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Postmodernism and Genre Fiction as
Deferred Action: Haruki Murakami
and the Noir Tradition
Steffen Hantke
a
a
Sogang University, Seoul, Korea
Published online: 07 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Steffen Hantke (2007) Postmodernism and Genre Fiction as Deferred Action:
Haruki Murakami and the Noir Tradition, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 49:1, 3-24,
DOI: 10.3200/CRIT.49.1.2-24
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/CRIT.49.1.2-24
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Copyright © 2007 Heldref Publications
Postmodernism and Genre Fiction as
Deferred Action: Haruki Murakami and
the Noir Tradition
STEFFEN HANTKE
ABSTRACT: Conspicuous in the work of author Haruki Murakami are his use of the
hard-boiled detective, in whom Murakami recognizes himself as a professional writer,
and the problematizing of the boundaries that separate one genre from another and
circumscribe genre discourse in general. By means of noir pastiche, Murakami carries
these tropes into A Wild Sheep’s Chase and Dance Dance Dance where they function
within a larger critique of the postmodern. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the
World takes this deployment of noir even further. In a skillful montage of alternating
discursive modes, Murakami deconstructs noir itself, divesting it of its power to define
a postmodern Japan that only exists in a politically conservative Japanese imagination,
or in a peculiarly postmodern type of Orientalism within the Western imagination.
Keywords: Hard-boiled detective, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the
World, Haruki Murakami, noir pastiche, postmodernism
I
n recent years, Haruki Murakami’s reputation has not only started to spread
outside of his native Japan—the man has arrived. I discovered him in 1993
when my science fiction reading group selected the Vintage paperback of Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World as its book of the month. Published
in 1993, only two years after its original Japanese release, the English translation
of the novel coincided with Knopf’s publication of the short-story collection The
Elephant Vanishes, both following the 1990 Penguin edition of A Wild Sheep Chase.
His career began in his native Japan around 1980, and he began to reach an Englishspeaking audience during the early 1990s with this wave of translations. At roughly
the same time, his work was also being translated into a number of languages other
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than English, a clear sign that he had attained the status as a writer of international
acclaim. His novels are now released simultaneously in a number of languages, and
the release of Kafka on the Shore, one of his more recent novels, was staged by publishers around the world as a major event. In fact, the New York Times listed Kafka
on the Shore as one of “The Ten Best Books of 2005.” Praised by an anonymous
reviewer as “the work of a powerfully confident writer,” it was the only novel out of
the five works of fiction on the list that was a translation.
As I cannot read Murakami in his original Japanese—a considerable handicap—I
will refer to critical sources better equipped to deal with the finer points of style
and diction in Japanese. However, because the point of this essay will be to argue
Murakami’s cosmopolitanism and situate his writing in a context of textual production and reception across cultural boundaries, this handicap strikes me as oddly
appropriate. True, it does impose limits on interpretation but also implicates me as
a reader in the same global contexts in which Murakami operates. As much as any
proliferation of contextual awareness carries the risk of producing misreadings, it
also opens up new interpretive options that remain unavailable to those operating
within a single cultural framework.
Murakami’s international success is even more of an accomplishment given
that Japanese writers with more sterling credentials, such as Nobel Prize winner
Kenzaburo Oe, have not yet secured a readership outside of their native country as
large as Murakami’s. Western readers may find aspects of Murakami’s work that
are grounded in Japanese culture and tradition as baffling or impenetrable as those
in Oe’s or other more idiosyncratically “Japanese” writers. But what reconciles
those readers with Murakami is, I believe, his ability to integrate elements into his
work that are utterly familiar to Western readers.1 Many have noted the “copious
pop references” cropping up in his writing (Rubin 17). Among these references, the
creative variations he teases out of the American hard-boiled mystery are the most
conspicuous and significant. In tone and theme, Murakami’s novels are about as
noir as contemporary fiction in a slipstream mode gets, which raises the question:
What is the appeal of the hard-boiled detective to the Japanese writer?2
The Japanese Writer as Hard-boiled Detective
In an essay on Raymond Chandler, Pico Iyer credits Murakami with “quietly
revolution[izing] Japanese literature with his everyday mysteries of identity and
disappearance (who am I, and what happened to that memory—that girl—that was
here a moment ago?)” (87). Iyer’s tongue-in-cheek summary is dead on: Murakami
manages to take the formula of hard-boiled detective fiction and, with its help, raise
questions of cognition and identity with respect to the personal lives of his characters, questions that were background material for the likes of Hammett or Chandler.
Murakami’s “mysteries of identity and disappearance” have steered the hard-boiled
detective story away from the exploration of milieu and toward encounters with the
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unknowable. His heroes, if they arrive at a solution to the mystery at all, do so by
means other than rational analysis; their modus operandi, as well as their mode of
existence, is existential, ironically playful, and largely textual.
Murakami has been experimenting with the hard-boiled variant of noir since A
Wild Sheep Chase, published early in his career in 1982. In the novel, the detective
is in pursuit of an elusive, mysterious sheep, a MacGuffin reminiscent of Dashiell
Hammett’s Maltese Falcon or “the big whatsit” in Robert Aldrich’s production of
Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me, Deadly (1955). In a lecture in Berkeley, Murakami talks
about “one West Coast reader [who] saw the connection. Referring to Chandler’s The
Big Sleep, he called my novel The Big Sheep. I felt honored by this” (qtd. in Rubin 81).
Murakami’s exploration of the genre continued with Dance Dance Dance (1988), the
sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, and elements of noir still figure prominently in more
recent novels such as The Sputnik Sweetheart (1999).
On the most basic level, Chandler and the hard-boiled detective tradition have
provided Murakami with a blueprint for protagonist and plot. A detective figure, not
always a professional investigator, is called on to solve a case that reveals itself as
more complex than is apparent at first glance. The investigation begins inconspicuously, revolves around an act of violence or a disappearance, and features a female
character whose allure overcomes the protagonist’s initial reluctance to involve
himself in something that spells trouble. Ultimately, no clear moral lesson emerges.
Although the truth, fully or partially, emerges, people are killed, justice proves elusive, and the world remains a dangerous and godforsaken place.
More important than this sequence of events and crucial to the tone of the novels
is the detective himself. It is this figure for which Murakami is particularly indebted
to Chandler and his frequently quoted dictum that the hero in hard-boiled fiction “is
everything” (“Simple” 18). Although plot and setting have their attractions, it is for the
sake of this character, for the sake of his voice and world-weary cynicism, that readers
return to hard-boiled fiction. Critics have noted the consistency with which Murakami
employs this protagonist throughout his work, often leaving him nameless to allow for
the reader’s projection of continuity from one novel to the next.3 The figure appears
even in stories and novels that are not overtly modeled on the hard-boiled formula,
suggesting that Murakami has succeeded in deriving the character from the formula,
but then making him so uniquely his own that he can function independent of his
indigenous fictional environment.
