Return to What One Imagines to Be There: Masculinity and Racial Otherness in Haruki Murakami's Writings about China

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 2004 by Lo, Kwai-Cheung

Recent studies of masculinity have shifted slightly in their focus from representations of men of Western cultures and literatures to those of non-Western ones.1 But since hegemonic (i.e. Western) definitions of masculinity continue to dominate our understanding of these so-called alternative models, even they inadvertently enforce stereotypes of "weaker" or "feminized" non-Western masculinity. Studies of Asian masculinity are still conspicuously rare. A new body of work on Asian masculinities is always expected to be emphatically local, culturally specific, and history-oriented, presumably challenging the ubiquitously imposing Western "universal" norm. But paying attention to a particular tradition as an instance of separate development does not necessarily help. In a rapidly globalizing Asian environment, the simple East-West dichotomy and confrontation is insufficient in regional gender studies, as is the sheer assertion of some uniquely Asian realities. In the following essay I examine how Haruki Murakami-one of Japan's most celebrated living novelists, whose books are usually full of Western literary and pop-cultural references and icons-deals with issues of masculinity and national character in opposition to an entity that is not Western but Asian. Male gender and race in Murakami are articulated as the ultimate horizon of meaning in a world where the belief in the plenitude of being no longer holds. Focusing on Murakami's writings about China and Chinese people in relation to his construction of manliness and Japaneseness, however, I argue that sexed and ethnic beings, which nowadays may have replaced the alleged universal being or the whole of being to constitute the subject's core, are fundamentally performative. Their incompleteness of substance is actually the guarantee of their identity. In Murakami's literary representation of the inter-Asian encounters, the external ethnic object to be described and reflected upon is always inherent in the conscious self. What has been assumed to come from outside as the bodily property of a particular racial or gendered group is something that has always been inside the self and is constitutive of the interior subject. What is supposed to be within the self and (re)discovered through an inner journey, however, cannot emerge without an external traumatic encounter that knocks the subject off-balance. Such a disturbing encounter prepares the subject not simply to identify himself as a member of his race and sex, but to rethink certain notions of race and gender as the source of profound violence.

Compared to many other Japanese literary works, Murakami's fiction is exceptionally well received by Chinese readers in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Many of Murakami's writings have been extensively translated and published in Chinese.2 He is so popular that younger Chinese writers and internet users have developed a Murakami-esque writing style (Zhou 130-44). Murakami's popularity among Chinese youth derives not only from his cool and comical narrative style, but also from the fact that Murakami's work always involves a gap that prevents its first-person male protagonist from being fully Japanese and completely masculine. Murakami's heroes read Jack London, listen to Bob Dylan, and eat pâté de foie gras and spaghetti. They are always soft, irresolute men-homebodies with more dynamic girlfriends or wives. And they go through inert periods of ennui and renounce the male-dominated ethos of Japanese society. These characteristics suggest that both Japaneseness and masculinity are structured around a certain kind of void that readers of different nationalities manage to fill in with various contents.

In the mid-1990s, however, with the publication of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Nejimakidori kuronikuru, 1994-95), Murakami changed the direction of his writing career by shifting to the role of Japan in World War II, a heavy subject matter that is rarely found in his earlier fictions, which-though they sell well-are, according to Masao Miyoshi's dismissive comments, mainly for "'college girl' readers" (235). In other words, Murakami's early fiction is derogated for being too "feminine" and attracting only immature readers.3 But the thematic focus on recent Japanese history and the brutal wars the country waged in China has been hailed as Murakami's "return" to his cultural and national roots.4 Even Kenzaburô Ôe, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, who used to criticize Murakami's works for appealing only to young audiences, praises The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for being "beautiful" and "important" (qtd. in Rubin, Haruki Murakami 235). Murakami's interest in China, especially during the war period, might have something to do with his own father, who was drafted to fight in China at that time. In an interview entitled "Becoming Japanese," Ian Buruma reports how Murakami has revealed his very personal relationship with his father:

Mumkami began to speak about his father, from whom he is estranged, and whom he rarely sees anymore. Before the war, his father was a promising student at Kyoto University; then he was drafted into the Army, to fight in China. Once, when Murakami was a child, he heard his father say something deeply shocking about his experience in China. He cannot remember what it was. Perhaps it was something his father had witnessed, or even something he did. But he remembers being terribly distressed. "Perhaps," he said, in his flat voice, which conveys intimate information without sounding intimate, "perhaps that is why I still cannot eat Chinese food." Had he never asked his father about China? I don't want to," he said. "It must be a trauma for him. So it's a trauma for me as well. We don't get on well. Perhaps that is why I can't have children." (70-71, emphases added)5