Murakami and the Noir Tradition

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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 Hard- boiled 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 English- speaking 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 I
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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 pub- lishers 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 produc- tion 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 charac- ters, 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 inconspicu- ously, 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 elu- sive, 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 first- person 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 myster- ies 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 aim- lessly 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 cru- cial 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 individual-
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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 fig- ure 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 hard- boiled 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 funda- mental 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 cul- ture. It also allows him to reflect on himself as a man in a profession coded as femi- nine, 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 popu- larity 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 popu- lar 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 tak- ing 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 wreck- ing 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 narra- tor’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 nostal- gia 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 “absent- centredness”, 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 cin- ema; 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. Nare- more 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 direc- tors 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 con- temporary 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 pin- points 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 rei- fied, 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 Ken- tucky 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 spec- tacular 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 Won- derland 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 sub- stantial 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 environ- ment 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 exemp- tion or spatial otherness.15 “Its undistinguishedness was metaphysical,” the protago- nist 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 wav- ing 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 connota- tions. “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 pro- cess 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 self- imposed sequestration, remains a collective cultural blind spot. Because the protago- nist’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 individu- ation, 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 noncom- modified oral tradition. Except for this form of transmission, which is either pre- industrial 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 trans- forming that “referent.” Postmodernism is what you have when the moderniza- tion 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 reputa- tion 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 transfor- mation 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 “every- day 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 post- modern 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 exalta- tion. 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 loca- tion 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 Hard- boiled 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 con- templation 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 relation- ship 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 sepa- rate, 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 writ- ers 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 conscious- ness 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 connota- tions, 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 for- mula. 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 ontologi- cal 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 subter- ranean 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 Hard- boiled 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 convert- ing 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 sup- ply 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 Gravi- ty’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 projec- tion, a compensatory construct that originates in Hard-boiled Wonderland. Conse- quently, 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 dis- course. 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 his- torical 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 favor- ite 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 inescap- able 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 inven- tory 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 Univer- sity 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 conversa- tions, 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 pa st 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 [receiv- ing] 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 trans- porting 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 assess- ments 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.
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 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.
WORKS CITED
The Asphalt Jungle. Dir. John Huston. Perf. Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, and Jean Hagen. MGM, 1950. Burnett, W. R. The Asphalt Jungle. New York: Knopf, 1949. Cassegard, Carl. “Haruki Murakami and the Naturalization of Modernity.” International Journal of Japanese Sociology 10 (2001): 80–92. Chandler, Raymond. Farewell, My Lovely. New York: Knopf, 1940. ———. The Long Goodbye. 1953. New York: Vintage, 1992. ———. “The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay.” 1944. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage, 1988. 1–19. Creed, Barbara. “Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection.” Gelder 64–71. Dark City. Dir. Alex Proyas. Perf. Rufus Sewell and William Hurt. New Line Cinema, 1998. Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2000. Freud, Sigmund. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (‘Wolf Man’).” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989. 400–29. Gelder, Ken, ed. The Horror Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000. Gibson, William. “Modern Boys and Mobile Girls.” Guardian Unlimited 1 Apr. 2001 <http://observer .guardian.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,466391,00.html>. Goodis, David. Down There. Greenwich: Fawcett, 1956. Gregory, Sinda, Toshifumi Miyawaki, and Larry McCaffery. “It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing: An Interview with Haruki Murakami.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 22.2 (Summer 2002): 111–19. Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Knopf, 1930. Iyer, Pico. “The Mystery of Influence: Why Raymond Chandler Persists While So Many More Respected Writers Are Forgotten.” Harper’s Magazine Oct. 2002: 85–91. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Kiss Me Deadly. Dir. Robert Aldrich. Perf. Ralph Meeker. United Artists, 1955. Latham, Rob. “VR Noir: Kim Newman’s The Night Mayor.” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 16 (2001): 95–109. Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. The Matrix. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Perf. Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. Warner Bros., 1999. Murakami, Haruki. Dance Dance Dance. New York: Vintage, 1994. ———. The Elephant Vanishes. New York: Knopf, 1993. ———. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. New York: Vintage, 1993. ———. Kafka on the Shore. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. Norwegian Wood. 1987. New York: Vintage, 2000. ———. The Sputnik Sweetheart. 1999. New York: Knopf, 2001. ———. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. London: Harvill, 2000. ———. A Wild Sheep Chase. New York: Penguin, 1990. ———. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. 1997. London: Vintage, 2003. Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Porfirio, Robert.“No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir.” Silver and Ursini 77–95. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1972. Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1989. Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. London: Harvill, 2002. Le Samouraï [U.S. title: The Godson]. 1967. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville. Perf. Alain Delon. 1967. Artists Intl., 1972.
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Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir.” Silver and Ursini 53–65. Seltzer, Mark. “The Serial Killer as a Type of Person.” Gelder 97–111. Se7en [Seven]. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and Gwyneth Paltrow. New Line Cinema, 1995. Shoot the Piano Player [Tirez sur le pianiste]. 1960. Dir. François Truffaut. Perf. Charles Aznavour and Marie Dubois. Astor Pictures, 1962. Silver, Alain, and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir Reader. New York: Limelight, 1996. Snyder, Stephen. “Two Murakamis and Marcel Proust: Memory as Form in Japanese Fiction.” In Pur- suit of Contemporary East Asian Culture. Ed. Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder. Boulder: Westview, 1996. 69–83. Spillane, Mickey. Kiss Me, Deadly. New York: Dutton, 1952. Strecher, Matthew. “Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki.” Journal of Japanese Studies 25.2 (Summer 1999): 269–98. Sunset Boulevard. Dir. Billy Wilder. Perf. William Holden, Gloria Swanson, and Erich von Stroheim. Paramount, 1950. Tamotsu, Aoki. “Murakami Haruki and Contemporary Japan.” Trans. Matthew Strecher. Ed. John Whittier Treat. Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1996. 265–75. Telotte, J. P. “Lost Memory and New Noir.” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 16 (2001): 177–89. “The Ten Best Books of 2005.” New York Times 11 Dec. 2005 <www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/books/ review/tenbest.html>. The Thirteenth Floor. Dir. Josef Rusnak. Perf. Craig Bierko and Armin Mueller-Stahl. Columbia Pic- tures, 1999. Vernet, Marc. “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom.” Shades of Noir: A Reader. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: Verso, 1993. 1–33. Walley, Glynne. “Two Murakamis and Their American Influence.” Japan Quarterly 44.1 (Jan.–Mar. 1997): 41–50.
