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Writing as self-therapy: competing therapeutic

paradigms in Murakami Haruki's Rat trilogy

Jonathan Dil

To cite this article: Jonathan Dil (2010) Writing as self-therapy: competing therapeutic
paradigms in Murakami Haruki's Rat trilogy, Japan Forum, 22:1-2, 43-64, DOI:
10.1080/09555803.2010.488942

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2010.488942

Published online: 18 Jun 2010.

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 Writing as self-therapy: competing
therapeutic paradigms in Murakami
Haruki’s Rat trilogy
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J O N AT H A N D I L

Abstract: Murakami Haruki’s first three novels, commonly referred to as the

Rat trilogy, deal with the growing pains of a young man suffering from personal
and cultural loss. In the psychological journey of the narrator we see a number of
elements that remind us of other authors: a response to loss reminiscent of Peter
Homan’s description of de-idealization; an attempt at growth and development
reminiscent of both Carl Jung’s writings on individuation and Joseph Campbell’s
description of the monomyth or hero’s journey; and blocks and barriers remi-
niscent of Freud’s writings on mourning and melancholia. Later, as this narrator
is reunited with his alter ego Rat, he also experiences a radical abandonment
of self that is reminiscent of Jacques Lacan’s description of an act. This trilogy
offers three competing models of what self-therapy might mean: the catharsis
of self-expression, the promise of self-completion and the radical possibility of
self-abandonment.

Keywords: Murakami Haruki, Rat trilogy, therapeutic paradigms

Introduction
Murakami Haruki started writing fiction as a means of self-therapy. He just had
no idea of it at the time. As he explained to Jungian psychologist Kawai Hayao
in 1995, for example, ‘Why did I start writing novels, even I do not really know,
I just suddenly wanted to start writing one day. Thinking about it now though, I
think it was some kind of step toward self-therapy (jiko chiryō)’ (Murakami and
Kawai 1996: 79).1 This same sentiment, though expressed more ambivalently,
is found in the first chapter of Murakami’s first novel, Kaze no uta o kike (Hear
the wind sing, 1979). As the nameless narrator Boku (the first-person, informal
pronoun) suggests:

Japan Forum 22(1–2) 2010: 43–64 ISSN: 0955–5803 print/1469–932X online

Copyright

C 2010 BAJS DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2010.488942
 44 Writing as self-therapy

When you get right down to it, writing is not a method of self-therapy. It’s just
the slightest attempt at a move in the direction of self-therapy. . . . And yet I
find myself thinking that if everything goes well, sometime way ahead, years,
maybe decades from now, I might discover myself saved.
(Murakami 1990–1, 1: 7; Rubin 2002: 42)
So what is Boku seeking self-therapy for and how does he go about trying to
achieve it? Why, despite his reservations, does he even hold out hope for some
kind of salvation?
Murakami’s first three novels – the above-mentioned Hear the Wind Sing, 1973
nen no pinbōru (Pinball, 1973, 1980) and Hitsuji o meguru bōken (A Wild Sheep
Chase, 1982) – though three separate and distinct works, are linked together by
a common narrator and central protagonist, Boku, and an important secondary
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character, Nezumi (Rat in English, and so the reason these works, though not
designed as a trilogy, are sometimes referred to as the Rat trilogy).2 In the first
novel, Boku is a young biology student returned home for the summer holidays
following the turbulent aftermath of the student protest movement. The year is
1970, and Boku spends much of his time drinking and talking with his friend Rat
at J’s bar and meeting a mysterious woman with a missing finger on her left hand.
The second novel is set in 1973, and Boku and a different friend have started
a translation company. The main thrust of this story, however, follows Boku’s
conscious and unconscious attempts to mourn the death of a girl from his student
days, a quest that is sublimated in the novel into a search for a pinball machine.
The third novel starts in 1978 with Boku having recently divorced from his wife.
A photo of a special sheep sent by Rat, however, and a new association with a
mysterious woman with magical ears, starts him out on a wild sheep chase that
is also unknowingly an attempt to reconnect with his old friend Rat. Throughout
these novels, Boku must learn how to mourn his past, but also how to take the
things he has lost and somehow begin the process of moving on and creating
something new. In this journey, he is offered three competing models of what
self-therapy might mean: cathartic self-expression, individuation or attempted
self-unification and radical self-abandonment.

Early therapeutic paradigms in Hear the Wind Sing:

from the ‘talking cure’ to Boku’s Jungian cast of characters
Hear the Wind Sing is a story with more mood than movement. While the some-
what detached and aphoristic view of the narrator undoubtedly owes something
to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s creation, Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Nick at least
had exciting things to witness and to share. Boku, on the other hand, is telling us
his story without, it seems at first at least, very much to say. One senses that there
are perhaps events from his past – stories of political turbulence, love and death –
that if shared honestly and straightforwardly might have the ability to move one.
 Jonathan Dil 45

And yet, as his narrative begins, this is not the story he chooses to tell. While
the natural inclination of anyone starting a therapeutic journey might be to dive
immediately in and directly confront the most painful and disturbing events from
their past, Boku takes a different path. Rather, he begins by talking about things
seemingly unrelated and inconsequential – an endless digression that can leave
one wondering what he is seeking self-therapy for to begin with.
One of Boku’s most obvious psychological difficulties as a child was his inability
to express himself, though, as his narrative begins, there are signs that change is
under way. The earliest and simplest therapeutic paradigm on display in these
works is thus a simplified version of the talking cure (or perhaps more accurately
the writing cure). The general idea is simple: we have a problem, we talk (or write)
to someone about it and we feel better. Even if nothing really changes, the act of
sharing the burden is enough to bring relief. As Boku explains at the start of his
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narrative, for example, ‘All sorts of people have come my way telling their tales,
trudged over me as if I were a bridge, then never come back. All the while I kept
my mouth tight shut and refused to tell my own tales. That’s how I came to the
final year of my twenties. Now I’m ready to tell’ (1990–1, 1: 7–8; see also Rubin
2002: 42).
This reluctance to speak seems to be a product of both nature and nurture.
As a 14-year-old, for example, Boku had been an ‘extremely quiet boy’ (hidoku
mukuchi na shōnen) (1990–1, 1: 23) and had consequently been sent by his parents
to see a therapist. It is here, in true Wittgensteinian fashion, that he receives his
first lessons in communication and being: ‘Civilisation’ his therapist tells him, ‘is
transmission. . . . If you can’t express something, it’s like it doesn’t exist’ (1990–1,
1: 24). This discovery leads to what he describes as the unplugging of a dam and
a three-month verbal eruption that is an attempt to compensate for fourteen years
of silence. In the end, he breaks out in a forty-degree fever and has to take three
days off school. Finally, he reaches a new equilibrium; he goes from what he
describes as an ‘extremely quiet’ to an ‘ordinary boy’ (heibon na shōnen) (1990–1,
1: 26).
Unfortunately for Boku, this lesson is soon forgotten. As he later explains, there
was a time during high school when it was cool to only say half of what you were
thinking. The problem, he realized years later, was that he had soon become the
kind of person who could only ever say half of what they thought. By the time he
realized this was a mistake, it was too late, and, what is more, he had no idea how
it related to being cool. Consequently, his underlying motive for starting to write
seems to be a desire to start opening up again.
Boku’s one redeeming quality in the communication department, like a skilled
therapist, is his ability to listen. At the start of Pinball, 1973, for example, Boku
tells of a time when people would deliberately seek him out to tell him their stories.
What these people were looking for was the catharsis of self-expression. As Boku
vividly describes, it was like releasing monkeys stuffed into a cardboard box: ‘I
would take these monkeys out of the box one by one, carefully brush away the
 46 Writing as self-therapy

