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Transformed by Comics
The Murakamiverse, Palimpsestic Iconography, and
Cumulative Meaning in the Fiction of Murakami
Haruki
Tiffany Hong
Abstract
Murakami Haruki, Japan’s most widely translated and popular author, is known for his repetition of protagonists, motifs, and story arcs across his fictional novels and short stories, which extends to his non-fiction and even personal interviews. Constructing and operating within what I term the Murakamiverse, the author utilizes fan service, genre conventions/parody, visual cues, and manipulation of narrative temporality that has traditionally been the domain of popular culture studies and in particular, comics studies. The Murakamiverse, with its spatial, temporal, and geographic restriction of recognizable tropes to an intellectual property originating from one source, has more in common with the contained and idiosyncratic fictional universes of Marvel or DC than it does with the arbitrary benchmarks of a national literary tradition. I argue in my paper that Murakami consciously employs strategies prevalent in sequential art in order to metatextually question: a). teleology and chronology as defaults for making meaning, b). the manipulation of the reading experience through focalization, c). the hierarchy of genre and attendant categories of form and convention, d). the role of the visual in processing information (this is particularly relevant to the Japanese language, with the visual differentiation of its three alphabets and their complex relationships to notions of national language and the foreign), and e). the move away from serialization as integral to the composition of the novel.
Keywords
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Murakami Haruki, the most ubiquitous Japanese contemporary author, is alternately lauded and ridiculed – usually paralleling the fan/critic divide – for the inevitable recurrence of his protagonist(s), story arcs, and tropes throughout his literary output, be it works of fiction, journalism, or pseudo-autobiography. While contained fictional universes are by no means alien to novelistic tradition – one immediately recalls the American, and to a lesser extent, British mystery genre to which Murakami owes considerable stylistic debt – I situate his oeuvre to date within what I term the Murakamiverse (a neologism after the nomenclative tradition designating multi-platform, fan-interactive/fan-generated pop culture constructs such as the Buffyverse), an internally consistent, fan-mediated space which relies on genre conventions typically associated with the visual and serialized medium of the comic book. In particular, the Murakamiverse utilizes strategies of world-building such as fan service, experimentation with narrative temporality, and a certain mode of repetition and cumulative association enacted through primarily non-textual means which has been variously named within comics studies. With its spatial and temporal restriction of recognizable tropes to an intellectual property originating in one source, the Murakamiverse resonates with the contained and idiosyncratic fictional worlds of Marvel or DC, while interrogating the dynamic of reader respons(ibility) within the necessarily teleological and traditionally linear framework of the novel. The comparison here, however, is not limited to the merely technical: the very conditions of the Murakamiverse necessitate that its producer be conversant in the reciprocal and esoteric dynamic between creator and reader/fan that informs so much of comic book culture and criticism. Although the Murakamiverse is of necessity tethered to logos (less so in Murakami’s collaborations with illustrator Sasaki Maki on his sub-genre of ‘adult fairytales,’ which are arguably pure fan service1), I argue
that Murakami consciously employs strategies prevalent in sequential art in order to metatextually question: a). teleology and chronology as defaults for making meaning, b). the manipulation of the reading experience through focalization, c). the hierarchy of genre and attendant categories of form and convention, d). the role of the visual in processing information (this is particularly relevant to the Japanese language, with the visual differentiation of its three alphabets and their complex relationships to notions of national language and the foreign), and e). progression away from serialization as integral to the composition of the novel. Murakami’s narrative teleology, which relies on the immediate and the direct address (the attempted transcription of experience as it occurs, and the first-person point of view), the polyvocal (multiple and competing first-person homodiegetic narratives), alongside his suspicion of the hegemony of historical/national narratives, attempts to enact within the boundaries of the novel form a democratic, ambiguously authorial, and associative experience of narrative that dramatizes the conditions of reader agency.
The Hermetic Murakamiverse
The Murakamiverse encompasses the entirety of Murakami Haruki’s production, loosely termed to incorporate exegeses of his own work in interviews or as ‘objective’ journalist in non-fiction publications like Underground (as the author explicitly parallels lived experience – his own and others’ – with what he himself identifies as recurring themes in his fictional work), and is defined as a microcosmic, self-sustaining, and copyrighted fictional universe much like the Marvel Universe or the DC Multiverse. Whereas the latter transmedia empires are invested in a veritable pantheon of intellectual properties that occupy a common conceptual space – subject to its own history, physics, and distinctive geography – the Murakamiverse is, in
1 『ふわふわ』、『羊男のクリスマス』、『不思議な図書館』(the latter translated as The Strange Library and published in 2014)
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essence, the externalization of a single individual’s consciousness.