Murakami’s professional background explains, to some extent, his working with
formulaic elements of noir isolated from the totality of the genre. Not only did
Murakami begin “his career by translating Chandler, among others, into kanji and
katakana script” (Iyer 87) but also served as the Japanese translator of Raymond
Carver, a writer who manages to sustain a laconic hard-boiled voice in the absence
of the typical genre trappings of noir. Murakami’s intense study of Carver may
have taught him that certain noir elements are sustainable apart from their generic
origins, and that recontextualizing these elements can serve his own idiosyncratic
voice and vision.
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The typical Murakami protagonist, the result of this generic eclecticism, never
refers to himself by using the formal watashi or watakashi, the conventional firstperson pronoun favored in Japanese literature that serves as an unambiguous marker
of “literariness.” Instead, he calls himself boku, “another pronoun-like word for ‘I’,
but an unpretentious one used primarily by young men in informal circumstances”
(Rubin 37). Endowed with “a generous fund of curiosity and a cool, detached,
bemused acceptance of the inherent strangeness of life” (37), this narrator is a
unique yet readily recognizable variation on Chandler’s detective. Even when un- or
underemployed, Murakami’s Japanese middle-class Everyman remains strangely
unconcerned with money, career, or social prestige. That peculiar lethargy latent in
Hammett’s Sam Spade or Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is brought into the foreground
with Murakami’s protagonists. They derive pleasure from the minutiae of small
household chores, like ironing a shirt or cooking pasta—activities that are explicitly
coded as domestic or feminine. Sometimes they are deserted by wives or girlfriends,
divorced, abandoned without explanation, or demoted to the status of househusbands
after leaving their jobs or being fired. They are slow to get involved in the mysteries life deposits at their doorsteps and often seem incapable of explaining why they
persist on the course that has taken them out of their comfortable, aimless daily
routines. They are tempted by the women around them, but, on the whole, they
respond according to Chandler’s demand that they should be neither eunuchs nor
satyrs (“Simple” 18). When they resist temptation, it is less because they adhere to
Chandler’s code of chivalric honor and more because of a lack of energy, initiative,
or sexual appetite.
Discussing this unique recurring narrator and unpacking his significance has
become a staple of Murakami criticism.4 But while many critics identify the character
as a hallmark of Murakami’s style and philosophical outlook, few elaborate on the
connection between Murakami’s boku and the hard-boiled detective. Perhaps they
underestimate or even overlook the link because few of Murakami’s protagonists
actually are detectives. Most of them end up in this role by accident, because they are
energized by some small mystery that enters their field of vision, or they drift aimlessly into the gravitational field of an enigmatic event. This deprofessionalization of
the detective figure sets Murakami’s boku apart from the Spades and Marlowes. At
Chandler’s own strong insistence, these figures are in it for the money, as professionals
making a living, although they already “mark a transitional stage between detecting as
a fine art and as a large-scale organized profession” (Mandel 36).
Murakami makes no secret of his penchant for hard-boiled pastiche. Despite his
admission that hard-boiled detective fiction is not the only “pop structure” he is
interested in (“I’ve been using [. . .] science fiction structures, for example. I’m also
using love story or romance structures” [qtd. in Gregory, Miyawaki, and McCaffery
114]), he gives a reason why the figure of the hard-boiled detective is of such crucial importance to his work that cuts more to the quick of his serious intentions as a
writer. As far as “my thinking about the hard-boiled style” is concerned, Murakami
explains, “I’m interested in the fact that [hard-boiled detectives] are very individual6
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ist in orientation. The figure of the loner. I’m interested in that because it isn’t easy
to live in Japan as an individualist or a loner. I’m always thinking about this. I’m a
novelist and I’m a loner, an individualist” (114).5 Although the loner may be a figure of normative individualism in American culture, its significance changes within
Japanese culture. Especially “the lack of a ‘subsystem’—a means of defining oneself
outside the parameters of ordinary life as a sarariiman (white-collar worker), factory
worker, or other predefined role”—leaves little room for highly idiosyncratic and
individualistic activities, like those of a fiction writer (Strecher 281). By adopting
the central character, the structures, and the tone of the hard-boiled detective novel,
Murakami finds an instrument that invests his profession with a modicum of glamour
and adventure, which are conspicuously absent from a profession coded as domestic
and thus deficient in masculinity, or just plain antisocial. But noir is not just a tool
of vicarious self-aggrandizement; to the degree that the hard-boiled detective is an
anachronism in a postmodern world—and perhaps an exotic, maladapted figure in
Japanese society—it also helps Murakami reflect critically on his own activity as a
writer, or, more specifically, as a contemporary Japanese writer.
A psychological reading of Murakami’s central character suggests that hardboiled weariness functions as a defense mechanism against the trauma of modernity.
Murakami’s protagonists “embody the intuition, ubiquitous in late modernity, that
the inexplicable has become commonplace: it is normal that abnormal things occur”
(Cassegard 82). Because they have traded in vulnerability for “a masochistically
tinged resignation which borders on indifference,” their “instinctual needs and fundamental impulses become channeled in such a way that their gratification is made less
dependent on relations to other people” (85, 86). The boku’s self-sufficiency becomes
a hallmark of the postmodernity of Murakami’s writing; it aligns itself with the texts’
frequent forays into a fantastic mode that transgresses the rules of verisimilitude,
with the pastiche of the hard-boiled detective novel and the powerlessness writers
experience in a culture in which literature functions primarily as cultural commodity
without its traditional role of social arbiter. A “masochistically tinged resignation”
strikes me as a valid response to this situation.6
Given the ubiquity of Murakami’s boku and the self-reflexive quality in his use of
the hard-boiled detective genre, it is necessary to revise the earlier critical discussion
of Murakami in one respect. The hard-boiled tradition is not one of the key elements
of Murakami’s literary cosmopolitanism; it is the key element. It is a means for
Murakami of mapping out a narrative position from which writing fiction becomes
possible. It allows him to reflect on himself as a cosmopolitan writer working in a
tradition extraneous to traditional Japanese culture and thus as a spokesperson for
Japan in its contemporary role within the global economy and emerging global culture. It also allows him to reflect on himself as a man in a profession coded as feminine, someone whose activity is not on a par with the sarariiman’s productivity but
more along the lines of ironing shirts or cooking pasta. It is the association with the
hard-boiled detective that transforms the novelist’s deprofessionalization from social
stigma into a prerequisite of heroic independence. In other words, it invites reflection
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on writing fiction as a socially responsible activity, both inside the mechanisms of a
capitalist market and yet oddly undisciplined; a shadowy profession, socially coded
as a nonprofession, and thus in need of validation through either commercial success
or the trappings of academic respectability.