dust, give them a slap on the backside and release them into the fields. I don’t
know where they went after that’ (1990–1, 1: 123). Boku’s writing project is his
attempt to start doing this for himself.
In this way, Boku’s narrative can be read as his therapeutic discourse. It is his
chance to start unburdening himself of the things that weigh him down. What such
a therapeutic model implies, however, is that he already knows what is bothering
him. It is not self-knowledge he seeks, but the cathartic pay-off of self-expression.
And yet, as one gets to know Boku, it soon becomes clear that this is not the case.
He is not conscious of everything he needs to say, and the more he presses on
in his writing and in his life, the clearer it becomes that he is walking into the
unknown. Thus, while the idea of self-therapy as cathartic self-expression plays a
part in understanding his early therapeutic impulse, it is really only preliminary
to the larger psychological journey he is undertaking. An expanded model of
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self-therapy is still needed.

Before going on to consider what this model might be, it is first useful to consider
what Boku is seeking self-therapy for. The simple answer is loss – both personal
and cultural. Boku has lost friends, particularly as revealed in 1973, Pinball, a girl
named Naoko, and as his narrative proceeds he will lose many others: the woman
with the missing finger, twins that appear in his bed one morning, the wife he later
marries and even his friend Rat. At the same time, he is suffering from a more
general sense of cultural loss. Compared to the idealism and innocence of the
1960s, a mood hinted at throughout Hear the Wind Sing with references to John
F. Kennedy and the Beach Boys, the 1970s, the period in which Boku is writing
his narrative, are characterized by boredom and sterility, a situation which is only
interrupted by the mysterious figures that enter his life. Seen in psychoanalytic
terms, what Boku seems to be dealing with is what Peter Homans describes as
‘de-idealization’.
The experience of loss, though deeply coloured by culture, is a human uni-
versal. Consequently, so is the need to mourn. As Freud described, ‘Mourning
is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some
abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an
ideal, and so on’ (Freud 1978 [1917]: 243). The loss of abstract ideals Freud
describes is particularly paramount in the shift from adolescence into adulthood.
Peter Homans writes of the different names English speakers have for this expe-
rience: ‘disappointment, mourning, pining, disillusionment, longing, deploring,
renunciation, and disenchantment’ (Homans 1989: 24). The word he feels best
captures the anguish and confusion of this period, however, is ‘de-idealization’.
He describes this experience as follows:

It is an inner psychological sequence of states, characteristic of adult life, with

a beginning, middle, and end. It is developmentally grounded and can be de-
scribed both phenomenologically and genetically. It begins with conscious and
unconscious idealizations and an enhanced sense of self-esteem, accompanied
 Jonathan Dil 47

by feelings of loyalty, merger, and fusion with other objects – persons, ideas,
ideals, groups, even a social and intellectual tradition. Since history rarely
optimally facilitates psychological development, such mergers are eventually
challenged by interpersonal, social, and historical circumstances. As a result,
the idealizations lose their firmness and may even crumble, leading to a weak-
ened sense of self, a sense of betrayal, a conviction that an important value has
been lost, moments of rage at the object subsequently perceived as having failed
the self in some way or other, and a consequent general sense of inner disor-
ganization and paralysis. The final disposition of the de-idealization experience
usually takes one of three directions: (1) It may move toward new knowledge
of self, new ideals, and consequently new ideas, or (2) the paralysis can persist,
leading to apathy, cynicism, and chronic discontent, or (3) one may disavow
the experience entirely and instead attack, often fiercely and rebelliously, the
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events or persons producing the de-idealization.

(Homans 1989: 24)

This is Boku’s experience in a nutshell. He is caught between ‘apathy, cynicism,

and chronic discontent’ and the desire for ‘new knowledge of self’ and ‘new
ideals’. What he requires is both a conscious and unconscious working through
of loss and guilt, a process otherwise known as mourning.
Boku’s therapeutic quest is about more than what he needs to say. Rather, it
is about things he needs to work through and rediscover through the characters
he meets along the way. This is because, in important ways, these characters are
merely extensions of his larger personality. As Jay Rubin astutely observes, ‘It
might be said that the only “personality” in most of Murakami’s Boku-narrated
works is that of Boku himself, whose perceptions never cease to fascinate. The
other characters are functions of his psyche’ (Rubin 2002: 39). The question is,
what functions are these other characters fulfilling? From a Jungian perspective,
the answer is simple: they are the guides offering him a way forward in his own
project of individuation.
Jungian readings of Murakami’s fiction, while not uncommon in Japan, are
rare in the Western secondary literature on Murakami, a product in part of the
low status Jungian criticism presently holds in Western literary studies. Rather,
Western critics interested in psychological readings of Murakami’s fiction have
tended to turn to Lacan (Fisch 2004: 361–83; Hirata 2005: 43–91; Strecher 2002:
109–56). This is a natural marriage when one considers the radical questions
Lacan asked about subjectivity, the ways we structure the world through the
Imaginary and the Symbolic and, most provocatively, the traumatic encounter
with the Real. Many of these concerns, of course, map nicely onto Murakami’s
fiction and provide insight in to the psychological and existential questions with
which he is wrestling. What can be missed, however, are the very real sympathies
also evident in this fiction for a loosely Jungian view of the compensatory power of
the unconscious. One might call Murakami a Jungian who rejects the teleological
 48 Writing as self-therapy