24 CRITIQUE
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The Journal of Popular Film & Television examines commercial fi lm and television from a sociocultural perspective. Its editors seek thoughtful articles on fi lms, stars, directors, producers, studios, networks, genres, series, and audience reaction/reception, in the popular culture context. Essays on the social and cultural realities of fi lm and television, fi lmographies, bibliographies, and commissioned book and instructional video reviews are features. Articles on fi lm and television theory/criticism also are invited.
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Historical Mourning in Murakami (article)

The paste here is messy, unfortunately; the Library has a clean e-version, just search the title/author.


Writing Guilt: Haruki Murakami and the Archives of National Mourning Jonathan Boulter University of Western Ontario

      In the work of mourning it is not grief that works: grief keeps watch. Blanchot, e Writing of the Disaster                                                                                                                                                                    Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. Adorno, Minima Moralia                                                       Who can swear that our unconscious is not expeing this? Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now”


I. In , two traumatic events occurred in Japan. On  January, an earth- quake struck Kobe, killing five thousand people. On  March, the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas into the Tokyo subway system killing twelve and injuring four thousand, some permanently. ese events pow- erfully traumatized Japanese society, exposing as it did hidden—one might say, subterranean—uncertainties and anxieties. As Haruki Muramaki puts it in Underground: “Both [events] were nightmarish eruptions beneath our feet—from underground—that threw all the latent contradictions and weak points of our society into frighteningly high relief. Japanese society proved all too defenseless against these sudden onslaughts. We were unable to see them coming and failed to prepare” (). ese events,
“two of the greatest tragedies in Japanese postwar history” (), present serious challenges to Murakami, both as novelist and citizen of Japan. On the one hand, the events demand memorialization, demand, that is, a mourning response; yet on the other, these historical events, so cataclys- mic, so beyond imagining, resist representation, resist language itself. It is here, in the crucible of history’s impossible claims, that an aporetic guilt arises for Murakami and perhaps for Japan: the guilt of failing to imagine the possibility of trauma (“We were unable to see them coming”) and the traumatic guilt of being unable to imagine the means to represent the traumatic event in order properly to mourn. And for Murakami the problem of representation is a problem of guilt, a guilty problem: he is faced with the difficulty of attempting to repre- sent trauma and the problem of representing guilt. Both of Murakami’s narrative responses to these traumas (after the quake and Underground) represent Murakami’s (guilty) attempt to speak of guilt, to speak through guilt (and thus to mourn), and to speak of the fundamental impossibility of representing guilt within language itself a priori incapable of accom- modating trauma.¹ Blanchot’s words from e Writing of the Disaster are thus crucial in what follows: “e disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing [limite de l’écriture]” (). e disaster defies representation, and in some profound way this defiance—the disaster’s resistance to representation—becomes the disaster. What Murakami’s texts implicitly argue is that authentic trauma—and the guilt arising from that trauma—is not the initial event but the failure to represent that event: the disaster is both the limitation of writing and that which, as border or boundary, encloses writing’s impos- sibility. What then can be said about guilt, for guilt, within this limit-space  In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth writes: [T]he wound of the mind—the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world—is not, like the wound of the body, a sim- ple and healable event, but rather an event that … is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor. (-)    Trauma, she argues, is “not known in the first instance” () and this results in the peculiar temporality of the condition of trauma. See also the analysis of the temporality of trauma in LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, Geoffrey Hartman’s e Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. For an exploration of the temporality of trauma as it plays out in the non-corporeal subject, see my  “Does Mourning Require a Subject? Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing.”
J B is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (  of Florida, ) and co-editor of Cultural Subjects: A Cultural Studies Reader (omson-Nelson, ). His work has appeared in Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, Genre, Hispanic Review, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd-hui, and the Journal of Beckett Studies, as well as in Digital Gameplay: Essays on the Nexus of Game and Gamer ().
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where writing becomes its own effacement, its own impossibility, its own disastrous immolation? after the quake and Underground stand as testimony, as witness, to Murakami’s attempt to find the appropriate narrative means to express the disaster. after the quake is a series of six short stories (I will analyze two here); Undergound, in its English version, is a series of interviews with victims of the sarin attack (Part One) and with members, past and current, of the Aum Shinrikyo cult (Part Two). In Underground, Murakami makes clear that the workings of memory displace historical events, transforming trauma into another narrative: Simply put, our memories of experience are rendered into something like a narrative form. To a greater or lesser extent, this is a natural function of memory—a process that novelists consciously utilize as a profession. e truth of “whatever is told” will differ, however slightly, from whatever actually hap- pened. is, however, does not make it a lie; it is unmistakably the truth, albeit in another form. ()
As we turn to after the quake we should note a key rhetorical manoeuvre here in Murakami’s defense of the truth of testimony: the event, accord- ing to Murakami, is always troped into another form in the workings of memory. Moreover, this transformation of the event, “the truth of whatever is told,” defines precisely the work of the novelist which itself becomes the task of the translator. after the quake thus offers a series of displacements—call them translations—of the Kobe quake. after the quake stands manifestly as an admission that the trauma of the quake, the real “reality” of the quake, cannot be represented as such (hence the temporal designation of the title—“after”—itself an indication that trauma is not only cause but lasting [after]effect). If it is a central tenet of trauma theory that an understanding of the initial event as event evades comprehension and that trauma proper must be understood as a doubly inflected temporal event—cause and effect—one way of reading after the quake is precisely the expression of the disruptive (after)effects of great shock. e symptoms of the after-effects of trauma, as Freud noted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, are somatic responses that must be read back into the originary scene of shock: the victim’s body—displaying its hysterical symptoms of paralysis or mutism—is a text through which trauma expresses its (displaced) narrative.² after the quake must be read   Freud writes: “e symptomatic picture presented by traumatic neurosis ap- proaches that of hysteria in the wealth of its similar motor symptoms” ().
