THE SEARCH FOR THE JUNGIAN STRANGER

IN THE NOVELS OF HARUKI MURAKAMI:

A WILD SHEEP CHASE,

HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD,

AND THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE

by

JASON B. BARONE

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the degree of Master of Arts

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May 2008
 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of

Jason B. Barone
_____________________________________________________

Master of Arts
candidate for the ______________________degree *.

William Marling
(signed)_______________________________________________
(chair of the committee)

Mary Grimm
________________________________________________

Margaret Fitzgerald
________________________________________________

________________________________________________

________________________________________________

________________________________________________

March 20, 2008

(date) _______________________

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any
proprietary material contained therein.
 1
 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ................................................................................................................................2

Introduction ..........................................................................................................................4

Chapter One: A Wild Sheep Chase.....................................................................................14

Chapter Two: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World ..................................39

Chapter Three: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle....................................................................66

Conclusion .........................................................................................................................93

Works Cited .......................................................................................................................97

 
 2

The Search for the Jungian Stranger in the Novels of Haruki Murakami:
A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,
and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Abstract

by

JASON B. BARONE

Haruki Murakami’s novels are characterized by a struggle between the conscious

and unconscious regions of the mind, with his protagonists maneuvering between the two

worlds and seeking a way to bridge the gap. Haunted by memories, dreams, and visions,

they must determine the correct route to understanding their hidden, unknown selves.

The protagonists move in a gradual progression from the physical, conscious world

(marked by a perplexing mystery) to that of the unconscious (the source of their sense of

loss and desire)—and then back again, to the real world. The novels end with a

temporary sense of reconciliation between these realms.

The “Jungian stranger” is a nebulous figure that resides within the subconscious

mind of the Murakami protagonist. Based on Jung’s observation that “within each one of

us there is another whom we do not know” (Psychological Reflections 67), the stranger

draws the protagonist more deeply into the novel’s mystery so that he can gain the

knowledge and ability he needs to overcome his real-life problems. Whether the stranger

initiates the quest via the perplexing identity of an odd-looking sheep, the unexpected gift

of an apparent unicorn skull, or the futile search for a missing cat, the seemingly
 3

innocuous and ordinary are often Murakami’s portal into something deeper, darker, and

more dangerous—yet potentially transcendental.

This paper analyzes the Murakami protagonist’s psychological journey towards

the Jungian stranger in the novels A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the

End of the World, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. He begins as a detached, bemused

observer, unable to initiate any passionate involvement with his world. His attitude

changes as various characters force or lure him towards a mysterious goal, one that is

somehow linked to his vague sense of disquiet. His dilemma is caused by the rift

between his conscious and subconscious selves; the only way to resolve his situation is to

link them together. This Jungian process is accomplished as the protagonist, guided by

other characters, moves through four psychological stages (awareness, encouragement,

identification, and fulfillment) in which he sheds his passivity, confronts the Jungian

stranger, and acquires self-knowledge.

 4

INTRODUCTION

The subconscious is very important to me as a writer. I don't read much Jung, but
what he writes has some similarity with my writing. To me, the subconscious is
terra incognita. I don't want to analyze it, but Jung and those people,
psychiatrists, are always analyzing dreams and the significance of everything. I
don't want to do that. I just take it as a whole. Maybe that's kind of weird, but
I'm feeling like I can do the right thing with that weirdness. Sometimes it's very
dangerous to handle that. (Murakami, qtd. in Miller)

Based on these comments, Haruki Murakami dislikes analysis of his work, which

is one of the reasons for his well-known reclusiveness and the scarcity of his interviews.

Yet his mention of Jung is telling, for it acknowledges the indirect influence that Jung’s

research has had on his writing.

Murakami’s novels are characterized by a struggle between the conscious and

unconscious regions of the mind, with his protagonists maneuvering between the two

worlds and seeking a way to bridge the gap. Haunted by memories, dreams, and visions,

they must determine the correct route to understanding their hidden, unknown selves.