This is a particularly urgent issue for Murakami because, on the one hand, his popularity nudges him toward the role of the public intellectual while, on the other hand,
his investment in an ostensibly lowbrow and, more important, explicitly non-Japanese
cultural tradition seems to bar him from just this role. Writers of serious standing
have not had to legitimize themselves professionally in the way Murakami has; in
fact, their cultural marginality, when framed by a high modernist ideology, appears
as a privileged position. A writer such as Oe, “whose traditional business [it] is to
define what is popular and what is legitimate” (Ross 5), is not so much part of popular culture as he is occupying a position outside or above it. An emphasis on “being
Japanese” would then, as in the case of Oe, tie the writer back into the community as
a public intellectual. A popular Japanese writer like Murakami, however, “hopelessly
in love with the cultural classlessness in whose republicanist name [American pop
culture] conquers internal and external resistance the world over” (Ross 7), might be
perceived to be a participant in popular culture rather than a critical commentator.7 His
status as a public intellectual would be compromised not only by his association with
popular culture but also more specifically by the non-Japanese aspect of contemporary
Japanese culture. By introducing a figure that epitomizes, glorifies, and mythologizes
American individualism into the Japanese cultural context, Murakami’s work opens
a line of inquiry into the flexibility of Japanese society, or the lack thereof. By taking on additional significance as a means of generic self-reflexivity, the boku serves
as a stand-in for the postmodern author and his options of how to participate in, and
respond to, the culture that has created him.
The Panoptic View of Genre: Noir as Deferred Action
Given this complex meshing of biographical and cultural forces in Murakami’s
background, it is hardly surprising that his use of hard-boiled or noir tropes shows
all the self-consciousness of an author who has come to noir as an outsider and with
a degree of belatedness. Take, for example, the scene in Hard-boiled Wonderland in
which two toughs barge into the apartment of the nameless private eye “like a wrecking ball” (131). Undaunted by the physical threat, the narrator dubs one “the hulk” or
“Big Boy” and the other “Junior.” While they intimidate and interrogate him, he has
time for a few wisecracks: “Junior didn’t say a word, choosing instead to contemplate
the lit end of his cigarette [. . .] This was where the Jean-Luc Godard scene would
have been titled Il regardait le feu de son tabac. My luck that Godard films were no
longer fashionable” (132; emphasis in original).
No one is surprised, least of all the boku himself, that in the scene that follows,
the two thugs politely yet systematically trash his apartment. After all, they are in
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character, and this is what “muscle” in the noir universe usually does. The narrator’s calmly self-reflective response to the physical danger and his reframing of the
scene as a piece of movie trivia place Big Boy and Junior in a line of noir thugs
reminiscent, for example, of Moose Malloy in Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, or
the men sent to kill Jean-Pierre Melville’s protagonist in Le Samouraï (1967). But
the fact that Murakami has his narrator reveal his textual savvy by an intertextual
reference that is poignantly not to a classic film places the text self-consciously in
a position of extreme ironic distance from the noir tradition. Godard’s ambivalence
toward American pop culture and its global influence would make genuine nostalgia for the hard-boiled detective or film noir difficult, if not impossible. Godard is
relevant here, but only as a marker of historical obsolescence; after all, his “films
were no longer fashionable.” Despite the insistence on ironic distancing, there is an
obvious affection for the noir style that shines through every line of Hard-boiled
Wonderland. It originates from a position even further removed from the genre’s
fashionable critical distance. We have traveled through a critical assessment of the
hard-boiled style into a phase in which nostalgia, albeit a self-conscious nostalgia,
becomes possible again—from modern parody to postmodern pastiche.
Film noir historians have identified this position Murakami occupies as one of
cultural belatedness, or “deferred action—Nachtraeglichkeit,” as Thomas Elsaesser
calls it (423).8 Elsaesser’s terminology reflects a critical consensus in cinema studies
that has begun to coalesce around the idea that, in a sense, there never was such a
thing as film noir. Elsaesser himself comes to this conclusion after examining what
might be called a foundational myth of film noir, the “connection between German
Expressionist cinema and American film noir” (420).9 Ever since this story about
noir’s origins has solidified into one of the “commonplaces of film history,” Elsaesser
argues, it has become difficult to see film noir for what it really is, “an imaginary
entity whose meaning resides in a set of shifting signifiers” (420).10 He concludes:
film noir has no essence, [. . .] its most stable characteristic is its “absentcentredness”, its displacements, its over-determinedness, whose ghostly
existence as too many discourses, instead of canceling each other out, merely
seems to amplify the term’s resonance and suggestiveness. Most noticeable is
the term’s historical imaginary as deferred action (Nachtraeglichkeit). (423)
James Naremore follows Elsaesser’s lead in pursuing this constructionist approach.
Film noir, he writes, “belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema; in other words, it has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse”
(11). To the degree that it is “a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings that
helps to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies” (11), it has not only
“become useful to the movie industry” (38) but also to academics, film historians,
and, by proxy, writers like Murakami who are influenced by these traditions. Naremore points out that, because noir is “a concept that was generated ex post facto,”
it can easily be transformed into “a dream image of bygone glamour” (39). This
transfer of an ideological construct from critical discourse into “a worldwide mass
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memory” entails a process of fetishization, which, in turn, “represses as much history
as it recalls, usually in the service of cinephilia and commodification” (39). From
Elsaesser’s and Naremore’s comments, film noir emerges as a commodity that is
simultaneously material and immaterial, an object of exchange as much as an object
of desire. In both of these capacities, noir is produced by the studios, with their directors and producers, and by critics and reviewers, who are invested in the term as the
coinage of professional and cultural capital.
This fetishizing of noir seems most starkly visible to critics approaching U.S.
culture from the outside. For Marc Vernet, for example, noir is deeply implicated in
the ways American culture circulates through global markets in the years after World
War II. His reading of noir’s precarious ontology, aside from echoing Elsaesser’s and
Naremore’s essential tenet, eloquently elaborates on this dimension of the outside
of noir—geographically and culturally—as an essential prerequisite for the genre’s
critical understanding:
As an object or corpus of films, film noir does not belong to the history of cinema;
it belongs as a notion to the history of film criticism, or, if one prefers, to the
history of those who wanted to love the American cinema even in its middling
production and to form an image of it. Film noir is a collector’s idea that, for the
moment, can only be found in books. (26; emphasis in original)
All three critics operate from a perspective of doubly deferred action, or, to use
Elsaesser’s term, Nachtraeglichkeit, which allows for a panoptic view of the genre’s
historical development. Their vantage point, in the second half of the 1990s, is also
that of Murakami. It encompasses first the cycle of classic noir films themselves, as
well as their subsequent critical assessment by French and American critics from the
1950s to the 1970s, from Borde and Chaumeton to Schrader’s “Notes on Film Noir”
(1972). Historically speaking, the panoptic width of their perspective is that of contemporary directors and writers who are also invested in film noir, yet treat it not so
much as a preexisting phenomenon, an accomplished cultural fact, but as a construct
to be dismantled and reassembled at will.