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as displaced narrative, but—and here we encounter the precise economy of guilt—as a narrative that knows it is a displacement. My task here is to suggest ways of reading this displacement as itself a disaster in Blanchot’s sense: the displacement of trauma must carry over a residue, a trace, of the impossible-to-narrate/imagine real. Murakami’s six texts, texts at times seemingly only tangentially related to the Kobe quake, carry traces of the traumatic real even as the historical event is subsumed. In this sense, the displacement becomes the trauma: the narrative is the trauma that cannot be narrated. And thus paradox and aporia attend each narrative as the text both is and is not the originary trauma. Murakami’s texts articulate a kind of traumatized testimony in which the event in a sense is formally traumatized by virtue of its translation into textual and narrative form. after the quake, explicitly fictionalized, can be read as Murakami’s subjective (impossible) testimony of events beyond the telling. Underground, as I will argue, is Murakami’s attempt to produce an empirical, call it “objective,” historical testimony. Yet as we will see, this attempt to speak objectively, which becomes the attempt to let others—or the Other that is the victim—speak objectively, is marked by anxieties about transcending those subjective limitations that mark the explicitly fictional texts as, in some senses, ironized simulacra of the traumatic event. Underground thus becomes fictionalized in the way Hayden White reminds us that all histories become fictionalized. It is here, in Murakami’s manipulation of these testimonies, that a fundamental displacement of the event of trauma occurs and a concomitant guilt arises.³ is guilt resides precisely in the tacit and unconscious admission that displacement can only ever be a translation or metaphor of the originary experience. Displacement as representation—representation as displace- ment—is guilty of an a priori and unavoidable failure. Murakami may wish to maintain that the “truth” of the event survives its transmission, but that very (defensive) statement speaks to an extreme anxiety precisely about the ability to represent and a guilt about the very attempt to represent. In other words guilt—as manifest in the formal structure of the stories—is itself a displacement of trauma. Here we see precisely the complexity of writing guilt/writing trauma: if the symptoms of trauma are themselves a displacement of the originary event, then guilt must be understood as
e “motor symptoms” of hysteria are explained “by fixation to the moment at which the trauma occurred” ().   See Hayden White’s Metahistory and e Content of the Form for fully elaborated arguments about the fictionalized element of historical writings.
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a displacement of a displacement, a double deferral of the impossible event of disaster. And because guilt functions to displace trauma—and the narrative of that trauma—mourning, as a kind of narrative return to the originary scene of disaster—is endlessly deferred: guilt makes mourn- ing an economic impossibility. us the initial demand of the event of trauma—that it be memorialized—is impossible to meet and the novelist is left with a remainder, a melancholy debt, which can never be expiated. And certainly the formal arrangement of Murakami’s stories bears wit- ness to this uncanny deferral of the disaster. e narratives are not about the quake per se, but all make oblique (or in some cases casually direct) references to the disaster. But the narratives are not set in Kobe; they do not concern characters involved directly in the disaster. e disaster is marginalized in the individual narratives yet paradoxically and uncannily central to the text as a whole. Displaced to the centre, the representation of the quake reflects formally—en abime—the complex psychoanalytical “rhetoric” of guilt-as-displacement-of-displacement: the texts thus reflect formally the guilt that cannot be expressed as such. II. e initial story in after the quake, “ufo in kushiro,” illustrates the narrative method Murakami will use throughout the collection. e wife of Komuro (she is unnamed throughout the story) is transfixed by news coverage of the Kobe quake. For five days she watches the coverage, never saying a word. On the sixth day, she disappears, leaving a note: I am never coming back … the problem is that you never give me anything … Or to put it more precisely, you have nothing inside you that you can give me. You are good and kind and handsome, but living with you is like living with a chunk of air. It’s not entirely your fault, though. ere are lots of women who will fall in love with you. But please don’t call me. Just get rid of all the stuff I’m leaving behind. (–)
A possible reading of her disappearance is that the quake brings on a real- ization of fundamental emptiness, but Murakami is careful not to make the link between the quake and the disappearance manifest. We only are invited to read this disappearance as a kind of existential aftershock, a transposition of massive trauma onto the all too familiar scene of a mar- riage in crisis. But this disappearance is only the initial event of the story: the remain- der of “ufo in kushiro” concerns Komuro’s trip to Hokkaido. Komuro has
The disaster is marginalized in the individual narratives yet paradoxically and uncannily central to the text as a whole.
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agreed to transport a small box containing an unknown object, perhaps indeed no object at all, to Hokkaido. is box which “weighs practically nothing” and which resembles boxes “used for human ashes” () becomes a portentous emblem, a physical objective correlative to Komuro’s own emptiness. In some ways, it is a crypt for what Abraham and Torok, in e Shell and the Kernel, would call the “lost object,” that element of the ego, unknowable, untellable, displaced by trauma. is box becomes the manifestation of the crypt in the ego which Abraham and Torok argue forms in the traumatized subject; the crypt forms as a result of the loss of the valued object, more precisely the loss and burial of a memory of an “idyll”: Between the idyllic moment and its subsequent forgetting … there was the metapsychological traumatism of a loss, more precisely, the “loss” that resulted from a traumatism. is segment of an ever so painfully lived Reality—untellable and therefore inaccessible to the gradual, assimilative work of mourning—causes a genuinely covert shift in the entire psyche … is leads to the establishment of a sealed-off psychic place, a crypt in the ego. ()
Murakami’s text suggests that the work of mourning required by Komura is work responding not only to the economy of his own loss of his wife but the massive loss initiated by the quake. In my reading of “ufo on kushiro” the physically embodied crypt—the box—is a precise symptom of the massive disruption, as if the quake has unearthed, or created an awareness of, the normally sealed-off crypt of loss. And we need to be clear about this: the crypt, physically originating with Komura’s colleague Sasaki, incrementally seems to become a part of Komura. ere is therefore an intimate connection between all who meet in this text and all who are merely phantoms (the disappeared wife, the ghosts of the Kobe dead). Komura speaks to Sasaki’s sister Keiko and her friend Shimao, two women he meets in Hokkaido:     “Do you mind if I ask you about your wife?” Keiko said. “I don’t mind” “When did she leave?” “Hmm … five days after the earthquake, so that’s more than two weeks ago now.” “Did it have something to do with the earthquake? Komura shook his head. “Probably not. I don’t think so.”