The protagonists move in a gradual progression from the physical, conscious world

(marked by a perplexing mystery) to that of the unconscious (the source of their sense of

loss and desire)—and then back again, to the real world. The novels end with a

temporary sense of reconciliation between these realms; such hope is always uncertain

but increases as the novels progress. Matthew Strecher, a Murakami scholar, explains

that Murakami presents the mind as “as a uniformly coded division between the world of

the light and that of the dark, the latter corresponding to the unconscious realm,” which is

depicted as “dark, cold, and lifeless, [sometimes] only symbolized, other times … real”

(“Magical Realism” 270).

 5

In the subconscious lie the Murakami protagonist’s fears, doubts, and desires.

The novels A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle begin with the protagonist as a detached, bemused observer,

unable to initiate any passionate involvement with his world. His mood begins to change,

however, as a vague, puzzled awareness of his deficiencies casts a shadow over his

tranquility. This feeling coincides with the emergence of a real problem. An odd

assortment of characters enters his life to force or lure him towards a mysterious goal,

one that is somehow linked to his emerging disquiet. Without these peripheral characters

(with women taking on increasingly stronger, more important roles as the novels

progress), he can neither break into his subconscious nor take action in the physical world

to bring about the necessary change. His dilemma is caused by the rift between these

opposing sides of reality, and in order to make his Self complete, he must link them. As

one critic observes, the protagonist is much like “a detective, but the crime has somehow

happened within himself” (Thompson, “Nobel Prize Winner in Waiting?”).

Jung described the protagonist’s process of unifying his Self as “individuation,”

but before it can be explored more fully, we must first examine, in Jungian terms, what

the Self is. As Jungian analyst Anthony Stevens explains, Jung and his colleagues

discovered that the hallucinations and traumatic memories they witnessed in their patients

“contained motifs and images that also occurred in myths, religions, and fairy tales from

all over the world” (75). The significance of these universal motifs, Stevens writes, “is

comparable to that of gravity for Newtonian physics, relativity for Einsteinian physics, or

natural selection for Darwinian biology” (ibid.). Known as the Jungian archetypes, of

which the Self is one of the most prominent, they originate from the unknown,
 6

subconscious region of the mind and provide the hidden meaning behind dreams. The

Self archetype extends far beyond the unconscious, however. As Jung describes, it is

“the totality of the psyche ... not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which

embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego

is the centre of consciousness” (qtd. in Colman 157). Jung claimed that this totality is

“far more comprehensive” than Freud’s ego (Psychological Types 33). In simpler terms,

the Self comprises both what we normally perceive as the real, physical world and that of

visions, memories, and dreams. The Murakami protagonist seeks to reconcile these two

realms by seeking out what I will refer to as the “Jungian stranger.”

The Jungian stranger is an entity who occupies the “centre” depicted in Jung’s

description. The basis for this hidden and shadowy figure is the following excerpt from

Psychological Reflections:

Within each one of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in

dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from how we see ourselves. When,
therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation, to which there is no solution,
he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude, the very attitude
that led us into the difficult situation. (Psychological Reflections 67)

As each Murakami novel begins, the Jungian stranger is little more than a hazy,

unsettling notion in the protagonist’s mind. However, as a series of unusual events

unfolds around him and various characters appear bearing clues and demands, he realizes

that the stranger holds the key to understanding. His goal is to locate and identify his

Self’s Jungian stranger, who is responsible for the sudden resurgence of old memories,

the protagonist’s increasingly upsetting day-to-day experiences, and the vague feeling

that something vital is missing. Another critic explains, “Some [Murakami protagonists]

are shallow, with little interior life; others have a deep need for meaning and self-
 7

fulfillment. Mostly, they are simply bewildered by their sense of disconnection and loss”

(Loughman 20). Their void can be filled—at least temporarily—by their successful

identification of the Jungian stranger, whose nebulous appearance would be what Jung

referred to as “‘a big dream,’ an event of transformative power that cannot be attributed

to daily life and one that contains significant communication from the unconscious

through symbolical and archetypal imagery” (Spurgeon 72).

