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

Even if the Chinese represent something significant in Murakami's story, these nameless characters do not designate any single individual self but rather a trans-individual ethnic other to complement and help define the male subjectivity of the narrator. The shy Chinese girl is precisely positioned to allow the narrator to verify and prove his masculinity in the making. The ideal of chivalry and of man as the protector of woman is always presented with some ironic reflections in Murakami, though. After the first date with the Chinese girl, the narrator makes double mistakes by putting the girl on the wrong train and absentmindedly throwing away the cigarette pack on which the girl's phone number was written. The encounter with the Chinese girl designates the impossibility of his realizing the ideal image of masculinity. He simply fails to assume any responsibility for the opposite sex. At some point, the Chinese girl gets so frustrated that she associates her bad luck with her own unhappy lot as an ethnic minority and says, "This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn't a place for me" (230). The words of the confused and sensitive youngster who is still seeking her identity haunts the narrator many years later, when he finds himself swallowed up by the whirlwind of modernization in the big city: "This is no place for me. This occurs to me while I'm riding the Yamanote Line.... Our city, these streets, I don't know why it makes me so depressed. That old familiar gloom that befalls the city dweller, regular as due dates, cloudy as mental Jell-O. The dirty façades, the nameless crowds, the unremitting noise, the packed rush-hour trains, the gray skies, the billboards on every square centimeter of available space, the hopes and resignation, irritation and excitement" (238, emphasis in original).

The paragraph, appearing to be a general depiction of the alienation and lack of fulfillment in modern Japanese life, also reveals the crisis of masculinity under the emasculating pressure of modernity. The feeling of displacement or of not being in the right place could be understood as a common emotional state for the modern subject. The description of displacement is indeed a recurrent theme in Murakami's works. But what is worse for the narrator, who still has a lingering desire for ideal manhood, is that there is no longer any place for masculinity (in the traditional sense) to manifest itself in the bureaucratization of the everyday life coupled with the implied feminizing effects of marriage. In this story, the perception of one's displacement always emerges by means of putting oneself in the place of the other. Right from the beginning, the protagonist recalls that the Chinese teacher, in order to persuade the Japanese kids not to damage the desks of the Chinese elementary school, urged them to imagine themselves in the other's shoes and used diplomatic language that "China and Japan are neighboring countries," "neighbors must make friends" and they "must begin with respect for each other" in order for both "to enjoy happy lives" (223-24). The words of the Chinese teacher are presented not without derision in the narrator's memory. The rhetoric and the didactic message of loving, respecting and understanding one's neighbor are always uttered when neighbors are not really treating each other nicely or are even engaged in somewhat hostile relations. However, would putting one's foot into the other's shoe really enable one to understand a neighbor, and hence love and respect him or her? Perhaps putting oneself in the place of the other would not help one understand the other more, but only elicit one's own inner otherness, with which one identifies and simultaneously denies.