Where comics employ pseudo-science or mysticism as a means of bridging inconsistencies, let alone impossibilities, in logic and chronology, Murakami’s fiction is reliant on a magical realist framework that renders literal and anthropomorphic the psychological components of the stock protagonist, the anonymous or pronominal Boku (the Japanese informal male ‘I’). The means of division have been variously theorized as Freudian (corresponding to the hierarchy of ego, id, and superego), Lacanian schizophrenic (in the breakdown of the signifying chain), or Manichean psychomachia (primordial archetypes of good and evil in combat for the human soul). Classification aside, the standard Murakami narrative sublimates the narcissistically personal – Boku’s existential ennui and sense of temporal displacement (writ large as the consumerist disenchantment and enervation of onetime social justice revolutionaries of the Baby Boomer generation) – into universal imperative. The hero’s quest to recuperate manifestations of his own fractured psyche is magnified into an everyman’s campaign to purge the collective unconscious of a (literal) personification of the repressed and dangerous underside of human nature; the allegorical nature of this classical narrative necessitates reduction to simplistic and thus readily inhabitable dichotomies.
A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)2 – an early articulation of these plot mechanics – may serve to elucidate
this abstract dynamic: Boku, a typically disenchanted thirty-something ad exec, is blackmailed into pursuing the photographic source of a postcard sent by his estranged friend the Rat. The sheep pictured is revealed to be the malevolent incarnation of a being that manipulates human history through possession of political leaders such as Genghis Khan, WWII military strategists, right-wing politicians, and currently the Rat (a putative writer born into a life of means). The Rat, who manifests himself in the text only through letters, as a costumed Sheepman who casts no reflection, and a literally disembodied voice in the darkness, may be readily theorized as no more than a projection of the protagonist, with whom he interacts exclusively. Boku’s abortive attempt to reconcile the inertia and apathy of his existence – the something missing, the nostalgic objective correlative reified in the metaphysically suspect figure of the Rat – is thus elevated to national or global salvation. The figurative search for self is thereby taken at its word: ontology-as-mystery.
To further complicate this ontological multiplicity, aspects of the fictional Boku overlap with biographical specifics of his creator and his cultivated public persona: most notably, Norwegian Wood is considered loosely autobiographical, factually corresponding to dates and locations from Murakami’s college years. Moreover, in his 2011 Catalunya Prize acceptance speech, the author aligns himself with “unrealistic dreamers,” an exact phrase of his own characterizing the protagonist of A Wild Sheep Chase. Murakami – and the editor-translator-publisher trifecta that sustains his globalized brand – thus strategically incorporates himself into the hermetic terrain of fan service by conflating his own cult of personality with the (interestingly, almost definitively bland) everyman appeal of his signature hero.
The Murakamiverse is thus all the more coherent and engrossing in its lack of separation from its singular creator: fans identify ‘stock features’ that recur throughout the novels/short stories while identifying the roots of inspiration; the author himself plays on this impulse by declaring his affinity for wells – a stable trope in his fiction – or by aligning himself with characters on the periphery of Japanese society from whose vantage he consistently writes. This double reading – detecting the patterns/verbal cues/images/tropes that constitute ‘Boku’ as archetype rather than as singular character, while simultaneously matching these trademarks to the
2 Although I use the English translations (where available) for the purposes of this article, I cite the original, Japanese date of publication.
