dark and violent part of oneself has no way of stopping itself. Loss of self-control appears again when Ushikawa, a sycophant who works for Noboru Wataya, describes how he physically abuses his family: “‘…when I got home I would take it out on my wife…It was like a sickness. I’d beat her face out of shape until you couldn’t recognize her…I’d try to stop myself, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t control myself’’” This is another example of and admonition against what happens when the subconscious dominates a person. A similar feeling is described by May Kasahara, who has a habit of doing reckless things that could be potentially fatal, such as trapping Tōru down the well during one of his meditations. More shocking is when she confesses that she put her hands over her boyfriend’s eyes while on a motorcycle, causing an accident
the library’s supervisor, who he theorizes to be his long lost mother, is also crucial for Kafka in finding his identity. As Crow narrates it, the moment he forgives his mother through Miss Saeki, “the frozen part of” Kafka’s “heart crumbles.” Endō and Gabriel are correct in including forgiveness as a part of Kafka’s journey to being freed from his father’s curse; however, another important component of his liberation from the prophecy is his realization that while there are things that one must face alone, he cannot completely alienate himself from society and other people. As Ōshima states, “‘…my point is that it’s really hard for people to live their lives alone.’” Of course, Kafka learns this as he realizes that without the help of people like Sakura, who allows him to stay in her house the first night he is away from home, and Ōshima and Miss Saeki, who allow him to live in the spare room of the library, he would have been in lost. Nakata is also emotionally and physically forsaken by his parents after his memory loss. His “parents – totally focused on their children’s education – ignored him and turned their attention to his younger brothers,” and sent him to be raised by his grandparents. Despite his abandonment, Nakata does not hold resentment towards his parents as Kafka does towards his mother. Additionally, unlike Kafka, who believes when he first sets out on his journey that he will be able to move completely independently from others, Nakata, who is always worrying about losing his government subsidy, is aware that although he leads a very closed off world with little outside contact, he needs the help of others in order to live. When Mimi the cat aids him in locating Goma, the lost cat that he is searching for, he tells her that he “‘can’t get by without other people’s help.’”
in his subconscious. The omen becomes a “mechanism buried inside” of him, a “‘timing device buried inside’” his genes that he feels will lead to his destruction. Kafka relates his father’s omen to the execution device that appears in Franz Kafka’s The Penal Colony. For him, the device in the story isn’t “some metaphor or allegory – it’s actually here, all around me” in the form of the omen. Kafka’s father, Tamura Koichi, is a famous sculptor whose “…chief theme was the human subconscious…His best-known work was his major ‘Labyrinth’ series, which explored…the beauty and inspiration found in the meandering contours of the labyrinths.” For this reason, Kafka feels that to his father he was just another sculptural project. The omen that he buried in his son’s subconscious is just like his sculptures, which focuses on the labyrinth of the subconscious. Kojima refers to the omen in the words of Ōshima as a “labyrinth set within” (「内にセットされた迷宮」). In other words, the labyrinth is a metaphor for the subconscious. Subsequently Kafka must constantly deal with the struggle between his conscious mind that is trying to get away from the omen and the subconscious mind, the labyrinth within, which is trying to fulfill it. This leads to an alienation from himself. As Macquarrie states, “For the existentialist, alienation is understood chiefly in inward terms. It is the existent’s alienation from his own deepest being.” Ōshima clearly sees this struggle within Kafka: “‘You’re seeking something, but at the same time running away for all you’re worth’” What Kafka is searching for is his identity. However, he will not be able to reach it while denying and running away from a part of his identity: his subconscious (omen).
internal fate, which is referred to as a sandstorm: “‘…it feels like everything’s been decided in advance-that I’m following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn’t matter how much I think things over…the harder I try, the more I lose my sense of who I am. It’s like my identity’s an orbit that I’ve strayed far away from.’” The internal map that Kafka feels somebody has etched in him refers not only to the omen; this is also Murakami’s metaphor for the identity that postmodern Japanese society tries to distribute to its citizens. Kafka is not alone in feeling that it is fate and not his actual self that is steering his life. Hoshino, too, feels similar sentiments. “‘…it’s like fate decided everything. The only one who hasn’t had a clue has been me.’” In this case, fate can be interpreted as societal constrictions, and therefore a criticism of the system. In addition to a harsh sprinkling of criticism of the Japanese police, to which Hoshino refers as “just gangsters who get paid by the state,” there are several examples in which Murakami writes of protagonists trying to break free from Japanese societal conventions. For example, Hoshino is described as man who became a truck driver because “…he knew he couldn’t stand a regular company job, commuting to a dingy office every morning only to have a boss watch his every move like a hawk.” This counters the conventional idea in Japanese culture that all men want to become a サラリーマン, or white-collar worker (Of course, this refusal to conform is also reflected in Murakami’s personal life.). Another example of a character living an unorthodox life is Sada, Ōshima’s brother, who describes to Kafka how he changed his fate: “‘I was working at a big ad agency in Tokyo. I couldn’t stand it so I quit…and started surfing.’” Both characters refused the ready-made identities handed to them by Japanese society, and instead chose their own paths. Through these examples, Murakami is advocating a life