Murakami metaphorically alludes to the Jungian stranger, as indicated in the

following interview excerpt:

I’ve been married for 30 years. Sometimes I wonder what would it be like if I had
been single . . . If and if and if. I could go along that passage and find new
strange rooms. […] That’s the beginning of the story. We have rooms in
ourselves. Most of them we have not visited yet. Forgotten rooms. From time to
time we can find the passage. We find strange things…old phonographs, pictures,
books…they belong to us, but it is the first time we have found them. (Murakami,
qtd. in Thompson)

Although the subconscious “rooms in ourselves” are not an entity, they correspond to the

unknown “another” whom Jung describes. The stranger waits inside the rooms and, to

make his presence known, tosses “strange things” through the “passage” towards the

protagonist’s conscious mind. Strecher contributes the term “core identity” to the

growing list of metaphors for this figure; all of them occupy the deepest levels of

consciousness. The attainment of the Murakami protagonist’s core identity, he explains,

is

…to suggest a metaphysical process by which that inner mind can be accessed,
and this forms one of the most recognizable trademarks in Murakami literature.
[In Murakami,] a realistic narrative setting is created, then disrupted, sometimes
mildly, sometimes violently, by the bizarre or the magical. (“Magical Realism”
267)
 8

The Jungian stranger reawakens the protagonist’s conscious desires and propels him on

an odyssey both physical and psychological. Strecher adds that the transformation of the

protagonist’s physical environment into something unrecognizable serves as Murakami’s

means to “show his readers two ‘worlds’—one conscious, the other unconscious—and

permit seamless crossover between them by characters who have become only memories,

and by memories that reemerge from the mind to become new characters again”

(“Magical Realism” 268). In order to achieve a sense of order and balance in his life, the

protagonist must not only find their hidden connection, but he must also travel down that

path into his core identity—the “centre” of the totality of his being as well as the home of

the Jungian stranger—and make the elusive contents he discovers there more “real.”

Jung calls this procedure “individuation,” defining it as “embrac[ing] our

innermost, last and incomparable uniqueness … and becoming one’s own self” (qtd. in

Colman 156). The path to individuation, which Jung also calls “‘coming to selfhood’ or

‘self-realization’” (ibid.), becomes accessible to the Murakami protagonist via both

regular dreams and his waking imagination. As he progresses along that path, it becomes

impossible for both him and the reader to tell the difference between the two. Just as

individuation is possible in Jung, so it is in Murakami. Guided by other characters, the

protagonist realizes that, as Jung discovered, “he need no longer be a passive observer of

his unconscious but that he could actively step into fantasy” (Conger 76). In his

encounter with the Jungian stranger, the protagonist uses his new-found ability to “hold

onto [this fantastic] figure … and demand something through active imagination” (ibid.).

The Jungian stranger assumes various guises—the ghost of an old, long-lost friend, a

mysterious and faceless woman in a dark hotel room, and even the protagonist’s own
 9

alternate self—but in all cases the “something” that the protagonist demands is self-

knowledge. While the circumstances and repercussions of the understanding he receives

are vastly different, his psychological quest always achieves at least limited success.

Such accomplishment raises the question of whether Murakami is alluding to

possible spiritual implications as well. In other words, does the protagonist’s creation of

a clear pathway between his subconscious and conscious worlds bring him closer to the

divine Other? The answer is an unqualified no. Murakami has claimed to have “almost

no concern about religious matters,” and his protagonist must make extreme sacrifices in

exchange for only a temporary elevated level of awareness (Murakami, qtd. in Gabriel

156). Ultimately, the most the protagonist can hope for is to return his life to normal. In

Murakami, however, the word “normal” does not have the usual connotation. As one

critic writes, his protagonists “embody the intuition, ubiquitous in late modernity, that the

inexplicable has become commonplace: it is normal that abnormal things occur”

(Cassegard 82). In a milieu in which both the conscious and unconscious components of

the Self are portrayed with the trappings of our physical reality, the border between the

two realms is nonexistent.