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putative source – lend Murakami’s brand of fan service a certain cultivated authenticity lacking in fictional universes that cannot locate creative impulses to an originary individual.3
Beginning in January 2015, Murakami launched a temporary website –『村上さんのところ』or “Mr. Murakami’s Place” – through which he personally operated an advice column for his readers. The complete collection is advertised as available now in print and e-book form on the now otherwise inactive website. This venture – the technology of the medium updated – reproduces the dynamic of Kafka on the Shore Official Magazine (『村上春木編集長少年カフカ』), a 2003 compendium of Murakami’s e-mail exchanges with fans that parodies shōnen manga weekly/monthly anthologies, complete with a colour insert showcasing “Special Goods,” from “a cocktail Mr. Haruki loves” to the original figurines featured on the book’s covers (replete with an index to the specific email soliciting the information). This nostalgic dynamic of the agony uncle can be likened to Saga’s letter page, remarkable in its stubborn adherence to paper correspondence, and in its inordinately personal responses from veterans and new mothers, with whom the ongoing series’ exploration of both war and parenthood resonates. An indispensable component of fan culture is the cultivation of this personalized interaction with the creator(s); at the same time, the ‘authenticity’ of this tenuous link is predicated on gatekeeping practices within the community which divide ‘true’ fans from the mainstream.
This is typical of Murakami’s preferred relationship to media, in which he eschews the role of pundit/ commentator/debater in mass media (primarily television talk shows) – historically legitimized by the bundan or Japanese literary establishment – in favour of a vox populi, intimate (and notably, limited) vis-à-vis ‘experience’ with the fans themselves. One such event was a Q-and-A session at UC Berkeley in 2008 featuring a reading of the English translation “The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes,” which the author elucidated as a satire of the bundan and their antiquated gatekeeping practices. Murakami strategically positions himself as external – to the establishment, to tradition, to Japan (geographically punctuated by his stays in Greece and America) – though in recent years he has occupied a positionality that enables him to critique his own nation through an outsider-from-within perspective. His 2011 Catalunya Prize acceptance speech – locally controversial, globally acclaimed – in which he acknowledges as fundamental national-racial concepts of mujō or impermanence while condemning the complicity of the Japanese government in embracing nuclear energy, is a consummate example of this double, strategic essentialist dynamic.
3 The Whedonverse may be advanced as a corollary, but Joss Whedon’s trademarks are stylistic rather than proprietary; indeed, he is noted for a). his banter (which retains a certain consistency even as it moves from such diverse subject matter and demographics as
Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Avengers), and b). his loyalty to a restricted set of actors who resonate with a shared sci-fi audience
whenever they are cast in new roles (ie. Nathan Fillion in Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Although the associations of the actor shift (in this case from hero to villain), fan service is performed as a certain “palimpsestic iconography” in terms of casting. The actor brings with him an established connection to a fan base privileged and enclosed in its familiarity with Whedon’s previous projects. This became a larger cultural trend during the Fall 2014 television pilot season, which saw the launch of three comic-based ventures in The Flash, Gotham, and Constantine. In the most self-consciously nostalgic example of palimpsestic iconography,
The Flash cast John Wesley Shipp as Barry Allen’s father. Older fans would identify Shipp as the original Flash in the 1990-1991
television series; younger viewers, meanwhile, most familiar with Shipp as the ideal father prototype from Dawson’s Creek, would project that association onto his newest paternal role. Like Whedon’s, Murakami’s style has become ‘trademarked’ in his translations of American authors, whom Murakami translates so exclusively – and whom enjoy newfound popularity by association – that he can be said to have a proprietary impact on their presence in the Japanese-language market. Miura Masashi maintains that Murakami’s translations of his pet authors (Carver, Chandler, Fitzgerald) sell because of his name, and are so omnipresent that it is Murakami’s style, rather than the original author’s, that are recognizable to contemporary readers (Suter 58).
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Navigating the Murakamiverse
Another overlap between comics and the Murakamiverse is the concept of parallel universes, a treasured sci-fi trope that migrates the notion of literary foils to an alternate reality/timeline/narrative. In the Murakamiverse the diegetic realm is divided into “this world” (chronological, realistic, mundane), and “that world” (temporally frozen, spatially removed). Whereas in comics, the actions of doppelgangers from parallel timelines cannot impact the anchor reality – what Karin Kukkonen terms the “counterfactuals” and the “baseline reality,” respectively (notwithstanding ruptures in the space-time continuum, the impetus behind so many story arcs) – the other world of the Murakamiverse exists as a shadow or mirror realm that is critical to the continuity and ‘completion’ (given the significance of proper temporal-geographic trajectory to Murakami plot/personal development, one might be tempted to say ‘culmination’ instead) of the real-time Boku (Kukkonen 161). The ephemera of the other world – abject psychological remnants reified into sentient characters when they ‘cross over’ – must be confronted and reconstituted in order to properly orient the protagonist of the anchor reality.