Murakami’s biographical background fits in with this historical model of doubly
deferred action. He belongs to a generation that came of age “in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, after their country had been assiduously importing American culture for
more than two decades” (Walley 41), the first generation “to be born in the postwar
period, without memories of hardship in the Second World War or participation in
the reconstruction of Japan following it” (Strecher 264–65). Toshifumi Miyawaki
describes this generation as the “emerging shinjinrui (literally ‘New Human Race’)
generation of Japanese youth” (Gregory, Miyawaki, and McCaffery 112), while Rubin
calls Murakami “the first genuinely ‘post-post-war writer’, the first to cast off the
‘dank, heavy atmosphere’ of the post-war period and to capture in literature the new
Americanized mood of lightness” (17). Postwar Japanese culture as Murakami has
experienced it and as he describes it in his fiction has embraced American cultural
imports for so long that they are virtually taken for granted.11 The historical phase
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in which postwar Japan experienced the intrusion of American culture as a cause for
alarm and trigger of cultural crisis has passed. What used to raise problems of national
identity is now accomplished fact. By the late 1960s, which Murakami himself pinpoints as the beginning of his political and cultural awareness, Japan was as culturally
colonized by the United States as most European countries, having reached a degree
of saturation at which the boundaries between indigenous and imported culture were
beginning to blur.12 Noir would still carry the mark of cultural otherness, but the
rough edges of the exotic, of genuine cultural otherness, would have eroded over time.
By the time Murakami’s generation encounters noir, it already exists as something
established and fully formed. As Murakami himself approaches noir both as someone
removed from the genre’s geographical and historical origins, his use of the genre fits
in with the accounts of noir that recent film scholarship has provided in refutation of
the idea that there is such a thing as “noir” predating the critical discourse about it.
The Noir City and Its Other: Escaping to the Residual Zone
An essential means by which noir discourse in literature and film has always
reflected on its own status as a cultural construct, from the classic cycle on, is the motif
of the spatial other. It postulates the existence of a space outside the noir universe, a
universe that traditionally appears claustrophobic and deterministic, vast, unknowable,
and of uncertain dimensions.13 The idea of a refuge from this nightmare serves as an
object of utopian desire or postlapsarian nostalgia for characters weighed down by
existential pressures, chafing against urban grittiness, and suffering from isolation and
alienation. It is a place of vague memories or unfulfilled promises. In the attempt to
escape, characters must cross the boundaries that encircle the noir universe, or at least
bump up against them when the attempted escape fails, which is almost always the
case. Through the attempted transgression, the boundaries are made visible. Once reified, they become available as a self-reflexive metaphor through which noir discourse
examines its own origins and effects.
Examples of this trope in classic noir and hard-boiled discourse abound, from the
brief rural idyll at the end of David Goodis’s Down There (1956, filmed as Shoot
the Piano Player, 1960) and the desperate dash across the border in Chandler’s The
Long Goodbye (1953), to Joe Gillis’s aborted attempt to return to his native Ohio in
Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Dix Handley’s failed return to the Kentucky farm of his youth in John Huston’s production of W. R. Burnett’s The Asphalt
Jungle (1950). Neo-noir is equally enamored of the trope. The final sequence of
David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) takes us out of the city with the promise of narrative
and dramatic resolution. Dark City, written and directed by Alex Proyas (1998),
features a place called Shell Beach, vaguely remembered by John Murdoch, the
film’s protagonist, as a childhood sanctuary to which he tries to return. Other noir
hybrids, such as Josef Rusniak’s The Thirteenth Floor (1999) and Andy and Larry
Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999), feature key scenes that stage the literal breaking
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through of the boundaries around the noir space. In keeping with noir’s cynicism
and determinism, most of these attempted escapes fail: Handley collapses at the
moment of arrival, Gillis ends up floating in Norma Desmond’s pool, and Fincher’s
two detectives are reeled back into the iron maw of the city. But even these spectacular failures shed light on the existence of boundaries and paradoxically confirm
rather than cast doubts on the existence of an outside, a spatial other.14
Murakami’s two novels published, respectively, before and after Hard-boiled Wonderland handle this trope largely in accordance with classic American noir in film and
fiction. A Wild Sheep Chase begins in Tokyo, presented as a space of postindustrial
urban alienation worthy of Chandler’s Los Angeles or Wilder’s Hollywood. From
there, the novel’s protagonist is sent on a mission that takes him to Sapporo on the
northern island of Hokkaido. The shift in location is accompanied by a shift in climate.
Murakami draws attention to the cold, snow, and wind, all elements of a natural world
that has been completely obliterated from the urban space in which the novel starts.
But despite its remoteness, Hokkaido does not offer an escape from the corruption and
political machinations in Tokyo. As in most noir discourse, the island merely promises
an escape that it ultimately fails to deliver. It is merely an extension of the urban noir
space, its periphery, not its outside.
The sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, in which Murakami explores the spatial logic
of noir further, begins with the protagonist revisiting the locations of the earlier novel.
But then Dance Dance Dance reverses the topographic sequence, as the more substantial part of the novel takes place not on Hokkaido but in Tokyo. This move from
the periphery to the center suggests that there is no escape from the noir space. To the
same degree that this is a sign of resignation in the face of an inescapable spatial and
ideological totality, it also signals Murakami’s willingness to conform to the rules of
the genre. The forces of postindustrial capitalism associated with the urban environment have extended their reach far enough that no uncolonized spaces are left; their
control of the narrative universe is total.
Or so it seems, because embedded in this totality are small niches or lacunae
exempt from the forces that dominate the noir city. These spaces, it turns out, do not
follow the logic of center versus periphery, but presuppose instead a spatial model
closer to that of the field. This field is humming with informational density and
postmodern paranoia. It is organized through an infinite connectedness that signals
vitality, agency, and emplotment (at least to the degree that noir cynicism permits).
Any space exempt, consequently, is coded as dead, inert, static, and void.
A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance feature a building—the Dolphin
Hotel in Sapporo—that functions as the novels’ primary metaphor of such exemption or spatial otherness.15 “Its undistinguishedness was metaphysical,” the protagonist tells us when he first sets foot inside the Dolphin Hotel in A Wild Sheep Chase
(163). He calls it “incomprehensible” (166), uneasily noticing the grasp of entropic
forces: “It wasn’t particularly old; still it was strikingly run-down.” When he revisits
this postmodern haunted mansion in Dance Dance Dance, he is stunned to find that
the old building has been “transformed into a gleaming twenty-six story Bauhaus
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Modern-Art Deco symphony of glass and steel, with flags of various nations waving along the driveway,” grandly renamed “l’Hotel Dauphin” (21). Although, at first
glance, the pressure-cooker of modernization seems to have eliminated the dead
space that used to be the old Dolphin Hotel, the protagonist discovers that its essence
has merely been condensed into a spatial ghost contained within the building. This
ghost now lurks behind the gleaming façade that so stridently denies the existence of
an unresolved past or of history altogether. The elevator stops on the wrong floor, the
doors open, and a darkness that is “deathly absolute” will “entrap the unsuspecting
guest” (74). Time, which had already slowed down in the Dolphin Hotel to an endless
undifferentiated series of days and nights, now comes to a complete standstill.