ideal of a unified self, or a Lacanian who perhaps consciously chooses to overvalue

the illusory power of the Imaginary.3 Personally, I have come to think of him as an
existential Gnostic: someone who, while they accept the limits of their existential
condition and the impossibility of salvation on a literal level, nevertheless sees in
the compensatory power of the unconscious a source of uncanny guidance and
inspiration that can provide open-ended answers to the problem of living.
With this in mind, it is interesting to see the ways Murakami’s fiction can and
cannot be mapped on to existing Jungian frameworks. The most obvious Jungian
theme running through these early works is Boku’s journey of individuation. He
has suffered significant personal and cultural losses, and his major response has
been to disassociate from his pain and to over-identify with his cool, calm and
collected persona. It is clear, however, that he is suffering. As Jung argued, the in-
dividual experiences the archetypal depths of the unconscious through complexes:
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the particular expressions of archetypal content that occur in an individual’s psy-

chic life. It is Boku’s interaction with the various personalities in his life that mark
the major turning points of his therapeutic journey.
The easiest way to understand how these complexes work in Jungian thought is
to think of them as sub-personalities working within the mind. As Jung explains,
‘Complexes do indeed behave like secondary or partial personalities possessing a
mental life of their own’ (Whitmont 1991: 64). Demaris Wehr usefully explains
how these secondary personalities function in the process of individuation: ‘Indi-
viduation consists in coming to know the multiple personalities, the “little people”
who dwell within one’s breast. One needs to “befriend” them at the same time as
one distinguishes one’s own voice from theirs. . . . Gradually the self displaces the
ego as the center of consciousness’ (Wehr 1988: 54).
The first character Boku needs to befriend is Rat, a moody and melancholic
figure who seems to belong more to the 1960s and is increasingly left behind as
Boku’s life moves through the 1970s. Rat is constantly bemoaning the economic
inequalities of the society he lives in, and is dissatisfied by Boku’s attempts to
dismiss these concerns through a detached sense of existential resignation. He
represents much that was lost with the class-consciousness and radicalism of the
late 1960s and highlights the sense of ennui that for many characterized Japan’s
period of high economic growth. Many commentators recognize Rat as an alter
ego for the milder, more pleasant Boku. It is perhaps not surprising then that
some have also come to see him as a manifestation of the Jungian shadow (Imu
2002: 25; Shimizu 2000: 97).
The shadow is the first ‘personality’ Jung saw people encountering in their quest
for individuation, and this is because the shadow, more than any other complex, is
seen as having a strong connection to the personal unconscious. As he explained,
‘To become conscious of it involves recognising the dark aspects of the personality
as present and real’ (Campbell 1976: 145). This is naturally a disturbing process;
the shadow is that part of ourselves which is least socially acceptable, and it is
natural for us to want to keep it hidden. It partly has its origins in our earliest
 Jonathan Dil 49

years of socialization as we learn to create a persona or social mask that will allow
us to function in society. Jung believed that it is usually experienced in dreams
and fantasy as someone of the same sex.
One of the easiest ways to recognize our shadow, Jung argued, was to become
conscious of the ways we project it onto others. Murakami offers his own example
of how this works in his non-fictional work Andāguraundo (Underground, 1997),
which examines the 1995 Aum Shinrikyō cult sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.
As Murakami recalls, he had earlier felt a deep sense of disgust upon observing
members of this cult campaigning for the election of the Lower House of the
Japanese Diet in 1990. In Jungian terms, the extremity of this emotion was a
sign that he was in the grip of a complex, in this case the shadow. As Murakami
writes, ‘I felt an unnameable dread, a disgust beyond my understanding’. He
goes on to note that ‘[p]sychologically speaking . . . encounters that call up strong
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physical disgust or revulsion are often in fact projections of our own faults and
weaknesses. . . . These subconscious shadows are an “underground” that we carry
around within us’ (Murakami 1990–1, 6: 644–5, 2001 [1997]: 198–9).
One of Boku’s most urgent tasks in these early novels is to talk to Rat and
to receive from him the message he bears. This encounter, in fact, provides
the climax of the trilogy. In Hear the Wind Sing though, we are given only a brief
introduction to this deep archetypal potential. We learn near the start of the novel,
for example, that Boku and Rat first met when they started university, somehow
finding themselves drunk and involved in an automobile accident together. It is
here Boku learns one of the first important things about Rat: he is rich. Even
though his shiny black Fiat 600 has been written off, Rat does not care; what
matters to him is how lucky they have been. Neither he nor Boku has been
injured in the accident and luck, he concludes, is simply something you cannot
buy. Encouraged by this discovery, Rat suggests that they become a team. Their
first item of business is to go and drink beer together, after which they fall asleep
on a beach. When they awake, they both experience a tremendous renewal of
energy:
When I woke up, my body was overflowing with some strange energy. It was an
odd feeling.
‘I could run 100 kilometres’, I told Rat.
‘Me too’, Rat replied.
(Murakami 1990–1, 1: 17)
Asked how he got the name Nezumi, Rat does not have a good reply: ‘I forget, it’s
something from long ago’ (Wasureta ne. Zuibun mukashi no koto sa). As Jay Rubin
reflects, ‘It is a nickname so old – so embedded in the psychic primordial slime of
once-upon a time (mukashi) – that he has “forgotten” how he came by it’ (Rubin
2002: 33). Though the shadow is closely related to the personal unconscious
and to the experiences of the individual, it is also related to a deeper archetypal
experience of otherness, a consequence of our deep evolutionary history as a
 50 Writing as self-therapy

