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

The "secret" of the father's experience in China becomes so traumatic for Murakami that he could never eat Chinese food. The loss of connection with the father (and his past in China) also leads to his failure of continuing the family genealogy. Not eating Chinese food (refusing to take in anything from China) and not having children (not knowing how to be a father to the next generation) may be symptoms of his disavowal of what his father has done in the war-torn China of the 1930s. Although he says he cannot remember his father's China experience and is now alienated from him, Murakami still identifies his father's trauma as his own. Obviously, Murakami perceives his father's weakness and feels guilty for it. Was his father so humiliated and weakened in China that he could no longer live up to an ideal paternal image? Or did his father actually enjoy all the obscene and excessive brutalities of the war that have so terrified his son? Either could be devastating to a son's perception of his father. Perhaps, as Jacqueline Rose puts it, "[f]or psychoanalysis, to be a son is to feel guilty, even when there has been no crime. Lineage is a deadly affair" (11). The mystery of his father may never be disclosed, as Murakami has already repressed it in his memory. But things repressed will definitely return, though in some uncanny forms.

Murakami's return to the history of Japan and his writings about China should be understood within this context. However, a return to such an irrational, violent form of the Japanese ethnic substance is itself not merely a blind drive towards the origin of one's being. The emotional recognition of one's own ethnic roots, cultural past, lost masculine energy or innermost truth, perhaps, are only the outcomes of a perplexed, dislocated modern subject. Murakami never, as his critics assume, swings drastically from the West and from "feminization" (caused by modernity) to a so-called authentic Japaneseness and rugged, primitive virile forces. It is misleading to describe Murakami's work in terms of an opposition between his "American fiction translated into Japanese" and his novels dealing with utmost Japanese concerns. I would argue instead that it is Murakami's fiction, which can be "read very naturally in New York/6 that produces the "Japanese" work that emphasizes ethnic identity and history. The revelation of the darker aspects of one's ethnic past and of uncontaminated but violent masculinity is probably the farthest limit for constructing meanings in the modern world, though masculinity itself, like other sexual categories, is always a disjointed, fragmented, and self-contradictory thing that is never as monolithic as it appears to be.

Missing Links of Manhood

To an extent, Murakami's "return to Japan" in his writing about China in the 1990s can be traced back to his very early work, "A Slow Boat to China" (Chôgoku-yuki no surô bôto), whose title references Frank Loesser's jazz standard "On a Slow Boat to China." In this short story published in 1980, Murakami mentions three Chinese people that the Japanese protagonist meets at different stages of his life. Usually understood as a nostalgic story pervaded by Western references, "A Slow Boat to China," I argue, should be read as a discourse about masculinity and a reflection of the Japanese identity mediated by interactions with the Chinese other. Perhaps by replacing the father, who always serves as a model of masculinity, these Chinese characters in the story constitute others of different ages or of the opposite sex who assist or challenge the Japanese protagonist's growth from boyhood to manhood.