The urban landscape in Murakami’s novels is riddled with such holes, neglected
or unexplored pockets and enclosures, which function in radical opposition to the
social and economic bustle around them. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, a dry well
in a neighbor’s back yard, abandoned and half-forgotten, becomes both a trap and a
sanctuary to the protagonist. A dead alley behind his house has the same connotations. “It was not an alley in the proper sense of the word,” Murakami’s narrator
tells us, but “then there was probably no word for what it was. It wasn’t a ‘road’ or
a ‘path’ or even a ‘way’. Properly speaking, a ‘way’ should be a pathway or channel
with an entrance and an exit, which takes you somewhere if you follow it. But our
‘alley’ had neither entrance nor exit [. . .]. The alley had not one dead end but two”
(12). The circumstances under which this dead space within the busy metropolis of
Tokyo came to be are similarly charged with allegorical overtones:
[. . .] the story was [. . .] that it used to have both an entrance and an exit [. . .].
But with the rapid economic growth of the mid-fifties, rows of new houses came
to fill the empty lots on either side of the road [. . .]. People didn’t like strangers
passing so close to their houses and yards, so before long, one end of the path
was blocked off [. . .]. Then one local citizen decided to enlarge his yard and
completely sealed off his end of the alley. (12)
Rubin, in his study of Murakami, has two interpretations to offer for these dead spaces.
“Underground” is associated with “lack of rational understanding, forgetting, free
association, [which] open the deep wells and dark passageways to the timeless other
world that exists in parallel with this one” (33–34).16 As Murakami’s characters enter
these spaces, they begin to explore their own inner space, recover what has been lost,
and, in the process, address their sense of displacement and isolation. But in the process of recentering the self through voluntary sequestration at the bottom of the well,
the protagonist of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle also discovers that his own narrative
is bound up with suppressed memories of the Japanese atrocities in Manchuria. The
psychological amnesia, which begins to dissolve as a result of the protagonist’s selfimposed sequestration, remains a collective cultural blind spot. Because the protagonist’s self-recognition remains an atypical event in the larger Japanese culture, Rubin
concludes that the space functions as an allegory of the 1980s, “a vacant, stagnant,
dissatisfying decade, just beneath the surface of which lurks a violent history” (213).
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The collective aspect of Rubin’s reading strikes me as particularly relevant for the
dead back alley that features so prominently in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Postwar
economic growth on one side and xenophobia on the other side are “squeezing down”
this space. This condensation is not a process that ends in a moment of explosion.
Instead, it squeezes, figuratively speaking, the air out of the space. It is a dead space,
hostile and uninhabitable. It is ejected from the Lacanian symbolic order and placed in
the realm of abjection, Julia Kristeva’s term for the prelinguistic space of the mother
that must be rejected before the adult self can come into being. As a postmodern
author, Murakami sees abjection less in Kristeva’s terms of psychological individuation, and more as a technologically mediated process that creates the self, from the
outside in, as an extension of industrial capitalism.17 To be outside the economic order,
cut off from the formative powers of circulation, constitutes abjection. Following this
logic, the origins of the mysterious back alley are relegated to the realm of conjecture
and myth. To the extent that the space does not altogether fall into the realm of the
unspeakable, it appears as a piece of urban legend, passed on in an informal noncommodified oral tradition. Except for this form of transmission, which is either preindustrial or functions largely outside the commercial mechanisms of industrial
culture, the space has no existence at all. Its peculiar nature cannot be captured in
language because it is nothing “in the proper sense of the word.”
Rubin’s psychological and historical reading of the topography is convincing,
especially in its account of the opposition between the ordinary and extraordinary
nature of both spaces. But by the same token, Rubin is unconcerned with the fact
that Murakami borrows strongly from the generic conventions of noir film and
fiction. These conventions, Murakami himself admits somewhat paradoxically,
appeal to him because of their “authenticity” (Gregory, Miyawaki, and McCaffery
114). To associate them, of all things, with “authenticity” requires a frame of mind
that completely ignores Elsaesser’s and Naremore’s account of noir—an inventory
of prefabricated elements, self-consciously reconfigured in plain view. Murakami’s
neo-noir narrators, hence, are hardly authentic; rather, they are masks the author
wears to reflect back on his own social role and the limited range of his influence
(“it isn’t easy to live in Japan as an individualist or a loner. I’m always thinking
about this. I’m a novelist and I’m a loner, an individualist” [Gregory, Miyawaki,
and McCaffery 114]).
In the context of Murakami’s noir pastiche, social allegory takes its place next to
individual psychology. The “dead spaces” in his fiction are reminiscent of Fredric
Jameson’s description of postmodernism as the historical stage at which modernism’s
project has finally been completed. “In modernism,” Jameson argues:
[S]ome residual zones of “nature” or “being,” of the old, the older, the archaic,
still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that “referent.” Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human
world than the older one, but one in which “culture” has become a veritable
“second nature.” (ix)
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Jameson’s categorization places Murakami’s writing at the modern end of the
spectrum of contemporary culture, which is surprising given Murakami’s reputation as a quintessential postmodern author. The double Nachtraeglichkeit in regard
to noir I have discussed earlier raises the question of whether Murakami intends
these “residual zones” to stand for “‘nature’ or ‘being,’ [. . .] the old, the older, the
archaic,” as Jameson puts it. In Murakami, these zones still require the kind of
cultural labor Jameson regards as a prerequisite for their completed colonization by
modernism. But it is doubtful whether this labor is progressive, pushing the entire
field toward a state of completed modernization, or whether this labor is already
part of a postmodern nostalgia that recuperates these spaces in the same manner in
which Murakami “constructs” noir discourse. True, Murakami’s “residual zones”
are associated with nature—the snowy countryside of Hokkaido, for example, to
which the protagonist of A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance travels.
Tokyo, by comparison, has “weather” or “climate” only in the figurative sense of
the word, while Sapporo and the mountainous countryside of Hokkaido are under
the sway of nature—exposed to snow, wind, and rain. But the transformation of the
Dolphin Hotel into “l’Hotel Dauphin” transfers the scene of postmodern transformation from nature to culture. The “residual zone” survives behind the seamless
postmodern façade of the hotel, cut off from the image-obsessed frenzy of what is
already a postindustrial economy. Jameson suggests that these residual zones have
been overlooked or temporarily neglected by the forces of social and economic
development, or have successfully resisted invasion. But Murakami explains their
existence by seeing them created by the pressures of “progress” itself, a kind of
inadvertent secondary product of the process of postmodernization at the moment
when it starts writing its own history as a struggle toward completion.