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 “Still, I wonder if things like that aren’t connected somehow,” Shimao said with a tilt of the head. “Yeah,” Keiko said. “It’s just that you can’t see how.” ()
e final moment of the story sees Komura begin to think consciously about what the box/crypt contains. Shimao suggests that the box “contains the something that was inside you. You didn’t know that when you carried it here and gave it to Keiko with your own hands. Now you’ll never get it back” (). e revelation brings Komura to the verge of “committing an act of overwhelming violence” () against Shimao until she reveals she was only joking. But what can we make of this moment? Primarily, we must notice that Komura’s loss of self—a realization initiated ultimately by the chain of events beginning with the quake—is permanent. e event of massive loss finds its echo in the permanent loss of self on a personal level (“you’ll never get it back”). Komura has lost the crypt containing his loss (he gives the box to Keiko): this doubled loss, this doubled absence, makes mourning impossible. Murakami has positioned his character in a state beyond mourning: Komura’s loss cannot be taken up and metabo- lized because it is permanently absent; one cannot mourn a loss that one cannot conceptualize as such. Komura now stands as an almost classic melancholic in Freud’s sense of the term. In “Mourning and Melancholy,” Freud speaks of the melan- cholic’s loss of the love object: Where the exciting causes are different one can recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind. e object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love … In yet other cases one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. is, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. (–) e melancholic, failing—or refusing—to metabolize loss, being unable to identify the precise nature of the loss but knowing that some loss has occurred, is thus permanently, painfully, tied to loss, to the unknowable event of loss, to an unknowable, unnameable history. Melancholia, as Eng and Kazanian remind us in Loss: e Politics of Mourning, is perhaps the only ethical response to loss precisely because melancholia keeps the
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memory of loss alive, refuses the comfort of forgetting what should not be forgotten.⁴ In some crucial ways, all of Murakami’s texts in after the quake and Underground are exercises in ethical melancholia in this sense. But we must notice the aporia of melancholy—the melancholy aporia—that arises in (at least) the fiction: Komura’s loss can never be named; the event—if it is the quake; if it is the event of the quake transposed onto an absent wife—cannot be known and named as such. Melancholia may work to maintain history, but the melancholic, not knowing “what” he has lost, can never name that loss. In this manner Komura is the perfect (melancholic) allegory of the writer who cannot articulate the “unknown loss” that trauma initiates. “ufo in kushiro” thus allegorizes and thematizes an aporia I wish to suggest is precisely the aporia of guilt: Komura, as suggested, can never name the loss, the “something” that is now absent. And yet he feels com- pelled now to know his loss. Shimao’s disavowal of the link between the “something” in the box and Komura—that the something is his loss—only serves to reinforce that desire for what remains unknowable (it is never revealed what is inside the box and it is clear that it is a space into which loss as such is projected and placed under erasure). I suggest this nar- rative allegorizes guilt because Komura’s loss—unknowable, unseen, erased—and his desire to know that loss suggests an indebtedness to loss, an impossible indebtedness. Murakami’s guilt, as a writer attempting to transcribe, translate, accommodate, the loss that is the quake, is in an indebtedness to an impossible to repay debt.⁵ e aporia of guilt arises in the inability to pay the debt demanded by history, by the inevitable trau- mas of history. e disaster, to return to Blanchot, is the limit and end of writing: it conditions writing, it is writing’s goal, and it brings writing to the ends of what it can do. Guilt thus is expressed formally in the impos-
  Eng and Kazanian offer a “counterintuitive” () reading of melancholy, one that attempts, counter to Freud, to depathologize melancholy: “While mourning abandons lost objects by laying their histories to rest, melancholia’s continued and open relation to the past finally allows us to gain new perspectives on and new understandings of lost objects” (). ey ask a provocative question: “Might we say that the work of mourning remains becomes possible through melancholia’s continued engagement with the various and ongoing forms of loss—as Freud writes ‘of a loved person’ or ‘some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on?’”   It is useful to keep in mind Nietzsche’s tracing of the term guilt and his admo- nition to remember that guilt is a moral concept with material origins: “[T]he basic moral term Schuld (guilt) has its origin in the very material term Schulden (to be indebted)” (Genealogy ).
Komura, as suggested, can never name the loss, the “something” that is now absent.
