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

It is always true to say that one can only find oneself by encountering the other. The self needs the other as the locus of its revelation. If the Chinese are not real but only a symbol of something lost in the story, it is always the Chinese who "return" to the protagonist to remember things for him. His "third Chinese" in the story confessed to him: "I remember absolutely every last detail about the old days ... I remember things I couldn't possibly have known" (233). What this third Chinese did not know is that his memory was actually not his own but intended only for the other. It is exactly like the encyclopedias he was selling: full of information that was meaningless to the encyclopedia itself. Only the person who consults the encyclopedia can find the meaning of its contents. By the same token, I argue that in this novel, Chineseness is the otherness in the Japanese self.

A thing in itself has no overt determinate character. It has a potential that would be actualized only by its relations with the other. Undoubtedly, the Japanese narrator could see a little bit of himself in his Chinese schoolmate. Both had been ambitious and dreaming young men who were now married and domesticated bourgeois "salarymen" trapped by the minutiae of daily life. All their dreams had faded away and their adventures were confined to the routines of Tokyo life. But seeing oneself in the other is only a strategy of containing the threat posed by the other. One does not encounter oneself on the outside, yet one finds the other in oneself. At a first glance, the Chinese others refer only to people like the Japanese protagonist, his fellow human beings with whom he is engaged in the mirror-like relationships of competition and mutual recognition. If the elementary school teacher represents a certain authoritative, rational and competitive masculinity for the Japanese boy to look upon and imitate, the girl indicates the difficulties, if not the impossibility, of the young protagonist's actually living up to the ideal male image. The schoolmate is the return of the repressed memories that haunt the adult Japanese narrator, who is finally rendered impotent by the emasculating and feminizing effects of modern life. The idealized notion of masculinity is like the China of the story, which is on the horizon but forever remains out of reach. The Chineseness that lures the Japanese protagonist to the ideal form of masculinity also prevents him from grasping it. The obstacle that inhibits the formation of a whole being is, however, what constitutes the narrator as a subject. To be a man here is to be not the whole. The very Chineseness in the story serves as a strange other-thing that is the embodiment of the blockage as well as the realization of the ideal masculinity that the protagonist (un)consciously longs for. The Chinese neighbor as the other-thing means that, beneath the neighbor as his or her look-alike or mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness, of a monstrous thing that cannot be easily absorbed; simultaneously, the Chinese is all surface, lacking any depth. They are indeed the fillers of the gaps in the notions of masculinity and Japaneseness. What we should not fail to notice here is the crucial fact that Murakami's China, in its fascinating presence, gives body to the inconsistency and impotence of the symbolic order in which the central character is inscribed. The experience of encountering the Chinese should be understood as a structural rupture that constitutes the present origins of his being a modern Japanese male. The conception of other-race as self-difference, that tears him from himself and undermines his very integrity, also safeguards the narrator's subjectivity in the vicissitudes of the modern world.