The price of the protagonist’s act of individuation, which another psychologist

describes as “a drive toward becoming more authentic, more wholly oneself” (Moody

272), lessens over the course of the three novels that this paper will analyze—but it is

never eradicated. In A Wild Sheep Chase, the darkest of the three, the protagonist

achieves his two-fold objective of destroying the evil sheep and breaking through the

barrier of his subconscious in order to be reunited with his dead friend. Yet in doing so

he becomes utterly desolate and alone. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the
 10

World, the results are mixed. The split-minded narrator discovers that as his conscious

and subconscious worlds are about to collide, he can maintain his identity and memories

only by leaving behind his physical environment and everyone he has ever known. In

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, his self-realization is mostly positive. In this novel, the

most complex and critically acclaimed of the three, the protagonist establishes a firm link

to his subconscious, thus defeating his arch-enemy and recovering his missing wife.

However, in hopeful resignation, he must wait to see if her ravaged mind will ever return

to normal.

No matter what level of success the protagonist achieves, however, there are

others beyond the borders of his Self who have roles to play. These figures exist in both

the past and the present, both as human and non-human, and with both benevolent and

evil intentions. Those of the malevolent sort signify an even greater, more foreboding

presence that looms in the murky background. Despite the protagonist’s final connection

with the Jungian stranger, he may never fully escape the darkness concealed beneath

Japanese society. Writes Matsuoka:

Murakami has revealed the underground world of modern Japan in which sinister
forces are at work: “the powerful underground kingdom” ruled by the mysterious
sheep, the dark and dangerous underground world just beneath Tokyo inhabited
by malicious creature INKlings, and the wells connecting Setagaya, Tokyo in the
1980s to the Manchuria-Mongolia border in the 1930s. (Matsuoka 308)

Such sinister forces are perceivable, but they are not easily categorized or vanquished.

The protagonist’s core identity—wherein dwells the Jungian stranger—holds the key to

their discovery.

Other characters, especially women, make up the protagonist’s key relationships.

They help him accomplish his physical and psychological objectives, the latter of which
 11

are accomplished in four major phases that I have named awareness, encouragement,

identification, and fulfillment. These phases of his journey to individuation, as Jung

would describe it, are part of a much larger framework, “universally present in all living

creatures,” in which his Self is part of a “graduated kind of psychological process” (Jung,

Psychological Types 33). Within each individual, likewise, there is a unique

psychological process of discovering and unifying one’s Self. That uniqueness is

revealed via the protagonist’s ability to engage with other characters along the way.

The nature of his relationships as he moves through the phases of his

psychological process are, in turn, ranked in four different categories, from the least

significant to the most critical: the basic, the personal, the profound, and the

subconscious. Characters in the basic relationship category are primarily used to carry

the narrative forward, for the protagonist reveals very little of his inner motivations.

Those in the personal category achieve a greater intimacy with the protagonist that may

or may not be benevolent; to a limited extent they understand his desires and doubts.

However, the protagonist’s profound relationships are the deepest humanly possible,

whether by his design or by utter chance. In these cases, the protagonist achieves a

special psychological bond with these characters, even though he may never realize how

deeply it goes. Finally, his subconscious relationships signify his interaction with the

Jungian stranger, taking him into another reality. The first three relationship types

collectively awaken and prepare his mind for this final encounter; they serve as “stepping

stones” or “waypoints” towards his unknown Self. The protagonist’s passage into his

core identity, therefore, can only be achieved via interaction with people in the physical,

conscious world. This process can be visually demonstrated in the model below:
 12