species. While Rat is not as deep and dark as some of the alter egos that appear
in Murakami’s later works, he does offer an early example of this archetypal
potential of the shadow.4 Before going on to look at what his existence means for
Boku’s psychological development, however, it is useful to look at one of the other
significant ‘personalities’ that Boku meets along the way.
Near the start of Hear the Wing Sing, Boku wakes up in the apartment of a
young woman who is naked and fast asleep. Lying there in the early hours of the
morning, he offers us a description of this woman sleeping beside him. She has
a fading tan line, is slightly on the skinny side and is probably not yet twenty.
Using the span of his hand, he estimates that she is about five foot two. He
likewise notes that she has a small birthmark just below her right breast. Finally,
nonchalantly, he mentions that she only has four fingers on her left hand. Typical
of Boku’s observations, the tone is detached and understated, and yet one senses
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that there is something significant about this woman lying beside him. Waking
up she demands to know who Boku is. Not really knowing where to start, he
launches into a story.
The night before, Boku had been frequenting J’s Bar, the hangout where he and
Rat spend much of their time in this first novel. On this particular night, however,
Rat was absent, and so Boku had decided to call him. Ringing his number, Boku
was startled to hear the voice of a woman on the other end; Rat does not usually
let others answer his phone, and Boku could not help but feel a strong sense of
annoyance that he could not fully understand. It was the first indication that wires
are beginning to cross, and that, along with his shadow, Boku is now going to
have to start dealing with a new presence in his life. (This kind of connection
to the unconscious through a telephone or some other form of modern media is
a common occurrence in Murakami’s fictional worlds.) Boku pretended to have
dialled a wrong number and returned to his drinking. Just as he was about to
return home, however, the Chinese bartender J, who acts as a kind of mediator
between Boku and his significant others, suggested that he go and wash his face
in the bathroom. It was here that he found the woman with only four fingers on
one hand, drunk and lying on the floor. Consulting with J about what to do, he
decided it was best to take her home.
For males, the encounter with the shadow is followed in Jungian theory by an
encounter with the anima. (In females, a corresponding complex is known as the
animus.) As Jung writes, ‘The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should
be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness’ (Jung 1953: 309). There are
many such females in Murakami’s fiction: mysterious, often hurt women who offer
the promise of compensation and connection. They offer the male protagonists
they encounter the opportunity to drop their cool personas and to start admitting
their pain and loss again.5
Again, as with Rat, there is a suggestion that there may be something archetypal
about this woman. Boku explains, for example, that there was something annoy-
ing about her voice, something nostalgic, something ancient (furui mukashi no
 Jonathan Dil 51

nanika da) (1990–1, 1: 31). She is not overly impressed with Boku’s story, how-
ever, and they soon part company, making it seem unlikely they will meet again.
A call from a radio station and a dedication from a different woman, however,
mysteriously brings them back together. Boku, it turns out, had borrowed a Beach
Boys record from a female classmate five years earlier, which he had failed to re-
turn. It is this woman who rings the radio station and requests they play California
Girls for him. Wearing the t-shirt sent from the radio station a few days later, Boku
is out wandering when he decides to enter a record store with the intention of
buying this same album. As chance would have it, the girl with only four fingers
on one hand is working in this very shop. There is a sense that this strange coin-
cidence may not in fact be so coincidental, an example of what Jung would have
called synchronicity. It is as if the universe is ensuring that Boku meets his anima.6
Slowly their relationship develops and Boku is able to start talking about his
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past again. Soon, however, she tells him that she is going away on a trip. Later
in the novel, when they meet again, it is clear that something has changed. It
turns out that she has been away to have an abortion, a consequence of a previous
relationship. The word anima comes from the Latin for soul, and for Jung this is
very close to what she is, the soul of a man. What we have in this novel, however, is
an anima figure that has literally had something precious ripped from inside her,
a motif repeated in one of Murakami’s later works (1994). While Boku’s persona
compels him to remain cool and detached, his anima figures are there to remind
him that he is in fact hurting and that he needs to open up and begin to mourn.
Trying simply to get on with life, Boku is constantly reminded through Rat and
the various women he meets along the way that there is something problematic
about his past and even the past of his country that he needs to confront. As
the trilogy continues, it becomes clear that there is one anima figure in particular
with whom Boku needs to reconnect. Significantly, she is the first person in
Murakami’s novels to receive a proper name.

Reading Pinball, 1973: understanding Boku’s mourning

and melancholia
Pinball, 1973 traces Boku’s life over three months from September to November
of 1973. While we know from Hear the Wind Sing that Boku majored in biology,
somehow by the time his story starts again he has become a professional translator.
Animals often represent a connection to the unconscious in Murakami’s fiction,
and so it is clear that Boku’s present career and lifestyle somehow represent a
retreat from these unconscious influences, towards a life that has become drab
and boring. Despite this obvious movement away from the unconscious, however,
there is a sense that the unconscious is not yet ready to leave him alone. He often
spends his lunchtimes visiting the local pet store in a vague attempt to reconnect
with something precious. Despite his best efforts simply to forget the past and
 52 Writing as self-therapy

move on, shadow and anima figures continue to re-emerge in his life in unexpected
ways.
For example, near the start of this novel, Boku describes a strange feeling that
sometimes comes over him, a feeling as if he is splitting into several pieces. He
describes the sense of incongruence as like trying to put together two different
puzzles mixed together at the same time. Usually, he just drinks whisky and goes
to bed, though this only makes things worse. One morning, however, he awakens
to find, mysteriously, twin girls sleeping under his arms. At first, this strange duo
seem suggestive of the girl with only four fingers on one hand from Hear the Wind
Sing, who at one point playfully tells Boku she has a younger twin sister who lives
30,000 light years away. This girl has disappeared from the narrative, and these
twins seem like a stand-in for this missing presence of the anima in his life. As
the narrative unfolds, however, it soon becomes clear that they are just as much
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a reminder of Rat. Offering suggestions for names they might be called the girls
offer such binary opposites as right and left, vertical and horizontal, up and down,
front and back, and east and west. Boku adds his own suggestion, entrance and
exit. This supposedly random contribution releases this chain of thought: ‘Where
there is an entrance, there is also an exit. Most things are made that way: a post
box, an electric vacuum cleaner, a zoo, a sauce dispenser. Of course, there are
also some things that are not: mousetraps (nezumitori), for instance’ (Murukami
1990–1, 1: 129).
The pinball machine, on the other hand, while it initially seems directly con-
nected to Rat, ultimately turns out to be a substitute for a missing anima figure
in Boku’s life. There is a brief scene in Hear the Wind Sing where Boku and Rat
play pinball together in J’s bar, but it becomes clear in Pinball, 1973 that the pin-
ball machine is connected primarily with a girl named Naoko that Boku knew in
university. Naoko is now dead, having committed suicide, but her memory con-
tinues to haunt Boku’s life. Early in the novel, Boku makes an attempt to move
past this painful chapter in his life. He dresses up and makes a journey to a train
station that Naoko had once vividly described to him. On the way home from the
station, he then tries to convince himself that everything is now over, and yet he
knows deep down that it is not. Nevertheless, as the narrative continues, Naoko
is temporarily forgotten and we observe Boku simply trying to get on with the
mundane responsibilities of his life. In one sense, it can be argued, his mourning
has simply moved underground.
Murakami’s early fiction is full of these kinds of losses. First there is Rat, a
close friend who slowly drifts away and eventually ends up taking his own life
in an attempt to save others. There are also other deaths that Boku has to deal
with: a couple of uncles, a grandmother and at a more distant level the fictitious
writer Derek Heartfield. There are also those who, while they do not die, simply
disappear from Boku’s life, often without much explanation: the girl with only
four fingers on one hand, the twins he meets in 1973, Pinball, the woman he
later marries and a call girl he meets with magical ears. At a more abstract level,
 Jonathan Dil 53