Inside on the Outside: Noir Dystopia and Preindustrial Nostalgia
The ways in which these pressures are written into the generic codes by which
we imagine the postmodern, Murakami explores in his most accomplished “everyday myster[y] of identity and disappearance” to date, Hard-boiled Wonderland and
the End of the World. Critical consensus has singled the book out as Murakami’s
most mature, most consistently developed work from this phase of his career.
Although it did not sell as well as Murakami’s later novel Norwegian Wood (1987),
which made Murakami a household name in Japan, it constitutes a breakthrough
for Murakami because in it, he perfects the pastiche of American hard-boiled
detective fiction that underlies his entire work.18
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World deploys the self-reflexive
spatial tropes of noir I have pointed out in Murakami’s other fiction. In a discussion
of Kim Newman’s novel The Night Mayor, Rob Latham coins the term “VR noir.”
By this he means “an offshoot of SF noir [mostly associated with cyberpunk authors
like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan] that deploys computer-based
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technologies of simulation, such as virtual reality, as interfaces between a realm of
private consciousness and a larger public system of images and collective fantasy”
(96). Latham’s descriptions of “VR noir” is highly reminiscent of Murakami’s postmodern sensibility: a heady amalgamation of “the stylish pell-mell action” harking
back to Alfred Bester’s 1950s science fiction, a “pop sophistication combined with
an undercurrent of camp” borrowed from such TV shows as The Avengers, and
Chandler’s “tone of simmering world-weariness that conveys both alienation from,
and anger at, a system of corrupt, irresponsible power” (95).
Continuing the line of nameless first-person narrators from his earlier novels,
Murakami’s private eye in Hard-boiled Wonderland is a Chandleresque figure “just
doing his job” yet trying to extricate himself from a complicated cabal that revolves
around the content of his brain. The cognitive breakthrough his investigation is headed
for will reveal that reality is not what it seems and that the fate of the universe depends
on him, as the novel mixes noir’s anxieties with science fiction’s technophilic exaltation. One part of the novel’s setting is a neo-noir Tokyo in which two technology
giants, ominously and vaguely referred to as “the System” and “the Factory,” battle
for economic domination in “a classic cops-and-robbers routine” (33). Fitting the
postindustrial nature of the economy, the object of their competition is information,
that multipurpose MacGuffin of the postindustrial economic imagination. While the
Factory traffics “in illegally obtained data and other information on the black market,
making megaprofits,” the System, operating in a “quasi-governmental status,” tries to
safeguard the data (33). The protagonist works as an agent who rents out his brain as
storage space for sensitive or valuable data, which are encoded by a process called
“shuffling” as they are moved from one half of his brain to the other and rendered
illegible even to himself. The competition is fierce, both sides play dirty, and the
differences between the two factions are negligible. In short, it is noir’s dog-eat-dog
nightmare of capitalism run amok.
Alternating with the chapters that are set in this “VR noir” Tokyo are chapters
that take place in a preindustrial or postapocalyptic village in an unspecified location and moment in history. This is the “End of the World,” as opposed to the noir
chapters of the “Hard-boiled Wonderland” in the novel’s title. Chapters in Hardboiled Wonderland are told in the past tense, while chapters in the End of the World
are told in the present tense, suggesting a perpetual narrative “now” outside of the
flow of history.19 Surrounded by a high wall, the village is as much a shelter as it is
a prison. Time is regulated by the cyclical patterns of nature, by the seasons of the
year and the labors and rituals heralded by their recurrence. In the opening of the
first chapter that takes place in the village, Murakami either uses primary colors,
associated with the world of myth and fairy tale, or earth tones, associated with
natural materials and substances. Unicorns graze on summer meadows. Their fur
is “golden” at the “approach of autumn”; it is ”black and sandy gray, white and
ruddy brown” in the spring (12). Similar colors are also used in descriptions of
the raw materials used in the making of buildings and objects. The narrative contemplation of the change of seasons echoes the nostalgia for a preindustrial Japan
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enshrined in novels such as Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country: “Spring passed,
summer ended, and just now as the light takes on a diaphanous glow and the first
gusts of autumn ripple the waters of the streams, change becomes visible in the
beasts” (Murakami, Hard-boiled 12–13). This elegiac style, “almost meditative in
[its] stillness” (12), marks a dramatic departure from the hard-boiled narration in
the alternate chapters. It is in keeping with the town as a metaphor for “a timeless
‘original place’ inside the deep wells of the mind” or “a repository of legend and
dream [. . .] inaccessible to conscious thought” (Rubin 116).
At first glance, the interplay of the two separate locations recapitulates the motif
of the escape from the noir space to its spatial other. Aligning itself with this motif,
Hard-boiled Wonderland becomes the dystopian present or future, named with the
typical sarcasm of the genre, whereas the End of the World is the refuge from it—the
re-creation of one’s personal or cultural past or of a topographically removed safe
haven, uncontaminated by the corrupting forces of industrial capitalism. In noir film,
place in the corrupt world can be represented by Huston’s Asphalt Jungle or Proyas’s
Dark City, while the haven is represented by the Kentucky boyhood farm of Asphalt
Jungle protagonist Handley or Murdoch’s Shell Beach in Dark City.
But this is where the similarities end. Murakami’s protagonist succeeds in making it
to the village at the beginning of the novel. Contrary to the genre conventions of noir,
by which the escape must end in failure, his escape from Hard-boiled Wonderland
appears to have been successful. More significantly, Murakami keeps the alternating
chapters in balance until the end, withholding the explanation as to the exact relationship between the two locations. As the two protagonists are revealed to be one and
the same person, the book ends with this person trying to escape from the village at
the end of the world.
Before this happens, however, Murakami keeps the two halves of the book separate, inviting the reader to fill the ellipses within the novel’s paratactic blueprint.
When the story lines in both locations and alternating chapters finally dovetail,
the End of the World is revealed as literally a place “inside the deep wells of the
mind,” to use Rubin’s words. It is a mental construct inside the protagonist’s brain,
its constituent elements self-reflexively referred to in the novel as “the stuff writers make into novels” (262). The explanation of this central idea of the novel is so
convoluted that it requires roughly twenty pages (254–74) and features a drawing
of a circuit as a visual aid (271). Its metaphoric conceit is that the End of the World
is the protagonist’s “core consciousness,” the “world in [his] mind” (270). This
world is ticking down to a countdown that ends with the protagonist’s consciousness entrapped in a permanent state of solipsism.
Within the larger structure of the novel, the End of the World is embedded inside
the ontologically more authentic Hard-boiled Wonderland. This would follow the
logic of noir inherent in the motif of the spatial other, albeit with inverted connotations, as the utopian haven is revealed as a dystopian prison. But the use of the word
and between the two halves of the novel’s title marks a departure from the noir formula. The classic noir motif would demand an or. Literally speaking, a person can
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only be in one place at a time; figuratively speaking, a person can be in two places at
once, but only if the relationship between the two places corresponds to the ontological difference between the tenor and the vehicle of a metaphor.