Boku proliferates through the novels and short stories in various incarnations that overlap through multiple temporalities – anchored through ‘trademarked’ characteristics – which paradoxically allows for character development (spanning several novels rather than concluding within a single text) simultaneous with a palimpsestic vision of this main (arguably only) character. For instance, Boku of Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase (unofficially grouped as the Rat Trilogy) is linked through verbal cues and parallel narrative trajectories to Okada Tōru, the now named Boku of the later novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Jay Rubin characterizes the latter as “a re-telling of A Wild Sheep Chase. It is as if Murakami had asked himself: ‘What if the Boku of that novel had not been so cool about the breakup of his marriage?’” (Rubin 205). Through such palimpsestic iconography, Tōru is at once a proxy for every other Boku before and after this text and yet a linear development across novels that were never designated as sequential.
In a fascinating extradiegetic development and an affirmation of the internalization of the linear-progressive model, critics were quick to retract their praise when Murakami appeared to regress, in terms of structural complexity, subject matter, and political critique, in his celebrated path from apathy to social commitment, as inferred from the title of a 2007 volume of Japanese Murakami criticism.4 Rubin muses
that for Nobel Laureate Ōe Kenzaburō, who was “wonderfully invigorated” by Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), “These words probably came back to haunt Ōe, who later complained that Murakami’s works fail to ‘go beyond their influence on the lifestyles of youth to appeal to intellectuals in the broad sense with models for Japan’s present and future’” (Rubin 115). Following the release of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995), Murakami abandons his trademark heterosexual male focalizer to mixed effect, and does not return to this most (critically and commercially) successful model until Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage in 2013.
This simultaneous, hypothetically independent, but impossibly chronological succession of Bokus is made possible by: a). his identity not being dependent on a name, and b). his largely allegorical nature. This phenomenon reflects the standard practice of ‘the Big Two’ of maintaining multiple but co-existing realities and timelines anchored to recognizable tropes such as: larger-than-life (allegorical) figures such as the Green Lantern(s); the rotating X-Men roster (and teams); the chronological divisions of Golden, Silver, and Modern Age; Earth-616 and other ‘primary continuities,’ and the vilified practice of retconning in order to forcibly
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incorporate parallel narrative arcs or alternate realities.
Even when explicitly differentiated by a singular name, every Boku prototype narrates – the familiarity of the Murakamiverse pivots on this voice, which is conflated with Murakami’s authorial and personal one – variations on an ur-text so ingrained in the fandom that much of the appeal stems from anticipating incarnations of the original cast, as it were; tracing a familiar trajectory (the externalized search-for-self), and appreciating repetition-with-difference, as the competing levels of palimpsest will – and I believe are intended to – resonate with longtime readers.5 Grant Snider’s “Murakami Bingo” in The New York Times crystallizes
this phenomenon into affectionate parody: the game board includes such ubiquitous Murakamiverse features like “precocious teenager,” “faceless villain,” and “ear fetish.” Neil Gaiman and Amano Yoshitaka’s The Sandman: The Dream Hunters illustrated novella, a standalone tangent of Gaiman’s ongoing The Sandman series, performs analogous fan service in the appearance of two brothers whom we understand to be Cain and Abel from the original comic through allusion to their homicidal relationship, despite the de-familiarizing lens of the setting (Japan), and Amano’s corresponding aesthetics.