however, all these personal losses are simply symptomatic of a more general sense
of lost innocence and lost idealism that pervades these early works. More than
anything, Boku seems to be mourning historical losses from the 1960s.
Innocence in these early works is most commonly associated with the year
1963. Significant here is the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which came to symbolize
Japan’s growing economic confidence and triumphant re-entry onto the world
stage following the post-war period of rebuilding. There are also a number of
American references that mark 1963 as a time of innocence. As Katō Norihiro
(1996: 15, 19) points out, for example, the Beach Boys’ album California Girls
and the numerous references made to American President John F. Kennedy all
point back to 1963: Kennedy’s words are quoted, Rat wears a Kennedy pendant
around his neck and the woman with four fingers on one hand speaks Kennedy’s
name in her sleep. More than all this, however, it is the connection with Naoko
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that really marks 1963 as such a special time. As Boku explains:

While it is tough to talk about those who have died, it is even tougher to talk
about those women who die young. By dying, they remain forever young.
In contrast, those of us who go on living continue to get older, year by year,
month by month, day by day. . . .
I only had one photo of her. The date was recorded on the back; it was
August 1963. The same year President Kennedy had a bullet fired through his
head . . . .
She was 14. It was the most beautiful time of her 21-year-life.
(Murukami 1990–1, 1: 77–8)

In Pinball, 1973, the reader is taken back through Naoko’s storytelling to a time of
lost innocence. Boku remembers Naoko talking about the community her family
moved to in 1961 when she was just 12. The scene she describes is idyllic, a
peaceful green valley and a community of artists and eccentrics. Around the time
of the Tokyo Olympics, however, development from the city had reached their
community. Finally, in 1966, when Naoko was 17 years old, the well digger who
provided the town with its delicious drinking water was struck by a train and
killed. From this point on, the good fortunes of the community had literally dried
up.
If 1963 was a time of innocence, then 1964 was a time of growing economic
development and by 1966 something precious had already been lost. By 1968 and
1969, however, a sense of struggle and resistance had crept back in, and some felt
like they could begin to fight back. And yet by 1970, the time period around which
Hear the Wind Sing is set, this newfound idealism had been shattered. Speaking
in August of 1970 with the woman who only has four fingers on one hand, Boku
is asked about the student protests and the fact that his front tooth was smashed
in by a riot policeman.
 54 Writing as self-therapy

‘Do you want revenge?’

‘Of course not’, I said.
‘Why? If I were you, I’d find that cop and knock a few of his teeth out with a
hammer.’
‘Well I’m me, and that is all over and done with. Anyway, you can’t find those
riot-police, they all look the same.’
‘So there was no point to it?’
‘Point?’
‘For getting your tooth smashed.’
‘No’, I replied.
(Murukami 1990–1,1: 70)

This, of course, is history as seen through the eyes of a particular generation. For
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the previous generation, 1960 was the high point of political resistance as seen by
the huge numbers that came out to protest the signing of the US-Japan Security
Treaty and in the bitter confrontations that broke out between big business and
labour in such places as the Miike coalmines in Kyushu. For Murakami and his
generation, however, 1960 was still too early. This new generation would come
of age in the idealistic and rebellious late 1960s. As they graduated and headed
out into the work force, however, they had to face the reality that their idealism
had failed to deliver. Increasingly, they would be left to their own devices as they
sought to make their way in a world that seemed to value nothing more than
profit margins and the diversions of consumerism. Murakami’s fiction speaks to
this generation and to every generation that has followed since vaguely searching
for something more.
So how is Boku supposed to carry out the mourning process? Elizabeth Grosz
offers this useful description of what is involved:

Mourning is the (gradual) process of disinvesting or de-cathecting the lost

object of the intensity of all memories, impulses, and libidinal investments
associated with it. Mourning is a reclamation of libido from unreciprocated
investments which have emptied the ego. The ego gradually replenishes its
libidinal reserves by reinvesting narcissistic cathexis in the subject’s own body.
Only after the associative networks of the lost, mourned object are sufficiently
disinvested, and the body reinvested, is the ego able to seek substitutes for the
lost object.
(Grosz 1990: 30)
Grosz’s definition here relies on the writings of Freud. Cathexis is a psychoanalytic
term for the investment of psychic energy into a particular person, object or idea.
In Murakami’s early works, there are people and ideals that have been lost, and
Boku’s role is to mourn their passing, but also to incorporate something of their
lost potential back into his life. This is what his quest for individuation is all
 Jonathan Dil 55

about. Mourning is a process of both de-cathecting emotional attachments from

a cherished lost object and reinvesting that energy back into the self. As Freud
wrote, ‘Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it
proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to
that object’. When the work of mourning was completed, he felt that the ego
would become ‘free and uninhibited again’ (Freud 1978 [1917]: 244–5).
In psychoanalytic theory, however, though a person outwardly mourns, the
attachment can remain and mourning can turn into melancholia. As Freud writes:

This, 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. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way
related to an object-loss which has withdrawn from consciousness, in contrast
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to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.

(Freud 1978 [1917]: 245)

It is this more unconsciously driven experience of melancholia that Boku seems

caught up in. He is consciously aware of whom he has lost, but not necessarily what
he has lost in himself. Naoko and Rat have both disappeared from his life, but
his melancholic attachments mean that he continues to have a vague, undefined
awareness that something is wrong.7 These are not just lost friends, they are lost
ideals, and they hang around in Boku’s life because in important ways he still
needs them. While these early works are clearly melancholic in tone, however,
there is also a sense that the unconscious is trying to bring these losses back into
consciousness again. Fetishistic substitutes appear in Boku’s life and in strange
ways lead him back to his original losses. The obvious examples are the twins and
the pinball machine that appear in Pinball, 1979.
Soon after their dramatic appearance, the twins begin to help Boku start mourn-
ing again. When they find a discarded phone panel left by a repairman, for ex-
ample, they use it as a device for grieving – the twins decide they need to have a
funeral for the panel. As already mentioned, phones often represent a connection
to the unconscious in Murakami’s work, and so a funeral for a discarded phone
panel can be seen as a funeral for a discarded unconscious, melancholic connec-
tion. As the novel proceeds, it becomes clear that it is Naoko that Boku really
needs to mourn.
This return to mourning can be seen as an attempt to get the process of
individuation moving again. As Peter Homans explains:

[I]ndividuation . . . is the fruit of mourning. Somehow, in a way that is not really

understood, the experience of loss can stimulate the desire ‘to become who one
is.’ That in turn can throw into motion a third process, what should be called
‘the creation of meaning.’ This action is at once a work of personal growth
and a work of culture. In it, the self both appropriates from the past what has
 56 Writing as self-therapy

been lost and at the same time actually creates for itself in a fresh way these
meanings.
(Homans 1989: 9)

In the same way, Boku’s quest for individuation is an attempt to appropriate from
the past what has been lost and an attempt to start creating something new. It is
a work of personal growth and a work of culture. When seen in this context, the
process of mourning takes on new significance. It is not an end in itself, but the
start of a much larger process.
In the climactic scene of the novel, Boku is finally able to locate the pinball
machine and through it have a conversation with Naoko. As he is clear to point
out, however, this is not the kind of denouement found in stories of Arthur and
his Knights of the Round Table; Boku has by no means found his holy grail. He
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has moved, however, ever so slightly forward in his quest towards individuation.
Disillusioned and culturally adrift, Boku’s quest seems like an attempt to recon-
nect with the unconscious and to start rebuilding a personal sense of meaning
again. Even though he often ignores these unconscious influences in his life, the
call from beyond continues to come and nudge him ever so slightly forward. By
the end of the novel, the groan of the pinball machine has left his life and so have
the twins. It is clear, however, that Boku’s psychological quest is not yet over.

Reading A Wild Sheep Chase: Campbell’s monomyth,

a Lacanian act and the quest for commitment
To understand how Boku’s psychological journey proceeds in the third work of
this informal trilogy, A Wild Sheep Chase, it is first necessary to return to his
relationship with Rat. Unlike Boku, Rat is a figure consumed by the economic
injustices he sees around him and unable to cope with the guilt he feels and
his own economic good fortune. His father made his money on the back of
the Second World War and Japan’s later deprivation and economic development.
During the war, he had sold insect repellent, a product that really took off once the
Japanese frontline starting moving into Southeast Asia. In the immediate post-war
period he moved to nutritional supplements and around the end of the Korean
War switched to household cleaners. The ingredients making up these various
products were supposedly the same. Although this may sound rather incredible,
the underlying message is that Rat’s father is simply an opportunist. It did not take
any special genius to make his money; he was simply riding the wave of Japan’s
wartime and postwar economic fortunes.
The first words that come out of Rat’s mouth in Hear the Wind Sing are
a drunken tirade against the rich: ‘The rich can all eat shit . . . they’re para-
sites . . . they can’t do a thing; it makes me sick just to look at them’ (Murakami
1990 1, 1: 12–13). Boku’s response is to come back to the futility of existence:
 Jonathan Dil 57

‘But we all die in the end.’ Rat, however, will have none of it: ‘That’s true, ev-
eryone dies some time. But before then we have to live for 50 years. Let’s face it,
living 50 years and thinking about many different things is far more exhausting
than living 5,000 years without thinking a thing’ (1990–1, 1: 15). Boku has to
admit he has a point. Again, it is the Chinese bartender J who helps to facilitate
Boku’s encounter with this significant other. He tells Boku that Rat has something
he wants to talk to him about and pushes him to initiate the conversation. The
next day, Boku invites Rat to a swimming pool and Rat starts talking about what
is on his mind: ‘You know, sometimes there are things I can’t put up with, like
being rich. I feel like running away. Do you know what I mean?’ (1990–1, 1: 89)
Boku, however, cannot really understand.
In important ways, Rat is not just Boku’s shadow; he is the shadow of an
entire generation. He represents what has to be forgotten as a new generation,
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largely unburdened by historical guilt and simply trying to enjoy the fruits of their
growing economic prosperity, tries to make their way in the world. In A Wild
Sheep Chase, the naivety of this position soon becomes manifest as Boku is drawn
into a world of politics and personalities he thought had no connection with him.
The question is what could self-therapy or the promise of salvation mean in such
a world?
For Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, the answer is very little. As he explains:
To imagine that, sheltered from the omnipresence of history and the implacable
influence of the social, there always exists a realm of freedom . . . is only to
strengthen the grip of Necessity over all such blind zones in which the individual
subject seeks refuge, in pursuit of a purely individual, a merely psychological,
project of salvation.
(Jameson 1981: 20)
For Jameson, it is ultimately impossible to achieve salvation free from politics.
As he argues, ‘The only effective liberation from such constraint begins with
the recognition that there is nothing that is not social and historical – indeed,
that everything is “in the last analysis” political’ (Jameson 1981: 20). What is
interesting to see in Murakami’s third novel, however, is the way the personal
quest for self-therapy and the political quest for commitment begin to come
together.
Murakami has described A Wild Sheep Chase as his first work to introduce
what he calls the ‘story element’ (Murakami and Kawai 1996: 81). One way
of understanding what this means is through Joseph Campbell’s theory of the
monomyth or hero’s journey. For Campbell, the monomyth relates to the basic
elements of a rite of passage involving a separation, an initiation and a return. As
he writes, ‘A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of
supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory
is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to
bestow boons on his fellow man’ (Campbell 1968: 30). What is interesting about
 58 Writing as self-therapy