Basic
Personal

Profo
ound

Subconsscious

The nature
n and puurpose of theese relationshhips, as part of the protaagonist’s fouur-

sttep psycholo
ogical processs, change inn each of thee novels. I will
w explore the
t details

reegarding these novels in their respecctive chapterrs. In Chapteer 1 (A Wild Sheep Chasse),

thhe relationsh
hip table dem
monstrates thhe narrator’s detachmentt and isolatioon from the

ouutside world
d, where he allows
a only a select few to know his real feelinggs. In Chapteer 2

Hard-Boiled
(H d Wonderland and the Ennd of the Woorld), the tabble presents how
h differennt

chharacters con
ntribute to thhe split narraators’ sense of awarenesss of one anoother as theirr

w
worlds collidee. Finally, in Chapter 3 (The Wind-Up Bird Chrronicle), the protagonist

brreaks throug
gh both this external
e andd internal barrriers and disscovers the power
p of

em
mpathy. Ov
verall, the moore profoundd his relationnships, the more
m he proggresses in hiss

psychological quest.

But I must
m tread liightly. It is not the intenntion of this paper to expplore in

painstaking detail
d how Murakami
M utillizes or interrprets Jung’ss theories. Inn an intervieew

thhe author staates, “Writing lets me ennter my own subconsciouus” (qtd. in Gregory, et.al.).

D to the inttense and peersonal naturre of this act,, Murakami is infamouslly known for his
Due

reefusal to exp
plain the meaaning of his works or to acknowledgge that they have
h any
 13

psychological meaning at all. A deep, literal analysis of the “terra incognita” of the

subconscious would miss his overall significance. While I would encourage a Jungian

critic to explore Murakami’s dream imagery and file it away into various archetypal

categories, such is not the ultimate goal of this paper. It is most likely the case that

Jungian influences seep into Murakami’s fiction from, for lack of a better word, his own

subconscious. Asked about his approach to writing, he states:

Usually I have just begun something whose story I don't know how to make
progress with. So I just write one chapter, then the second chapter, and just keep
going. I don't know what is going to happen; it just seems to come out
automatically. […] One of my great pleasures in writing is to find out what
happens next. Without that pleasure, it doesn't mean anything. (Murakami, qtd.
in Gregory, et.al.)

With this, Murakami tacitly acknowledges that his Jungian stranger directs much of his

narratives. “I don't trust anything New Age—or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot,

horoscopes,” he says. “I don't trust anything like that at all” (Murakami, qtd. in Miller).

Perhaps there will be a basis for such endeavors only after Murakami has passed on and

his life’s work is complete. Until that time, the author’s own core identity and

psychological implications, just like that of his protagonists, will remain terra incognita.
 14

Chapter One

Stepping into the Great Unknown: A Wild Sheep Chase (Hitsuji o meguru bouken)

With A Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami introduces a young male protagonist who is

a product of the vigorous 1960s, when “the air was alive, even as everything seemed

poised on the verge of collapse, waiting for a push” (5). The first-person narrator recalls

how he and his fellow university students demonstrated against the authorities by putting

up blockades, shutting down the campus, and fighting with the police—all as part of the

international antiwar movement that never fully coalesced. It is now 1978, a period of

boredom and disillusionment due the irrevocability of the “curtain [that] was creaking

down on the shambles of the sixties” (5). The narrator is the embodiment of this

sentiment, for he is locked so deeply behind a veneer of coolness and detachment that he

has squandered some important personal relationships. As “the quintessential model of

the hard-boiled detective, masking remarkable characteristics behind a façade of

simplicity,” it is rare for him to indicate to others the extent of his feelings (Strecher,

“Beyond” 358). However, his narration reveals his conflict, for he struggles to

communicate and overcome his aloofness. Most of the time he seems at ease with his

self-designation as “an authority on troublemaking” (145), but there is an anxious,

frustrated quality concealed somewhere beneath that only the reader can identify.