The infinite loop of Boku’s quest and the deferment of his happy ending correspond to the serial (or more cynically, mercenary) conditions of the monthly comic, which re-enact ad infinitum a primordial but interminable clash of ideologies rendered flesh. The overarching narrative tension of a series is not fixed to when Batman will finally defeat the Joker. Teleology in serial media and the comic book in particular is premised on the paradox of monthly (bi-monthly, weekly) units subject to a tactile finality (the issue is complete in and of itself, the page numbers determined) like the novel, but at the same time, subscriptions that are premised on the allure of (possibly perpetual!) continuity. The timelessness that this eternal delay engenders is a testament to the archetypal dimension of their interaction while galvanizing every issue – and beyond that, every panel – with the condensed and thereby palpable immediacy of the present tense.6
Scott McCloud defines the panel as a “general indicator that time or space is being divided,” noting that “In learning to read comics, we all learned to perceive time spatially, for in the world of comics, time and space are one and the same. So, as readers, we’re left with only a vague sense that as our eyes are moving through space, they’re also moving through time – we just don’t know by how much!” (McCloud, 99-100). As with film, the tense of the panel is the present continuous; that is, the mimesis of an instant transcribed as it is coming into being. In both media there are of course means to effect prolepsis and analepsis (learned cues to indicate that the time-space has shifted, despite continuing to simulate real-time), but that does not negate one fundamental divide between visual and textual chronotope: grammatical tense always already establishes a temporal perspective, and in many languages (Japanese included), a gendered and relational/hierarchical one as well. Sequential art fluctuates between image and text as the dominant means of information/communication and the diegetic authority of the narrative, but any attempt to elevate one at the expense or exclusion of the other is, I believe, an impoverishment of the potential of reader response to myriad and simultaneous modes
5 Naming is of paramount importance to Murakami’s characterization: aside from the unnamed/unnecessarily named Bokus, women have been allocated primarily auxiliary functions (oracle, happily liberated whore, virgin, often in combination) to punctuate the protagonist’s pure nature or to direct (but never involve themselves with) his destiny. Early incarnations of these female tropes especially never progress beyond the pronominal “her,” “my girlfriend,” or unfortunate epithets like “the girl with the ears,” or “the girl who would sleep with anyone.”
6 The incrementally progressive overlap of the Boku narrative within the Murakamiverse may be likened to the Proustian pseudo-iterative: “when the story narrates as something that happened repeatedly an event whose very particularity makes it seem undeniably similar” (Genette 12). Marcel’s impossible recollection of a singularity that occurs almost rhythmically, Sundays at Combray, is at once reduced through its specificity to one event and yet subject to the algorithms of mundane, temporal occurrence.
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of engagement.
Murakami’s simulation of real-time prose, a textual approximation of the panel’s visual function, may be understood as a fusing of Narrative Time and Story Time, or what Gérard Genette designates “the time of the thing told and the time of the narrative (the time of the signified and the time of the signifier)” (Genette 33). While this continuous present complements a first-person narrative and the genre of detective fiction – in which the protagonist and reader race to resolve the mystery, being presented the same clues at the same time – in the Murakami novel, this painstaking transcription of life-as-it-happens (the reader must literally wait alongside Boku for the spaghetti to boil) reads narcissistic, which is in keeping with Boku’s – and thus, our – obliviously myopic outlook.
While it may be tempting to classify Murakami novels as (metaphysical) detective stories, Boku’s ontological handicaps of being out-of-place-and-time, perpetually adrift in nostalgia, and incapable of articulating his will or demonstrating agency at the crucial time render him almost perfectly antithetical to the traditionally savvy, quick-witted, and seemingly omniscient detective figure. In both A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the villains – the Secretary and Wataya Noboru – mock the protagonist for failing to anticipate or even consolidate clues which were present from the start (in Boku’s psyche and in the first chapter of the text). Since Boku is himself the mystery in question, his fatal flaw is the inability to re-member in time; the reader is thus compelled to assemble a properly oriented narrative in spite of Boku’s mental blocks. This brings us to one of two reader strategies which Kukkonen identifies for navigating competing storyworlds: the reader surrogate.
Kukkonen’s article, “Navigating Infinite Earths: Readers, Mental Models, and the Multiverse of Superhero Comics,” discusses two approaches to comprehending the vast, contradictory, and non-linear succession of storyworlds in which comic book narratives operate: reader surrogates and iconography. Both enable the reader to remain anchored to a “baseline” reality – such as the Marvel Universe’s Earth-616, the primary continuity in which stories are incorporated as canon – in order to navigate the “counterfactuals,” or what Kukkonen simplifies as essentially ‘What if?’ narrative tangents. As Rubin postulates above, each successive Murakami novel may be seen as a ‘what if’ reformulation of a previous one. The apathetic Bokus of Hear the Wind Sing (1979) to Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) fail to ‘get the girl’ – in Kafka on the Shore (2002), getting the girl is to be avoided at all costs – in strikingly parallel narratives (indeed, there is the strong sense that the same girl is being pursued across certain novels) that are perhaps only satisfactorily concluded in the unusually explicative 1Q84, and only then due to the tenacity of the female protagonist.