this quest is the way it connects this personal quest with a desire for collective
salvation. While the hero must embark on their adventure alone, what they are
ultimately seeking, whether consciously or unconsciously, is something that would
help them to rejuvenate their entire community. From this perspective, the search
for self-therapy and the search for commitment ideally become one and the same.
The first step in the hero’s journey is what Campbell labels the ‘call to adven-
ture’. As he explains, ‘The hero can go forth of his own volition . . . or he may be
carried or sent abroad by some benign or malignant agent’. As Campbell writes,
‘Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in bore-
dom, hard work, or “culture”, the subject loses the power of significant affirmative
action and becomes a victim to be saved’ (Campbell 1968: 58–9). Such seems to
be the case with Boku as we meet him again near the start of A Wild Sheep Chase;
his life is directionless and listless. The first chapter takes us back to the buzz of
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1969 and the sense of despondency that followed in 1970. In the next chapter, we
examine the aftermath of Boku’s four-year marriage that had ended in divorce.
Finally, trapped in boredom and routine and incapable of finding a way out, the
call to adventure comes. Boku receives a letter from Rat asking him to display
a photo of a sheep with a star-shaped mark on its back in a prominent place.
A powerful right-wing organization, alerted by this photo, approaches Boku and
forces him on a quest to find this sheep. While Boku has been reluctant to respond
to the summons, finally his hand is forced. He starts out on a quest that, while
in some ways an extension of his quest for individuation, is also about finding
renewal and a way forward for an entire generation.
Having received this call to adventure, the first encounter for the hero is with
what Campbell labels the ‘supernatural aid’ or ‘protective figure’ (1968: 69).
As Campbell writes, ‘What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting
power of destiny’ (1968: 71). Though the hero must ultimately face the danger
of the journey alone, the supernatural aid becomes a source of comfort and
guidance. The obvious parallel in A Wild Sheep Chase is a girlfriend with magical
ears who helps to lead Boku on his way. He first becomes acquainted with her
through a copywriting job that involves a photo of her ears. Mesmerized, he
organizes a meeting with her and they soon start seeing each other. It soon
becomes clear, however, that she is someone extraordinary. A proof-reader, a
model who specializes in ear shots and a high-class call girl, this woman provides
Boku with moments of pure rapture that are in complete contrast to his everyday
mundane existence. Boku is at first a little confused about why someone so
amazing has entered his life. This woman, however, is very clear about why she
chooses to stay:

‘It’s very simple,’ she said. ‘You sought me out. That’s the biggest reason.’
‘And supposing somebody else had sought you out?’
‘At least for the present, it’s you who wants me. What’s more, you’re loads
better than you think you are.’
 Jonathan Dil 59

‘So why is it I get to thinking that way?’ I puzzled.

‘That’s because you’re only half-living,’ she said briskly. ‘The other half is still
untapped somewhere.’
(Murakami 1990–1, 2: 63, 2000: 40)

This woman’s role as supernatural aid is simple. She must take Boku back to his
untapped other half (Rat) and help him to start living again. She intuitively aids
Boku on his journey, filling in the gaps when he does not know which direction
to take. She forewarns him that he will receive a telephone call relating to a sheep
and she directs him to the one hotel in Hokkaido where he can meet a man known
as the sheep professor and get the final clue of his quest. Once she has guided him
to the threshold of his final meeting with Rat, she disappears from the narrative
without much explanation.
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Another significant parallel comes with the crossing of the first threshold. As
Campbell writes, ‘With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the
hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the “threshold guardian” at
the entrance of the zone of magnified power’ (Campbell 1968: 77). This threshold
guardian marks the space between the present sphere and the unknown. Among
world mythologies, this role is played by various figures including beasts and
half-men. The obvious candidate in A Wild Sheep Chase is the sheep-man, the
character Boku meets before he enters into the trance-like state in which he can
meet Rat. The sheep-man is a curious figure, only 140 centimetres in height and
covered in a sheepskin, but with horns that are real. It becomes clear at one point,
however, that he is also a medium for Rat to communicate through and that he
marks the boundary between Boku and his significant other. It is this sheep-man
who sends the woman with the magical ears away and who helps prepare Boku
for his final encounter.
Having met this ‘threshold guardian’, Boku then goes through a period of
purification. Rat, it turns out, is dead, having hanged himself from a beam in
a kitchen a week before Boku’s arrival. The sheep, a mysterious entity that has
possessed other powerful historical figures in the past, had in turn tried to possess
him. Rather than succumb to the temptation the sheep embodies, however, Rat
had determined to kill himself with the sheep inside. His reason for doing this, he
claims, was to protect his weakness.
Clearly, the monomythic elements of this story are a big part of what drives the
narrative forward; similar elements can be found in major Hollywood blockbusters
and the broader quest literature tradition. Murakami’s story, however, resists the
kind of closure often associated with the genre. Rather than the reunion with Rat
bringing psychological wholeness and closure, he rather receives a message about
the impossibility of individual salvation. Thus, while the notion of self-therapy
as the catharsis of self-expression has quickly been left behind as Boku’s life has
increasingly been interrupted by bizarre figures and events, the promise that this
might all be leading to some kind of psychological resolution is also thwarted.
 60 Writing as self-therapy

Rather, he is offered an example of radical self-sacrifice that offers a completely

different view of what self-therapy might mean.
The question is what Boku can learn from Rat’s decision, and how this might
answer the question of where he is to go from here. While Boku has tried to
leave Rat’s radicalism behind and simply get on with life, he comes to realize
that this is impossible. Sinister forces abound that will use any means possible to
secure their own power base. Rat offers him a different model of what it might
mean to be saved; he has offered himself up as a sacrifice in the hope that others
might be saved. Confronted by Rat’s heroic act, Boku has to ask: ‘“And have you
been saved?” “Yeah, I’ve been saved all right,” said the Rat, quietly’ (Murakami
1990–1, 2: 353, 2000: 28).
In the epilogue to the novel, Boku takes the money he receives from this ordeal
and gives it to the Chinese bartender J. J has had to relocate his bar, and Boku
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offers the money as an interest-free loan to pay off his accumulated debts. In
return, he and Rat will become silent partners in the bar. In one sense, we might
think of the money as insurance; Boku has had an important encounter with
Rat, but the things he needs from him may not yet be completely exhausted.
By entering into an economic relationship with J, he is securing the services of
an important mediator and so will be able to call on him again in the future if
needs be. As Jay Rubin has argued, however, there is also the suggestion that
Boku, as a representative of Japan, is paying reparations to J, as a representative
of China (Rubin 2002: 94). The right-wing figures he had been working for have
connections going back to the Second World War; Boku takes the money he
receives from them and gives it to his Chinese friend J. In this way, Rat’s sacrifice
might be seen as a gesture of atonement for Japan’s past wrong doings.
Earlier in the novel, having met with the sheep-man, Boku makes the following
observation: ‘Now, if we could get J to come up here, I’m sure things would work
out fine. Everything should revolve around him, with forgiveness, compassion
and acceptance at the centre’ (Murakami 1990–1, 2: 32; Rubin 2002: 93). The
language of this passage, left out of Birnbaum’s (1987) translation, is so loaded
that Rubin offers the following comments:
Language like this almost invites speculation that ‘J’ might stand for ‘Jesus’.
Murakami is no Christian (or Buddhist, or anything else involving organised
religion), but he is surely toying with the image of the lamb of peace, from
which it is only a short hop to a J for Jesus. . . . In the end, almost as if paying
war reparations, Boku hands J the large cheque he has received from the Boss’s
secretary for undertaking his wild sheep chase.
(Rubin 2002: 93–4)
It is an interesting theory, but not without its problems. If there is a saviour figure
in this work, for example, it is not J but Rat. He is the one connected with the
sheep-man, and he is the one who offers himself up as a sacrifice, almost as if
taking the sins of his fathers upon his own head. He offers Boku a new way
 Jonathan Dil 61