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sible attempt to extend beyond the limits of the disaster into the disaster of writing’s limitations. Whereas “ufo in kushiro” instantiates guilt on a personal, subjec- tive level, “all god’s children can dance” wishes to transpose (a sense of) guilt into a larger arena. “all god’s children can dance” is a text that uses manifest psychoanalytical tropes/narratives to explore the uneasy relation between desire, loss, and national trauma. Yoshiro is the son of Osaki, a member of a religious cult; Osaki believes, as do some members of her cult, that Yoshiya’s father is God. Yoshiya has rejected his mother’s beliefs and knows rationally that his father is one of his mother’s many lovers; specifically, he believes that his father is an obstetrician with a missing earlobe. Yoshiya’s early childhood is spent desperately trying to avoid and repress his sexual desires for his mother, and thus Murakami explicitly stages the story according to an Oedipal scenario: ey slept in separate bedrooms, of course, but whenever she felt lonely at night she would crawl under his covers with almost nothing on. As if hugging a dog or cat, she would sleep with an arm thrown over Yoshiya, who knew she meant nothing by it, but still it made him nervous. He would twist himself into incredible postures to keep his mother unaware of his erection. Terrified of stumbling into a fatal relationship with his own mother, Yoshiya embarked on a frantic search for an easy lay … He should have left his mother’s house and begun living on his own, Yoshiya knew, and he had wrestled with the question at critical moments … But here he was, twenty five years old, and still unable to tear himself away. () “all god’s children can dance” takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Kobe quake. e text, however, contains only one direct reference to the quake: Yoshiya’s mother has been staying at her Church’s Osaka facility (Osaka is close to Kobe) and has been working offering aid to the survi- vors. e plot of the narrative concerns Yoshiya as he follows a man (who is missing an earlobe) into the subway and eventually into an abandoned playing field. e man subsequently vanishes, leaving Yoshiya alone to ponder the relation between his desire for his mother, the absent father, and the destruction of cities: “Now that the stranger had disappeared, however, the importance of succeeding acts that had brought him this far turned unclear inside him. Meaning itself broke down and would never be the same again” (). is is a crucial passage in this story and after the quake as a whole. Here Yoshiya—and Murakami—make clear that logical
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connections between events, whether temporal or causal, at times do not function. e structure of meaning itself, as expressed in narrative terms, or religious-philosophical terms, has collapsed: this collapsing becomes meaningful as itself a kind of meaning: “So what if the man was his father, or God, or some stranger who just happened to have lost his right earlobe? It no longer made any difference to him, and this in itself had been a mani- festation, a sacrament: should he be singing words of praise?” (). Just as Blanchot reminds us that the true disaster is the failure of writ- ing, the limit of writing, the end of representation, Yoshiya’s indifference to the nature of his identity—precisely, his indifference to the narrative of his identity—itself becomes a sacrament. And yet, enmeshed in this sacra- ment, perhaps indeed produced by this sacrament as a kind of uncanny after-effect, is a feeling of crime committed and punishment deferred. In some ways, the loss of the father, as the strange logic of Murakami’s story would have it, can only produce, as a kind of traumatic aftershock, a reminder of a prior guilty desire for the mother. And this desire is inti- mately linked in Yoshiya’s mind to the disaster at Kobe. Murakami’s logic of displacement suggests that the trauma at Kobe unearths—displaces in phenomenal and psychoanalytical senses—subterranean and (badly) repressed desires. Yoshiya dances in the field, a dance that works to bring him to this uncanny place of enlightenment: And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transport desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of earth … He thought of his mother far away in that ruined city. What would happen, he wondered, if he could remain his present self and yet turn time backward so as to meet his mother in her youth when her soul was in its deepest state of darkness? No doubt they would plunge as one into the muck of bedlam and devour each other in acts for which they would be dealt the harsh- est punishment. And what of it? “Punishment?” I was due for punishment long ago. e city should have crumbled to bits around me long ago. (–) Murakami’s analogue of repression—the physical subterranean realm with its rivers that transport desire (a perfect emblem of metaphorical displacement)—suggests that displaced desire, illicit desire, is a foun- dational element in the formation of the subject and of the city: these subterranean currents of darkness and desire help to “create a rhythm
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of the earth” (). And thus the fantasy that Yoshiya imaginatively plays out—the fantasy of returning to the past to enact these desires—suggests both the inescapability of desire and, perhaps, the inevitable desire for punishment. e phenomenal destruction of Kobe, and by implication Tokyo, thus is the inevitable outcome of a crime repressed and a punish- ment never inflicted. Yoshiya thus is indebted: he owes a punishment, a punishment that cannot be paid as such, and therefore a punishment displaced onto the city. Personal guilt (“I was due for punishment long ago” [emphasis added]) is neatly displaced onto a larger site of trauma (“e city should have crumbled long ago”). By using the manifest Freudian tropes, Murakami, in what is perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this story, evokes a kind of inevitability of trauma: the Oedipal paradigm, the story suggests, is ines- capable, erases temporal and physical boundaries, brings us, precisely, to the limits of desire. e resonance of this story lies in the large implication that somehow the guilt we inevitably accumulate, the punishments that are never meted out, must be (and will have been) expressed: the energy of overdue punishment, punishment for crimes that cannot but occur, produces a guilt that will be expressed as displaced trauma. Murakami’s text suggests, in its analysis of the inevitability of trauma, an essential and ineluctable link between the subject and his trauma (a trauma in this case which is transposed onto a larger national scale). It is possible thus to figure this inevitability, this unavoidability, this desire to repay the guilty debt of punishment, as a kind of melancholia: because this repayment of guilt, guilt that would only ever reconstitute itself in the Oedipal paradigm, can never be made. e desire for the mother that Murakami suggests brings about trauma on a national scale will always be there. What Murakami has uncannily suggested here in this story is that melancholia—as a process of failed mourning for trauma caused by the individual’s illicit desire—is oriented as much to the future as it is to the past. And thus the aporetic question: how can we mourn and work through a guilt for crimes that have yet to occur, crimes which will have taken place in a possible future? III. Part of Murakami’s stated anxiety about both the Kobe quake and the Aum Shinrikyo attack is that no one foresaw the events. In some sense, these inevitable traumas and crimes represent a (guilty) failure of the rational imagination, the failure to imagine the possibility of such future traumas and crime. In some sense, thus, after the quake and Underground represent
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archives of failure, guilty (because posthumous) attempts to retrospec- tively imagine these events.⁶ Yet, there is one moment in Underground where Murakami makes an explicit link between his work as a novelist and the Aum Shinrikyo attack. In this passage, Murakami speaks not of a failure to imagine the attack (itself a guilty act) but of an imaginative responsibility for the attack. Murakami mentions his novel Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World and the fictional race he invented called the lings. e lings are a subterranean race of eyeless mon- sters who have created a vast network of tunnels under Tokyo. Murakami’s words here are crucial: A childish fantasy, admittedly. Yet, like it or not, when news of the Tokyo attack reached me, I have to admit these INKlings came to mind: shadowy figures poised waiting just beyond my train window. If I were to give free rein to a very private paranoia, I’d have imagined some crucial link between the evil creatures of my creation and those dark underlings who preyed upon the subway commuters. at link, imaginary or not, provided one rather personal reason for writing this book. () And of course it is the words “imaginary or not” that contain the maxi- mum compression of responsibility and imagined and imaginary guilt. Underground, in one sense, can be read as the attempt by Murakami to exorcise that guilt, to work through the possibility of his imagined guilt (the guilt of his imagination) by painstakingly attempting to understand the real reasons for the traumatic event. Underground thus must be read as Murakami’s attempt to displace his guilt by uncovering the truth of history. But this attempt to work through, to mourn the trauma produced by a guilty imagination, can only displace and defer the event. As Baudrillard reminds us in e Spirit of Terrorism (in words echoing Blanchot), “[T]here is an absolute difficulty of speaking of an absolute event” (). Murakami, however, works to maintain the possibility of accurately transposing, trans- lating, transmitting the truth of the event. Testimony, rather than what we may call the “figurative testimony” of fiction, becomes Murakami’s
  One story in after the quake functions as a clear instance of wish-fulfilment. “super-frog saves tokyo” imagines how an earthquake threatening to destroy Tokyo is averted by the combined efforts of a hapless banker (Katagari) and a giant frog. is text clearly, perhaps too clearly, functions as a kind of exorcism of guilt as is plays out Murakami’s impossible desire to have saved Kobe from disaster.