In place of reader surrogates who ‘tour’ us through alternate timelines as in Tom Strong, we are invariably accompanied by Boku, who assesses information alongside us; the twist is that Boku is the least competent tour guide through what is fundamentally a universe-spanning externalization of his own psyche. While reader surrogates in comics allow the reader to compartmentalize the sheer infinity of extant storyworlds and return (physically, textually, temporally) to one, the definitively obtuse Boku falters in orienting even himself within the Murakamiverse of his own projected interiority, and thus impels the reader to actively filter competing realities (a neat variation on the unreliable narrator).
Furthermore, Kukkonen delineates iconography as an additional means of maintaining consistency within multiple storyworlds. Although this example pertains to a crossover story arc that occurs across series but within one contained universe – DC’s soft reboot/new continuity line The New 52 – it speaks to Kukkonen’s point about comics’ unique treatment of multiple planes of interpretation and the necessity of consistent (in
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this case visual) markers when chronotope is no longer assumed to be a stable point of reference. “Death of the Family” is a 2012 story arc in which the Joker seeks to dismantle the Bat-family (across the Bat-titles Batgirl, Nightwing, Detective Comics, and so forth) that is itself an homage to 1988’s “A Death in the Family,” in which Joker murders Jason Todd (enabled by the fans themselves, who voted by telephone to kill off the unpopular Robin). In Batman #15, Bruce Wayne narrates a flashback sequence to the assembled family; as the visuals transition to the past, the dialogue boxes are layered on top to showcase their (current) commentary. Rather than obfuscate pictorial consistency (and continuity) with illustrations of the speakers themselves, each speech box is stylized with the particular iconography of each character: Batgirl’s features yellow text on a black background, with purple piping containing half a purple bat icon. Red Hood’s is red on black, with half a red mask. The reader can thus jettison the necessity for an artistic representation of the source of utterance; the likeness of Batgirl and her corresponding speech bubble are condensed into pure iconography: fans will ‘read’ her presence merely by the colours of her costume.
To continue with “Death of the Family,” in Batman #13 – the first comic in the arc – the Joker and the title page do not appear until page 25 (the last page of the main story; a supplementary story occupies the remaining pages), yet the character’s corporeal ‘absence’ saturates and menaces on every page. This is especially resonant given the thematic parallels the Joker seeks to resurrect between himself and his nemesis, having (the Dollmaker) cut off his own face, and returning to restore Batman to his singular glory by similarly de-facing his ‘court’ of allies. On page 6, Joker massacres the Gotham City Police Department in the dark; through lettering exclusive to him (an erratic, italicized scrawl), the comic medium thus grasps at replicating the aural. This may well be incorporated as iconography, in the sense that the visual approximating Joker’s voice is connotative enough to resonate as the character in his entirety.
The Murakamiverse, rooted as it is in a verbal medium, lacks this visual dimension – excepting Murakami’s collaborations with Sasaki Maki or Anzai Mizumaru (or Chip Kidd in the English-speaking world) – but I contend that it is equally reliant on the associative impetus of iconography. Boku is such a readily inhabitable figure because of his signature mannerisms, in tandem with the trademark staples of the Murakami storyworld(s). We expect Boku to mumble 「やれやれ」, to soliloquize on his boring (退屈、 つまらない) life, to enjoy cooking and laundry, to masturbate, and to remain indifferent to the parade of oversexed women, anthropomorphic animals, and mystical antagonists who accompany him on his journey to ‘the other side.’ We expect a veritable index of pop, jazz, and classical recordings. We expect our narrator to be an unremarkable 30-something Tokyoite in an independent profession. The Murakamiverse is so stabilized in its own imagery as to warrant parody; Murakami is cognizant of this, as the tongue-in-cheek illustration for “Mr. Murakami’s Place” showcases the author picnicking with the Sheepman and a giant cat, while a vinyl record rotates on a turntable in the foreground of the pastoral scene. Like the symbolic trappings of the Red Hood – itself shorthand for key events in the Joker’s origin story – the Murakamiverse iconography facilitates the fans’ navigation through overlapping storyworlds, while underscoring the exclusivity and familiarity of a contained fictional universe.