forward, not a discovery of psychological wholeness, but a radical act of self-

sacrifice that would somehow allow a new kind of subjectivity to be born. In other
words, the final model of self-therapy offered in this trilogy is not about the self at
all. Rather, it is about a radical abandonment of the self that is at the same time
an attempt symbolically to form a new kind of community, not one founded in
the illusory wholeness offered by the sheep, an open symbol in the novel for the
appeal of various ideologies and world views, but rather one founded in weakness
and lack.
I would argue that this kind of sacrificial gesture is usefully understood through
the Lacanian terminology of an act. As Slavoj Žižek explains, ‘The act done . . . is
that of symbolic suicide: an act of “losing all”, of withdrawing from symbolic
reality, that enables us to begin anew from the “zero point,” from that point of
absolute freedom called by Hegel “abstract negativity”’ (2001: 43). Žižek, in fact,
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though a staunch historical materialist, has subsequently turned to the Christian

example of the crucifixion to explain this Lacanian terminology, contrasting it
with the Gnostic attempt to discover an uncreated self (Žižek 2003). Rat’s act is a
personal one, but also a wider collective gesture, an attempt to atone for historical
wrongdoings and to ground a new kind of subjectivity, not in ideology, but in a
shared acknowledgement of human weakness.
While Murakami’s narrative has thus been driven forward by an almost Gnos-
tic promise of unification, the familiar tropes of individuation and monomythic
quests that structure many popular narratives, his story ultimately undermines
this message and destroys this promise of closure. His final reunification with
his alter ego Rat offers not self-completion, but a model of self-abandonment.
The temptation offered by the sheep, of course, was real. Fundamentalism in all
its guises, both religious and ideological, has the power to cover human lack and
quiet existential anxieties, but also to be co-opted towards very questionable ends.
The message offered in A Wild Sheep Chase is that we must learn to live without
this comfort. So what does the narrative suggest we do in return?
One solution is simply the catharsis of self-expression. By opening up and
sharing our fears and anxieties with trusted others, our burden is lessened. This,
however, still leaves open the question of meaning. The Lacanian solution is to
break free of the illusion of the self and the counterfeit answers offered by others, to
confront the absence at the heart of subjectivity, and through a creative dialectic
with one’s own symptoms, to find a new personal foundation for living. The
Jungian solution, on the other hand, places much more faith in the spontaneous
images and narratives that burst forth from within and the uncanny power they
have to direct and guide. The therapeutic paradigm evident in Murakami’s early
trilogy, I would suggest, lies somewhere between these two points. The message
is to remain open to the bizarre messages and revelations that burst forth from
within, but not because they are leading you toward some teleological end point.
Rather, they are a way of coming to terms with absence, personal myths that can
help one to cope with the trauma of living.
 62 Writing as self-therapy

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Drs Kenneth Henshall and Matthew Strecher who provided
hours of guidance and support while I was working on Murakami for my PhD.
I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers at Japan Forum for their useful
comments.

Notes
1. Murakami has backed away from the self-therapy label in recent years. In an interview with the
present author in November 2005, he suggested that it may invite misunderstanding. This is
possibly a consequence of the increasingly radical view of the self that has appeared in his work.
As Murakami described in an interview in 2003, ‘It is just like peeling an onion. There is no
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such thing as a constant self. If we work from within the context of the story, however, there
is no need for self-expression. The story expresses in our place’ (Murakami 2003: 22). When
looking at his early fiction, however, I would still argue that the self-therapy label is relevant and
accurately reflects the kind of process his early protagonists seem engaged in.
2. A fourth novel, Dansu, dansu, dansu (Dance, dance, dance, 1988), continues Boku’s narra-
tive, examining his life and the continuation of his therapeutic quest under conditions in ad-
vanced capitalist Japan. Lack of space, the gap in publication dates and the significant de-
velopment of themes in this later novel, however, mean that it will not be dealt with in this
essay.
3. Here I am not arguing that Murakami has consciously borrowed from Jungian or Lacanian
thought in his writing, only that the therapeutic paradigms evident in his fiction share some
similarities, but also important differences, with these earlier frameworks. In fact, in my interview
with him in 2005, Murakami claimed to know little about Lacanian psychology at all. While he
has been careful to distance himself from Jung (Murakami 2003: 22), he acknowledged that
he is at least familiar with the general outline of his ideas and has read his autobiography
(Jung 1963). There is also the influence of Murakami’s wife to consider, a passionate reader
of Jungian psychology, as well as the influence and friendship of Japan’s most famous Jungian
psychologist, the late Dr Kawai Hayao. Murakami is also familiar with the writings of Joseph
Campbell mentioned in this essay, who of course in turn was deeply influenced by Jung, and is
approving of Campbell’s work. Murakami, however, claims no allegiance to any particular school
of psychoanalytic theory.
4. Examples of later figures include Gotanda in Dance, Dance, Dance, Wataya Noboru in The Wind-
up Bird Chronicle, and the faceless salary-man in Afterdark. These figures are much more sinister
and dangerous than the still rather likeable Rat.
5. While outside the scope of this essay, it should be acknowledged that there have been major
developments in the type of women portrayed in Murakami’s fiction. Many of these later women
offer their male counterparts less compensation for loss than anxiety about absence. In these
early works, however, there is much about these women that can be understood in the Jungian
terminology of the anima.
6. A fascinating alternative theory offered by some Japanese critics is that Boku already knows this
woman from when (it is supposed) she was dating Rat. This woman, the theory goes, had become
pregnant by Rat, and Boku, perhaps remembering his third girlfriend who killed herself (perhaps
even while carrying his baby), is determined not to let the same thing happen again. For a full
treatment of this thesis see Ishihara (2007: 19–98). Of course, as Ishihara points out, the fact
that Boku earlier dropped this woman off means that he would have had some idea of the general
area in which she might work.
 Jonathan Dil 63

7. For an interesting discussion of how this same dynamic plays out in one of Murakami’s later
short story collections, see Boulter (2006: 125–45).

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Jonathan Dil is a recent PhD graduate of Canterbury University in New Zealand; his thesis was
entitled ‘Murakami Haruki and the search for self-therapy’. He is presently teaching at Chuo
University in Tokyo, Japan. He can be contacted at: jondil05@yahoo.co.nz.
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