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

A Self-Journey: "It's a part of myself that's been cut off by the word China"

Murakami remarked to an interviewer that his rediscovery of Japan, after leaving for several years in order to concentrate on his writing, "took a supernatural turn when he visited Nomonhan" (Buruma 61) in China which always functions as a significant icon in his imagination. In 1994, while working on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the novel that has earned national recognition from the Japanese literary establishment, Murakami decided to make his first trip to China. As the novel explicitly deals with the Japanese invasion of China, the Kwantung Army in Manchuria and the Russian-Japanese battle, he was encouraged by the Japanese publisher to travel to Nomonhan, the battlefield near the border between Mongolia and China, where the short but brutal battle between Russia and Japan took place in 1939. One of the mysterious characters in the novel, Mr. Honda, was a survivor of the Nomonhan battle, and Murakami had never set foot on the place when he conceived the character. He claims that while visiting there he had a "revelation" that changed his life: "I felt as though I had experienced the battle myself.... I wondered what I would have done if I had been a Japanese living in 1939" (Buruma 61). What he probably would have done is commit the "irrational violence" which can erupt anytime in Japanese society-not only during wartime but also during the apparently peaceful and democratic contemporary era. A Westernized Japanese like Murakami would be forced to confront his other side when being brought face to face with the "reality" of China. It is precisely what The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is all about: the violent and terrifying aspects of Japan's recent history that lie underneath the surface of consumerism and the workaholic culture of modern Japan. The story's graphic depictions of several violent scenes-like the skinning alive of a Japanese spy by Mongolian soldiers, Japanese soldiers killing zoo animals, a Chinese prisoner of war executed with a baseball bat by the Japanese army, and the protagonist using a baseball bat to attack a man on a street in contemporary Tokyo-are unprecedented in Murakami's writings. Far from being alien to contemporary Japan, Murakami reveals, these outbursts of violence still occur in Japanese society.

The experience of the China trip has been recorded and later anthologized in his travel writing, Remote Region, Short Distance (Henkyô kinkyô, 1998). Murakami begins his travelogue in a nostalgic mode by telling us that many years ago, when he was a child, he saw pictures of the battle of Nomonhan in an elementary school history textbook and was impressed by the chubby, old-fashioned tanks. Though the battle was only a small episode in comparison to the numerous battles of the Pacific War that broke out two years later, images of the Nomonhan battle have since been vividly imprinted on his mind. The "revisit" of the forgotten battlefield is like the return of a ghost, which is not only Japan's own specter but also Murakami's, because the journey is intricately related to his father who was sent to fight in China during the war. But he only admits that his fascination with the battle is because "the origin of this war was all too Japanese, all too representative of the Japanese people" (qtd. in Rubin, Haruki Murakami 223).