Known only as boku (informal masculine Japanese for “I” or “me”), the

protagonist seeks to understand the nature of his mind and the meaning of various scraps

of memory that emerge years later—and the reason that, ever since his college days, it

seemed that “the world kept moving on [but] I alone was at a standstill” (8). His old

memories suggest a hidden stranger buried somewhere within his subconscious, but
 15

because of his emotional state, he lacks the ability to bridge that hidden gap and unify his

Jungian Self. While none of his recollections are directly related to the overall narrative,

they contain a wistfulness and melancholy that belie his cool, bored exterior. As one

critic writes, “A persistent, low-level sadness runs throughout the novel, most of it linked

to the atomization of old ideals by an antiseptic modern order” (Lin, “Break on

Through”). Early in the novel boku drifts about in a state of semi-consciousness, where

“nothing changed from day to day, not one thing” (24). He is only dimly aware of his

subconscious Self, which he must identify in order to attain any significance. In

congruence with his state of mind, the narrative flounders about with calculated yet

fretful uncertainty until a third of the way through, when boku is forced out of his isolated

world and embarks upon a physical quest. At this point, a change occurs in his demeanor,

and he begins to progress along a more focused and linear path. The narrative moves

from the real to the imagined, or more accurately between two different states or

conditions of reality—reality as perceived by the senses and reality as perceived through

the mind.

Boku’s progress throughout his journey towards his Jungian stranger will be

examined in this chapter via the four phases of his psychological process, as mentioned in

the introduction. This process remains intact throughout the three novels, and the

protagonist attains a rising level of success along the course of one novel to the next.

While Sheep’s protagonist achieves his desired confrontation with the Jungian stranger,

his final outlook is bleak. The individuation of his Self is only temporary, and it leaves

him empty. In the end, his abandonment by others drives him back behind his psycho-
 16

social barriers. Despite his unfortunate fate, he experiences a psychological awakening,

which consists of the following stages:

(1) Awareness, in which boku first senses the influence of the subconscious on the

physical realm via the resurgence of old, scattered memories;

(2) Encouragement, in which he realizes that the beautiful ears of his otherwise

ordinary-looking girlfriend are conduits to a hidden world, giving her psychic

powers;

(3) Identification, in which he prepares for his own passage to his subconscious by

engaging in a purification of himself and the house where his friend had

committed suicide; and finally

(4) Fulfillment, in which boku confronts the Jungian stranger—in the form of his

friend’s ghost—and completes his friend’s mission.

Helping him through each stage of his quest is an assortment of characters who have

varying degrees of influence on his barricaded mind. Before I examine both the steps of

his journey and the nature of his relationships in detail, a brief plot synopsis is in order.

As a nameless 29-year-old Tokyo advertising executive, boku leads a lonely and

unremarkable life. He is recently divorced, and his relationship with his business partner

is floundering. He has become haunted by odd, random memories stemming from his

more carefree and youthful days, and they fill him with a sense of loss and regret. One

day he uses an innocuous photograph of a meadow full of sheep for an insurance

company’s PR bulletin. Before long the image draws the attention of the “black-suited

secretary” (123) of a mysterious and powerful right-wing figure known only as “the Boss”

(69). The Boss, the secretary explains, is dying from a strange cyst in his brain, and he
 17

needs boku to locate an odd-looking sheep featured in the photo. Although boku refuses

the secretary’s demands to reveal the source of the image, he confides to the reader that it

had been sent to him as a postcard by his friend the Rat, who disappeared a few years ago.

The secretary threatens that if boku does not find the sheep within a month, dire

consequences will fall upon him and his company.