Reading the Murakamiverse
Sequential art has the potential to effect radical reader responses because the dynamic of image/text – and accordingly, its re-negotiation of relationships of time, space, and diegetic authority – forces unmapped and simultaneous paths of interpretation. I argue that Murakami’s experimentation with the novel form enacts
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an analogous performance of continuous deconstruction that reprioritizes reader responsibility and continually evaluates assumptions of positionality and perspective. The laminous structure of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in particular punctuates the novel’s preoccupation with divesting oneself of totalizing narratives – hereditary abnormalities, imperialist-militaristic rhetoric, loss of innocence, and the possibility of starting over/a new self – in favour of restorative utterance not reliant on the response of an interlocutor. Specifically, Okada Tōru must contend with his marginalized status as an unemployed and cuckolded husband against the aspirational model and mediagenic figure of his brother-in-law Noboru; Kumiko seeks to escape what she believes to be her insidious bloodline; Lieutenant Mamiya returns from Manchukuo a literal hollow man; Kasahara May attempts to purify herself of her fatalism, and Kanō Creta endeavours to reconstitute her identity – reified as a physical and thereby removable core – by reclaiming her previously violated corporeal self.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle advances for the first time in Murakami’s oeuvre a model of the psyche that is no longer immured and fatalistically narcissistic. The externalization of the unconscious terrain in the novel is notably a hotel, in which projections of other characters proliferate in distorted form. Just as the standard Boku voice recedes to make room for first-person narrators typically marginalized both socially and in the heterosexual male Murakamiverse – sex workers, veterans, teen dropouts, the mute – the form of the novel itself begins to materialize these developments. While Tōru remains the representative avenging figure of the allegory, his voice is no longer the priority of his own story arc; instead, his figurative dimension is enriched through the supporting and parallel trajectories of Mamiya, May, Creta, Cinnamon, and Nutmeg, all of whom no longer require Tōru’s mediation or response in articulating their own histories. Book 3 of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle repositions us outside of Boku’s familiar interiority; we are suddenly bereft of direction (however faulty), point-of-view, linearity, and interpretation. Without Tōru’s mediation, events are open to assignment of meaning, reliability, and placement: we are no longer certain who has read these documents or when. There exist multiple echelons of authorship: Murakami Haruki -> Cinnamon -> Tōru, and the reader is given no overarching timeline to contextualize Mamiya or May’s letters.
The reader’s unconscious deferment to authorial meaning is dismantled in comic book form through recourse to ‘pure text,’ operating on our biases towards graphic storytelling as a more escapist and unrealistic medium: Watchmen ‘ends’ each issue with textual inserts from books and newspapers that nonetheless originate in the contained universe. Some of the extradiegetic (?) material is mediated: for instance, Dr. Long’s file on Rorschach is drawn trompe l’oeil-style with paperclips on top. The excerpt from Daniel Dreiberg’s Blood from the Shoulder of Pallas following/in Chapter VII – otherwise reproduced as a ‘real’ document – is accompanied by a paperclipped note stating: “The following text is reprinted from the Journal of The American Ornithological Society, Fall 1983.” Once again, the individual(s) annotating and presenting these post-scripts is never explicitly revealed. The final panel of Chapter IX contains a quotation from C.G. Jung; could this be considered a more conventional form of heterodiegesis, since it remains within the traditional framework of the comic book page breakdowns? Watchmen remains a celebrated example of the medium because of its deconstruction of the superhero genre and the sequential art from itself, interrogating every assumption of readership and authorial scope through metatextual inserts, from the mise en abyme “Tales of the Black Freighter” to the (mediated, annotated) clippings from Sally Jupiter’s scrapbook. The inserts of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle perform a similar role, but the purely textual medium allows Murakami to refuse mediation where Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons choose to obfuscate the certainty of a singular, extradiegetic narrator. In Tōru’s absence, we cannot be sure of the intended recipient of the article on “The Hanging House”
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– besides our voyeuristic selves – or when it figures into continuity.