But Murakami casts significant doubts on the superior degree of authenticity of
Hard-boiled Wonderland. Just as noir’s spatial other falls conspicuously short of its
utopian promises, the noir universe itself is revealed to be lacking in authenticity as
well. In it, there are, for example, creatures called INKlings that haunt the subterranean caverns underneath the city. Whereas the mechanisms of “shuffling” or data
storage inside the human brain are naturalized through cybertechnological rhetoric,
the INKlings are nightmare creatures out of horror or fantasy fiction, explicable only
in reference to the supernatural. Their presence alone precludes any reading of Hardboiled Wonderland as a place of social realism set up in conscious opposition to the
mythic End of the World.
Murakami also undermines the relative proximity of Hard-boiled Wonderland
to the reader’s own reality by subtly undercutting the cyberpunk discourse that is
supposed to anchor neo-noir Tokyo in the discursive space of extrapolative science
fiction. Although “Murakami denies that [William] Gibson’s work was a source for
the novel,” the similarities between Gibson’s style of cyberpunk, which includes Rob
Latham’s “VR noir” as a sub-subgenre, and Murakami’s novel—or at least half of
it—are striking (Rubin 121). And yet the differences are far more crucial. Gibson’s
style is so densely allusive in its derivations from the rhetoric of science that it tends
to obscure its own metaphorical significance, while Murakami draws attention to just
that representational dimension. Side by side with a pastiche of Gibson’s high-tech
jargon (for example, “I input the data-as-given into my right brain then after converting it via a totally unrelated sign-pattern, I transfer it to my left brain, which I then
output as completely recoded numbers [. . .]” 32), Murakami has his protagonist supply a crude hand-drawn sketch of the human brain split in two. The drawing depicts
the brain with deadpan childish simplicity as a cracked egg.20 With tongue-in-cheek
humor, the left side is marked “LEFT BRAIN” and the right side “RIGHT BRAIN.”
The placement of this drawing amidst chunks of Gibsonian technobabble demystifies
the rhetorical device, pointing to the conceptual simplicity underneath the complex
language. Readers are reminded that the rhetoric carries, or perhaps conceals, a
metaphoric level of communication identical to that of a world in which shadows
are severed with the thrust of a knife from their owners, and dreams are embedded
in the skulls of unicorns.
It is no coincidence that the first chapter of the novel begins with an interminably
long and slow ride in an elevator, down into Tokyo’s underworld. The elevator is
another “dead space,” a residual zone typical of Murakami. The scene recalls Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which, unbeknownst to the reader, begins inside a
nightmare about the horrors of a nighttime evacuation of London during the Blitz. The
scene in Gravity’s Rainbow also functions as an elevator ride down into the world of
the novel, inviting us to “wake up” to a reality that is waiting for us somewhere outside
of the dream. However, when the novel begins “for real” many pages later, it is set in
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an unreal London that is so removed from empirical and historical reality that it is just
as much a nightmare as the one from which we just woke up. This repeated deferral
of the moment of cognitive awakening is atypical for classic noir, in which, sooner
or later, the moment of truth always arrives. Like Gravity’s Rainbow, Hard-boiled
Wonderland never really reaches safe ontological ground. What promised to be a safe
haven turns out to be a prison inside one’s own mind, embedded inside—not located
outside—the world from which one had tried to escape.
It is important to keep in mind that the noir sections of Hard-boiled Wonderland
have no claim on a higher degree of verisimilitude. Critics in pursuit of the novel’s
allegorical significance rely on the assumption that the End of the World is a projection, a compensatory construct that originates in Hard-boiled Wonderland. Consequently, they see “the walled, amnesia-stricken community [as] a metaphor for a
Japan that hesitates to come to terms with its past or actively define a global role
for its future” (Snyder 75). Murakami does indeed show us a projection of Japan,
cast in terms of a popular nostalgia for preindustrial times. In Japan, this nostalgia
might be based on either a conservative or even reactionary politics, while, in the
West, it might be linked to an exotic image of Japan popularized in Orientalist discourse. My point of departure from other critics, however, starts with the assumption
that this nostalgia is motivated by a historical reality in which contemporary Japan
does indeed look like the Japan in Gibson’s cyberpunk rhapsodizing—“the global
imagination’s default setting for the future”; “a mirror world, an alien planet we can
actually do business with, a future.” Murakami puts a stop to such conceptualizing of
Japan. The two halves of the novel, of the narrator’s consciousness, and thus of the
sociohistorical allegory, are balanced in the sense that they are equally inauthentic. If
the End of the World is supposed to be a projection emanating from an authentic historical Japan, then the Hard-boiled Wonderland of the novel cannot be this place. It is
a noir fabrication, self-consciously assembled, baring its artificiality at every turn.
Why, then, does Murakami go to such lengths, in his self-conscious deployment
of noir tropes, to distance both halves of the novel from contemporary Japan? Why
does he present both visions of Japan as projections—projections from where, and by
whom? What we can say with certainty is that, although his text is still recognizably
noir, albeit in a contemporary slipstream format, Murakami has dismantled that favorite noir trope—the attempted escape to a spatial other. His unique accomplishment
lies in the fact that this rewriting of the trope does not fall back on noir cynicism. That
is, the denial of an escape from the noir space does not confirm genre as an inescapable totality. Hard-boiled Wonderland does not compel the reader’s claustrophobic
resignation or masochist submission. Instead, Murakami calls our attention to the fact
that both sides of the boundary—what we perceive as inside and outside—are, in fact,
projections. The only firm ground to stand on is the one that emerges from the process
of negotiation between these multiple spaces, a position reminiscent of Bakhtinian
heteroglossia. We arrive at the collectively assembled consensus about empirical
reality, which is another way of saying “the world of the reader,” through a perpetual
process of dialogue between imaginary spaces. Japan is neither the nostalgic village at
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the End of the World, nor is it the “future we can do business with.” It does, however,
participate in both images, depending on whoever does the speaking. Murakami’s use
of noir shows his awareness that “noir in its heyday was already a symptomatic form,
marking a crisis in classical narrative’s capacity for depicting our world, for telling its
story” (Telotte 188). One step removed even from neo-noir, which “seems intent on
extending its skepticism to include the raw materials from which we fashion those
narratives,” Hard-boiled Wonderland marks the inclusion of noir itself into the inventory of “raw materials.” It indicts popular genres, just as it indicts the nostalgic and
potentially reactionary myths of an idyllic, preindustrial past, because they arrest the
processes by which we conceptualize the world and transfer their constituent concepts
into a static vocabulary of images. It is the world outside the text, Murakami insists,
that other space shared by reader and author, that is constantly in flux, and thus always
open to renegotiation and transformation.