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way of translating the ineffable real of the traumatic event. And thus, despite the fact that Murakami “edited, reordered, or rephrased where necessary” to make the manuscript of Underground more “readable” () and despite the fact that everyone interviewed “asked for some changes or cuts” (), what remains in this testamentary archive is “unmistakably the truth” (). is appeal to the truth, of course, speaks quite explicitly to an anxiety surrounding the nature of testimony, an anxiety which I will link in what follows to Murakami’s sense that testimony may only be another form of historical displacement. But it should be emphasized here at the outset that these claims to truth lose something of their authority, their appeal to a kind of historical objectivity, when placed next to these explicit confessions of editing, reordering, and rephrasing, of making the texts more “readable.” It is of course his term “rephrasing” that speaks most explicitly—and thus ironically—to the fact that Underground is as fictionalized as after the quake. What we do need to register here, as we pass from one genre (fiction) to another (call it non-“fiction”), is the way in which Murakami hides in plain sight the fact that his text is as much a subjective response to trauma as is after the quake, subjective both in the sense that each testimony is an individual response and in the sense that Murakami has re-written each testimony according to specific rhetorical needs. is hiding in plain sight can be read as another manifestation of guilt about the process of translating what cannot be translated: the attempt to capture the event of trauma in language—and thus to displace it—is a crime to which Murakami, by admitting his fictionalizing, obliquely confesses even as he makes claims to the truth. Indeed, there is a kind of messianic or prophetic impulse at work in this text, a desire to reveal the truth of the Japanese character to the Japanese and a desire to safeguard against future disasters precisely by preserv- ing this trauma in testamentary form. It is here, in the desire to archive the testimony, that the fundamental aporia of (and desire for) mourning occurs, because it is clear that one of Murakami’s goals in Underground is to force the Japanese to see themselves “in” the trauma (perhaps as in some ways responsible for the trauma) so as to allow a process of mourning-as-healing to occur. It should be foregrounded that this attack, because originating in human action, perhaps allows itself to be mourned in ways that the Kobe quake cannot: there is no fundamental reason for the quake to have occurred (that is, there is no way to stop earthquakes: there are potentially ways of stopping terrorist attacks). us, the stories in after the quake must end in a kind of melancholic guilt for the inability to understand and mourn that particular trauma. e Aum Shinrikyo
Thus, the stories in after the quake must end in a kind of melancholic guilt for the inability to understand and mourn that particular trauma.
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attacks, on the other hand, precisely because originating in human (and thus potentially comprehensible) action, allow for mourning, demand the process of mourning that narrative—as giving voice to and thus working through—can facilitate.⁷ us Murakami writes about the aftermath of the attack: One thing is for sure. Some strange malaise, some bitter after- taste lingers on. We crane our necks and look around us, as if to ask: Where did all that come from? If only to be rid of this malaise, to cleanse our palates of this aftertaste, most Japanese seem ready to pack up the whole incident in a trunk labeled THINGS OVER AND DONE WITH. We would rather the meaning of the whole ordeal was left to the fixed processes of the court and everything was dealt with on a level of “the system.” Certainly the legal process is valuable and will bring to light many truths. But unless we Japanese absorb these facts into our metabolism and integrate them into our field of vision, all will be lost in a mass of meaningless detail, court-case gos- sip, an obscure, forgotten, corner of history. () Murakami’s language becomes emphatically psychoanalytical as he speaks of the need to absorb the facts of the attack into a collective “metabolism” in order to comprehend the traumatic event. After this absorption, the trauma will be placed into a narrative form that purifies the event: “If we are to learn anything from this event, we must look at what happened all over again, from different angles, in different ways. Something tells me things will only get worse if we don’t wash it out of our metabolism … what we need, it seems to me, are words coming from another direction, new words for a new narrative. Another narrative to purify this narrative” (–). Murakami delineates in almost clinical fashion the Freudian paradigm of mourning: the new narrative—Underground, these various testimonials—becomes an archive in which the traumatic event is puri- fied. Murakami sets Underground up as a narrative of mourning and puri- fication. Yet the appeal to memory and history (and Murakami’s sense of the complicity of the Japanese with Aum Shinrikyo) transforms the mourning archive into a melancholic archive, because there is something
   If mourning is predicated on an understanding of trauma as trauma, it is clearly a process intimately connected to the function of narrative. Narrative—as a process of both knowing and telling—allows the epistemological working through that mourning requires: the event must be known as event and com- municated as such.