This process of stitching together lacunae in the represented – for it is impossible in both media to transcribe experience as it occurs – is termed “closure” by McCloud, and centers on the interstices between panels called the gutter. For McCloud, comics’ sequential nature by necessity must be tempered by selectiveness – it would be arduous, to say the least, to capture every single moment as it happens in Narrative Time – so that the reader must adjust to these lapses in chronology, geography, or logic. This largely automatic ‘stitching’ of the space-between and the unarticulated is the task and pleasure of the reader: “Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (McCloud 67). For Thierry Groensteen, meaning within sequential art is figured as aggregate; pattern-recognition ultimately reveals and retroactively imbues the text with layered and cumulative meaning:
Braiding thus manifests into consciousness the notion that the panels of a comic constitute a network, and even a system. To the syntagmatic logic of the sequence, it imposes another logic, the associative. Through the bias of a tele-arthrology, images that the breakdown holds at a distance, physically and contextually independent, are suddenly revealed as communicating closely, in debt to one another – in the manner that Vermeer’s paintings, when they are reunited, are perceived to come in pairs, or threesomes. (Groensteen 158)
Murakami Haruki, his signifiers of choice restricted to the ideological consistency of the Murakamiverse, makes use of incremental meaning and the unconscious associative function seemingly maximized within the comic book medium to inform an aggregate model across his works of fiction. Through fan service, the Murakamiverse reiterates idiosyncratic streams of knowledge that establish intimacy and exclusivity; through palimpsestic iconography, Murakami stitches together associative links that carry Boku across parallel narratives, only to trespass against the conventions of the form and scrutinize our reliance on narrative, teleology, and intent by inserting a reader surrogate singularly unqualified to negotiate his own ontological, let alone epistemological, burden.
Works Cited
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Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York: Cornell University Press, 1980. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2009.
Kukkonen, Karin. “Navigating Infinite Earths.” The Superhero Reader. Eds. Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. 155-169.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993. Moore Alan, et al. (2000) Tom Strong: Book 2. La Jolla: America’s Best Comics.
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Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84. Trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
---. “As An Unrealistic Dreamer.” 23rd Catalunya International Prize (Premi Internacional Catalunya)
Acceptance Speech. Trans. Collaborative Translation Project. Generalitat Palace, Barcelona, Spain.
67
---. A Wild Sheep Chase. Trans. Alfred Birnbaum. New York: Vintage International, 2002. ---. After Dark. Trans. Jay Rubin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
---. After the Quake. Trans. Jay Rubin. New York: Vintage International, 2002.
---. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Trans. Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin. New York: Vintage International, 2006.
---. Colorless Tazaki Tsukuru and His Year of Pilgrimage. Trans. Philip Gabriel. New York: Knopf, 2014. ---. Dance Dance Dance. Trans. Alfred Birnbaum. New York: Vintage International, 1994.
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---. South of the Border, West of the Sun. Trans. Philip Gabriel. New York: Vintage International, 1998. ---. Sputnik Sweetheart. Trans. Philip Gabriel. New York: Vintage International, 2001.
---. The Elephant Vanishes. Trans. Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin. New York: Vintage International, 1993. ---. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Trans. Jay Rubin. New York: Vintage International, 1997.
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---. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir. Trans. Philip Gabriel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. London: Harvill Press, 2002. Snyder, Scott, et al. (2012) Batman #13. New York: DC Comics.
---. (2012) Batman #15.- New York: DC Comics.
Starlin, Jim, et al. (1988) Batman #426-429. New York: DC Comics.
Suter, Rebecca. The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Vaughan, Brian K., et al. (2016) Saga. Berkeley: Image Comics.
Dr. Tiffany Hong is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Literature at Nazarbayev University. She holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures (concentration in Japanese) from the University of California, Irvine, an MA in World Literatures in English from the University of Toronto, and a BA in English Honours from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Hong’s doctoral thesis is titled “Teleology of the Self: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki.” Her area of research centers on sequential art, and modern and contemporary Japanese literature. Her work explores notions of (post-modern) narrative structure, new media and transmedia, intellectual properties, fan service, genre fiction and approaches to textual temporalities, pastiche and parody, post-national writing and translation studies, popular culture and popular literature, and aesthetics as politics. She is currently working on developing her thesis into a study of Japan’s most well-known writer, Murakami Haruki, which will address these issues as they pertain to his work within a global and hyper-modern context.