SOGANG UNIVERSITY
SEOUL, KOREA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This essay was written as a result of classes I taught on film noir, one at National Sun Yat-Sen University in Kaohsiung and one at Sogang University in Seoul. My thanks go to the students of both classes for
giving me an opportunity to present ideas that eventually found their way into this essay. I owe a special
debt of gratitude to Terri He, whose insights into Hard-boiled Wonderland, shared in a series of conversations, opened my eyes to aspects of Murakami’s writing of which I had not been aware.
NOTES
1. This may have antagonized critics engaged in “the quasi-religious rhapsodizing about the spiritual
superiority or unique magic of Japanese that has passed for serious intellectual commentary in Japan”
(Rubin 233).
2. Critics have called Murakami’s novels “cautionary parables about the dangers of life under
late capitalism—dangers which included information overload, the irrelevance of human values and
spirituality in a world dominated by the inhuman logic of postindustrial capitalism, and the loss of
contact with other human beings” (Gregory, Miyawaki, and McCaffery 112).
3. Exceptions are A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, in which the protagonist is explicitly
identified as the same person.
4. Jay Rubin devotes a lengthy discussion to the figure of the boku in his book Haruki Murakami
and the Music of Words (36–41).
5. Murakami also expresses a fondness for the taciturnity of the hard-boiled detectives in regard to
past trauma and present misfortune. Apart from their independence, Murakami praises the fact that they
“never [complain] about their misfortune” (Gregory, Miyawaki, and McCaffery 114). These comments
show that he has discovered an affinity between this most American of cultural icons on the one hand
and, on the other hand, a Japanese culture that, in the eyes of outsiders, places tight strictures and rigid
limitations on the expression of emotion.
6. Rubin points out that some of Murakami’s more outspoken critics consider this pose a form of
commercial compromise, which must be understood not from the author’s point of view but with an eye
on the audience he is courting. “One especially outspoken critic of Murakami is the ever-argumentative
Masao Miyoshi [. . .] Like Yukio Mishima, says Miyoshi, Murakami custom-tailors his goods to his
readers abroad.” Whereas “Mishima displayed an exotic Japan, its nationalist side,” Murakami exhibits
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“an exotic Japan, its international version”; he is “preoccupied with Japan, or, to put it more precisely,
with what [he] imagine[s] the foreign buyers like to see in it” (Rubin 6–7).
7. It is important to note that there is, of course, an oversimplification implied in this binary model—a
writer may not be “either” this “or” that. Within the binary model, however, the political flip side of
Murakami’s position has certain advantages, too. His association with American popular culture can be seen
as a conscious move against the politics of the serious Japanese intellectual, a conservative agenda that, at
its extreme right-wing end, might be associated with the heritage of Japanese militarism and imperialism.
8. Elsaesser borrows the concept of Nachtraeglichkeit from Freud’s description of “the child [receiving] an impression to which he is unable to react adequately; he is only able to understand it and be moved
by it when the impression is revived in him” at later stages in his development. Only much later “is he able
to grasp with his conscious mental processes what was then going on in him” (Elsaesser 415n).
9. Quotations from Elsaesser are from his book Weimar Cinema and After (2000), although this
specific argument was published originally in “A German Ancestry to Film Noir? Film History and its
Imaginary,” iris 21 (Spring 1996): 129–44.
10. Following a critical rather than a cinematic tradition, he traces the consolidation of the genre’s
identity back to the interventions of German exiles like Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner, and then
on to Nino Frank and Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, wondering what role they played not
in the discovery or classification of film noir, but in its invention or construction (422).
11. The import of Western culture did not begin during the years after World War II, but it had been
a feature of Japanese culture since the late 1850s and especially during the Meiji restoration. This
would include prewar adoption of early American film and hard-boiled detective fiction, which, as a
result of rising nationalism in the prewar years, was either curtailed or culturally reframed.
12. “It is important to note here that Japan in the 1960s is Japan before its period of ‘rapid growth’
(kodo seicho). American influence was in many spheres immense, but once the difficult period of
the 1960 Ampo (US-Japan Security Treaty) riots had passed, that influence turned almost entirely
cultural. In a sense Murakami’s protagonist is symbolic of the freedom—or perhaps aimlessness—of
jazz, perhaps of American culture in general” (Tamotsu 268).
13. In its visual style, film noir accounts for this mood and for the somewhat paradoxical meshing
of the claustrophobic and the agoraphobic in its use of deep-focus shots and, especially in the work of
directors like Orson Welles, in its use of wide-angle lenses. Both devices open the frame up so that more
visual information can be included and thus suggest a larger, less easily controllable field of vision.
Simultaneously, however, both devices also crowd the frame, and especially the wide-angle lens brings
objects so close that they are enlarged to the point of visual intimidation.
14. For a discussion of claustrophobia in noir and its origins, see Porfirio.
15. A closer look reveals that there are spaces that function, so to speak, as secondary enclosures of
this type. In A Wild Sheep Chase, for example, a limo picks up the protagonist, enveloping him “in near
total silence”; being inside is “as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs” (65, 66).
Hard-boiled Wonderland opens with a lengthy scene in which the protagonist is trapped in an elevator’s
“impossibly slow ascent” so unnerving in its smoothness that there “was no telling for sure” whether it
is ascending or descending—“all sense of direction simply vanished” (1). Clearly, these are transitory
spaces—an automobile, an elevator—serving as a foreshadowing of the place to which they are transporting the protagonist.
16. It is fitting that Murakami has called his series of investigative interviews with survivors of the
AUM gas attack on the Tokyo subway Underground (2000).
17. For further information on the terminology used here, see Creed, and for a discussion of individuation
within the sociohistorical and cultural contexts of late capitalism, see Seltzer.
18. Miyawaki calls the novel “perhaps his masterpiece to date” (Gregory, Miyawaki, and McCaffery
112), and Rubin declares that he has “been able to enjoy almost everything of Murakami’s knowing that
he was the creator of that incredible mind trip Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” He
places the novel at the center of Murakami’s oeuvre, reading it as a key to the entire work; “echoes of
[it] are to be found in everything he has written since” (285). Critics in Japan agreed with these assessments when they awarded the novel the prestigious Tanizaki Literary Prize in 1985.
19. This is, however, a reading of the English translation rather than Murakami’s original Japanese. In
the original, Murakami splits “his narrator-hero into Boku and Watashi, assigning the formal Watashi-‘I’
to the more realistic world of a vaguely futuristic Tokyo, and the informal Boku-‘I’ to the inner, fantastic
world of ‘The Town and Its Uncertain Walls’” (Rubin 117). The title in the quotation refers to an earlier
short story by Murakami that provides the thematic basis for the novel.
FALL 2007, VOL. 49, NO. 1
21
20. It also alludes to the map of the village at the End of the World that can be found in the opening
of the novel (placed before the beginning of pagination). The village is split down the middle into
two cerebral hemispheres by a river, much like a brain. The association with the child’s drawing of
the cracked egg demystifies the map, in its generic function as part of high fantasy.
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