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contradictory about Murakami’s desires in Underground, a contradiction that highlights the aporia at the heart of the work of mourning itself. Murakami desires to integrate the trauma of the attack—to remember in Freud’s terms; he then wishes to wash the event “out of our metabolism” (), to work through, again in Freud’s terms. Yet the work itself—Under- ground—like all monuments, all archives working to preserve the past, the memories of the past, stands as the absolute negation of mourning. e text functions as what I have elsewhere referred to as the “melancholy archive.”⁸ e individual subjects offering their narratives perhaps have worked through their individual trauma; yet Underground functions, to borrow again from Abraham and Torok, as a crypt in which the trauma is preserved.⁹ Indeed, the first part of Underground explicitly functions as a cryptic archive, supplementing the loss that occurred in the victims. One of the central effects of the sarin attack was the loss of memory; some, like Koichi Sakata (), Noburu Terajima (), Hiroshige Sugazaki (), or Shintaro Komada () found their short-term memories to be deteriorated (Komada, for instance, could not remember the details of the day-to-day routine of the office); others, like “Shizuko Akashi,” a thirty-one year old, suffered devastating losses of memory. Shizuko, paralyzed by the attack, has made progress to the point of being able to communicate verbally. Nevertheless, her condition is not promising: [H]er memory has almost totally gone. Sadly, she remembers nothing before the attack. e doctor in charge says she’s mentally “about grade-school level,” but just what that means Tatsuo [Shizuko’s brother] doesn’t honestly know. Nor do I. Is that the overall level of her thought processes? Is it her syn- apses, the actual “hardware” of her thinking circuitry? Or is it a question of “software,” the knowledge and information she has lost?… She remembers most of what’s happened to her since the attack, but not everything. Tasuo can never predict what she’ll remember and what she’ll forget. (–) e story of Shizuko, one that touched Murakami profoundly, can be seen, indeed should be seen, as a symptom of the trauma that Murakami’s archive seeks to preserve rather than to ameliorate and place under erasure   See “e Melancholy Archive: Jose Saramago’s All the Names.”   In “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” Nicholas Abra- ham and Maria Torok suggest that the crypt contains the traces of trauma, the “objectal correlative” of loss: “Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject. Reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects, the objectal correlative of the loss is buried alive in the crypt” ().
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through the process of mourning. Murakami’s archived story of Shizuko— and indeed the entirety of Underground—works to preserve the events and the knowledge of the events prior to the attack that erased her memory. More pointedly, Murakami’s re-telling of her story works to supplement the loss of her memory of events prior to the attack by refashioning the narrative of her life. Murakami retells stories of Shizuko’s past in order to facilitate an (imaginary) connection to a past that is clearly lost. Murakami describes Shizuko’s niece and nephew who repeat a narrative of visiting Disneyland every time they in turn visit their Aunt in the hospital: So Disneyland as a place has become fixed in her mind as something like a symbol of freedom and health. Nobody knows if Shizuko can actually remember having been there herself. It may only be a later implanted memory. After all, she doesn’t even remember her own room where she lived for so long. () As such Murakami’s narrative refuses, or strives to refuse, the comfort of mourning precisely as it maintains and supplements Shizuko’s lost memory. Shizuko’s narrative, thus archived and present to the reader, brings Shizuko back to that event, brings her trauma back to the time of its instantiation; thus that trauma is maintained in a kind of melancholy stasis, a narrative stasis brutally reflective of the somatic paralysis of Shizuko herself. One of the uncanny effects of Murakami’s collection of narratives is the (perhaps perverse) connection that is drawn between the victim and the terrorist cult member, because it is clear from the interviews that loss, deliberately inflicted or welcomed, defines both the victim and the terror- ist. e narrative of Shizuko, surely the emotional core of Underground, is uncannily refracted, inversely refracted perhaps, in aspects of the nar- ratives of some Aum members. Shizuko’s loss of her past, for instance, is echoed by the so-called “renunciate” members of Aum, those members who, on being selected by Shoko Asahara himself, deliberately—and bru- tally—sever all ties to the past. As Mitsuharu Inaba, a renunciate, puts it, “If there was nothing within me I could rely on, then the only thing to do was to give myself up to Aum. Besides, I always thought that someday I’d renounce the world” (). Inaba details how a sense of a loss of subjectivity defines the immersion in Aum and how the leader assumes total inter- pretive control of the world: the leader becomes “the person who would provide the final answer to Buddhist teachings. e one who could inter- pret it for me” (). Another renunciate, Hiroyuki Kano, details precisely
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how the leader compelled a severing of connections to the past, how the leader initiated loss as a central tenet of the Aum faith: “ere were very few people who started out as renunciates. It’s rare. But I was so weak I couldn’t walk properly and I was sure if things continued as they were I wouldn’t be able to live a normal life. ‘You don’t fit this transient world,” I was told [by Asahara],’ and I certainly agreed.” () us what appears to be a voluntary renunciation and loss of the past (for the terrorist) precedes the act of terror that robs the victim of her past. And just as Murakami’s narrative of Shizuko serves to supplement details of her (lost) past, so too do his interviews with Aum members: he forces a kind of nostalgic return to their renounced past. In these interviews, Murakami compels the Aum members to revisit the past, to revisit their childhoods and, in at least two cases (with Miyuki Kanda and Shin’ichi Hosoi), the effects of their renunciations on their families. It is here that Murakami’s Underground fulfills its purpose as absolute melancholic archive: he compels the Aum member back into the past and he preserves that nostalgic return in the archive that is Underground. Melancholia, as Derrida proposes, prevents the working through that occurs at the site of “normal” mourning. e dead other, the lost object, the event that has caused massive psychic disruption, remains: Now, what is the crypt in this instance? It is that which is constituted as a crypt in the body for the dead object in a case of unsuccessful mourning, mourning that has not been brought to a normal conclusion. e metaphor of the crypt returns insistently. Not having been taken back inside the self, digested, assimilated as in all “normal” mourning, the dead object remains like a living dead abscessed in a specific spot in the ego. It has its place, just like a crypt in a cemetery or temple, surrounded by walls and all the rest. e dead object is incorporated into this crypt—the term “incorporated” signal- ing precisely that one has failed to digest or assimilate it totally, so that it remains there, forming a pocket in the mourning ego. (Ear ) e event cannot be interiorized and thus “I keep it in me, as a persecu- tor perhaps, a living dead” (). It is here, in the sense that the historical event becomes a kind of persecutor, that Murakami’s, and by extension the Japanese people’s, guilt becomes manifest. Melancholia is a form, as I am characterizing it here, of a narrative preservation of trauma: that preservation becomes an objective correlative of the guilt that attends the apprehension of the event as trauma as such.
