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

However, travel is undoubtedly a "gendering activity" (Leed 217). It is not uncommon for some men's movement groups nowadays to blame the recent "feminization" of men as a result of rapid modernization and excessive materialism. For males, the return to the coarse, natural world is associated with a return to real manliness.9 In many of his travel writings, such as Rainy Sky, Blazing Sun (Uten Enten 1990) and the other essays in Remote Region, Short Distance, Murakami seems to see the physically demanding voyages (in Greece's sacred peninsula, in Turkey, in Mexico, or on an unpopulated island of Japan) as tests of his will and strength, that is to say, his masculinity. The consciousness of his male identity is definitely increased on the rough roads. What is revealing is that biological males, especially in modern times, do not necessarily possess masculinity. Men have to strive hard to regain such qualities, since masculinity is not natural and inextricable from maleness. The strenuous circumstances of the unknown provide a wonderful opportunity for men to revive and reclaim their "inner masculine natures." It is no secret that a tacit sense of masochism is always involved in the formation of masculinity. A male has to suffer various kinds of pain in order to gain status as a man. Through journeys through the unknown, Murakami suggests that he experienced even a stronger sense of reality, from which he was alienated in everyday life. It is a reality that is deprived of the convenience, comfort, protection, and material wealth of modern consumerist life; but it is built on the "substance" of one's "inner self."

For Murakami, his own China trip and the visit to Nomonhan symbolize not only a return to Japan's imperialist past that many of his compatriots want to forget,10 but also a return of the lost masculinity of the imperialist age represented by his alienated father. So no matter how popular Murakami's works are becoming worldwide, no matter how much his books are themselves typical products of the new global economy that blurs national and cultural boundaries,11 has he, like many other previous Japanese writers, chosen to "return to Japan" in a nostalgic search for his own cultural identity?12 Murakami did state that, after years of sojourn in the West, he began to think about his sense of responsibility to Japan, and how he "hoped to contribute to an evolutionary change in the ideas and attitudes of society at large" (Rubin, Haruki Murakami 231). But could he return to the "core" or "substance" of his being by encountering the Japanese past in China? As the past haunts the minds of the present like a specter, Murakami's itinerary to China reiterates the trek his many compatriots made in the early twentieth century. In his travel reportage, he is apparently interested in describing the historical Japanese presence in those Chinese cities occupied by Japanese military forces, i.e., the terrain of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state established in the Chinese northeast during the 1930s and 1940s.13 "The foreign visitors who might come to this [Chinese] city, I believed, would only be those aged Japanese who had lived here in the times of Manchukuo" (Henkyo 157).14 As the battlefield is conventionally a male arena, Murakami's China trip is destined to intertwine national historical pasts and the strong sense of some lost masculinity. Critics tend to praise Murakami's greater engagement in politics and history in his recent writings, obviously privileging those traditionally masculine realms over his treatments of relatively light and less masculine popular themes, which are "loved by the kids [but] hated by the grownups" (Buruma 60).15