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Murakami speaks of this guilt implicitly when he refers to the Aum Shinrikyo cult as the distorted image of Japanese culture: “[T]hey” are the mirror of “us”! Now of course a mirror image is always darker and distorted. Convex and concave swap places, falsehood wins over reality, light and shadow play tricks. But take away these dark flaws and the two images are uncannily similar; some details almost seem to conspire together. Which is why we avoid looking directly at the image, why, consciously or not, we keep elimi- nating these dark elements from the face we want to see. ese subconscious shadows are an “underground” that we carry around within us, and the bitter aftertaste that continues to plague us long after the Tokyo gas attack comes seeping out from below. () Murakami maintains that the Aum Shinrikyo cult cannot be held as the “other” to Japanese culture. e cult, “distorted image of ourselves” (), must be seen as an integral element of Japanese culture, and thus the actions of the cult are in some ways the responsibility of all of Japan. Murakami’s reading of the relation between Aum and Japanese society therefore also transposes the guilt for the crimes. Underground becomes a mirror reflecting the totality of Japanese culture, not merely the faces of victims and a few perpetrators: as a melancholy archive Underground strives to maintain the truth of the historical events of the attack present for all and for all time. Yet the links between Japanese culture, Aum Shinrikyo, and Murakami himself are perhaps more complex than Murakami tacitly would admit. In the Preface to Part Two of Underground, Murakami makes a cryptic state- ment that stands alone without commentary or further elaboration. He has mentioned his interviews with members of Aum and then he writes: “[S]till, talking to them so intimately made me realize how their religious quest and the process of novel writing, though not identical, are similar” (). ere is much hidden, encrypted, perhaps in a guilty fashion, in this statement. It should be clear that Murakami sees a link not merely between the religious quest of Aum and the novelist but between the inevitable outcomes of that quest—terrorism—and the work of the novelist. Perhaps at some level terrorism and art are works of imaginative transformation; perhaps terrorism and art work to shock the complacent imagination with new perceptions of the real (indeed, this may be what after the quake in toto is “about”). Yet at work in Murakami’s cryptic statement, and at work in both after the quake and Underground, is a perception, perhaps
There is much hidden, encrypted, perhaps in a guilty fashion, in this statement.
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too difficult to bring fully to light, a perception that must remain present in its guilty repression, of the relation between terrorism and testimony (both after the quake and Underground function as testimony). In e Illusion of the End, Baudrillard suggests that the end or goal of terrorism is the end of history. Terrorism, as an expression of a kind of messianic apocalypticism, works to bring about an ecstatic end to the narrative of history: “And what, indeed, is terrorism, if not this effort to conjure up, in its own way, the end of history?” (). e link between terrorism and testi- mony may seem a perverse one, an impossible one, an absurd one. But the logic of both after the quake and Underground suggests, even as the texts struggle to grasp and understand the nature of terror and terrorism, that testimony is itself only ever a displacement of history, of historical events. Murakami’s desperate assertion of the truth of his accounts—that are his after all—can only be seen as an expression of anxiety about the way the testamentary narrative serves to displace even as it supplements history. And Murakami’s strange sentence about the relation between the religious quest and writing begins to take on an added resonance, offering, perhaps, a commentary both on his own work and, we might add, on Adorno’s comment that “Every work of art is an uncommitted crime” (Minima Moralia ). Precisely as Murakami’s texts become the guilt they wish to express, precisely as the texts archive trauma (even in and especially as its supplemental displacement) and thus become that trauma, precisely as history is effaced by the logic of testamentary melancholy, the work of art becomes a committed crime, in every sense of the word. Committed to the preservation of trauma, to a continual melancholic return to the scene of the crime, the criminal narrative act is guilty even and especially as it acknowledges its failure, tacitly or otherwise, to mourn that trauma. IV. Murakami has created a narrative crypt in an effort to keep memory alive as a constant reminder to the Japanese of the failure to have seen clearly the true lineaments of their own culture, their own faces. Underground, as both testimony and persecutor, becomes the guilt of which it wishes to speak: it speaks of guilt as it becomes that guilt. More precisely, Under- ground reminds us of the peculiar nature of guilt; guilt is the remainder of the past and a reminder of the future to come. It is clear that a testamentary narrative like Underground—and by extension after the quake—works to remind of the past and to warn against potential blindness to come. Murakami wishes the Japanese to take responsibility for the failure to have recognized themselves “in” Aum; the inevitable corollary of this guilt is the
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idea that the potential for this misrecognition to repeat itself, a misrecogni- tion that perhaps allows the Japanese to define themselves against the other, is always present. It is in this sense that we can say that testimony—as a discourse of memory and a discourse oriented to the future—is always conditioned by twin absences or displacements: the past can never be rendered as such, the future, cannot, will not, take place as such.¹⁰ Texts like Underground and after the quake, precisely as they attempt to speak of guilt and responsibility, to speak past and thus to mourn this guilty responsibility, inevitably fail, fail in fact a priori to carry out the business of testimony. e writing of disaster becomes the disaster of writing, the failure, the guilty failure, to translate the event, the disaster, the narrative that must contain the past in order to work through. As the logic of the melancholy archive demonstrates, the past will always make claims on the present and the future, rendering any attempt to mourn impossible: the testament—as archive, as monument to loss, of loss—will only and ever render history melancholic. What remains then of the text, in the text, what indeed, can only be remains, are the traces, the cinders of the trauma: the writing that immolates as it speaks its failure to speak. Works Cited Abraham, Nicholas, and Maria Torok. e Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Nicholas Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Adorno, eodro. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, . Baudrillard, Jean. e Illusion of the End. Trans. Chris Turner. Stanford: Stanford , . ———. e Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Two Towers. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, . Blanchot, Maurice. e Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lin- coln: University of Nebraska Press, . Boulter, Jonathan. “Does Mourning Require a Subject? Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing.” Modern Fiction Studies . (Summer ): –.
 We might, after Baudrillard, refer to the absence of the past and the future as “the unlimited suspending of the end” (Illusion ).
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