Boku acquiesces to the order. He embarks on a journey to the northern island of

Hokkaido, where he presumes the sheep is located. He is accompanied by his unnamed

girlfriend, an ear model who uses her “unblocked” (45) ears as a passageway to her

subconscious. 1 She psychically guides him to the Dolphin Hotel in Sapporo, where they

stay for a few days to make inquiries about the precise mountainous location where the

photo was taken. There they meet the Sheep Professor, an eccentric old man who

explains that the sheep is a powerful force of evil, for it had briefly possessed his body

when he was a young soldier in the war and left him forever traumatized. The Sheep

Professor points them in the direction of a tiny remote mountain village called Junitaki-

cho, where he had built a house long ago. Boku realizes that it is this house where the

Rat has been living, yet when he and his girlfriend reach it, they find it abandoned but

well-stocked for the coming winter. His girlfriend, who upon reaching Junitaki-cho lost

her psychic abilities, tells boku to take a nap while she cooks dinner. He awakens hours

later to find that she has vanished.

There, isolated from the rest of the world, boku senses that something significant

is about to happen. He is visited by the Sheep Man, who wears a full-body sheep

costume. The Sheep Man seems to know the location of the sheep and the Rat but
                                                            
1
The lack of proper names in A Wild Sheep Chase plays a large factor in boku’s disconnection from both
his conscious and subconscious realities. However, in the novel’s sequel, Dance Dance Dance, his
girlfriend’s name is revealed as Kiki, which refers to “listening” and “hearing.”
 18

refuses to answer boku’s questions. The protagonist begins to suspect that this creature is

his friend in disguise. Feeling that the Rat is reaching out to him from the subconscious

world, boku cleans the house from top to bottom in preparation for their meeting. The

Rat comes in the darkness of night and tells boku that he had been possessed by the

malevolent sheep and committed suicide in an effort to destroy it. This task has one

remaining step to complete, which he asks boku to fulfill. The house is rigged to explode

so as to obliterate the evil sheep for good; he needs boku to set it off. The next morning,

the protagonist follows his friend’s instructions and the house, its lingering force of evil,

and the black-suited secretary are destroyed. Boku succeeds in his assignment, but upon

his return to Tokyo, he feels more alone than ever. The novel ends as he cries upon an

empty beach.

To understand the nature of boku’s ultimate loss, despite the achievement of his

goal, it is important to analyze his relationships with other characters. As explained in

the introduction, I have categorized these relationships into four types: the basic, the

personal, the profound, and the subconscious. As the novel progresses, boku’s

relationships in the first three categories enable him to accomplish his final confrontation

within his core identity. In turn, his subconscious encounter coincides with the ultimate

phase of his psychological process, fulfillment. Until he reaches that point, however, his

most important relationship is his girlfriend, and his selfish neglect of her brings about

his final sense of desolation. Because women always hold the most crucial significance

in Murakami, she appears in boldface in the table below. The importance of female

characters (as well as their number) increases along the three novels.
 19

Relationship
Meaning Characters
Type
The Basic Boku is interested only in gaining or The Rat’s ex-girlfriend
sharing information, so he doesn’t the black-suited secretary
venture into personal observations and
revelations the Sheep Professor

The Personal Boku lowers his guard a bit to offer the Chinese bar owner J
some insight into his feelings, yet his boku’s business partner
inability or unwillingness to reveal
more brings about awkwardness boku’s ex-wife
owner of the Dolphin
Hotel

The Profound Boku demonstrates sincere interest in the limousine chauffeur

the conversation and delves into
boku’s girlfriend
philosophical and personal matters

The Subconscious Boku establishes a connection to the the Sheep Man

blocked regions of his mind and the Rat
confronts the hidden stranger lurking
within

The rest of this chapter will explore in detail boku’s key relationships in Sheep as he

moves through the four phases of his psychological awakening.

The four types of relationships represent different levels of boku’s Self, from the

outermost periphery of his consciousness (the basic) and inward to the very core of his

identity, where the Jungian stranger resides. Unlike the four phases of his psychological

process, his relationships do not occur in strict chronological or narrative order; however,

his basic, personal, and profound relationships are always consummated before those of

the subconscious sort. Strecher uses Murakami’s own term “black box,” first used in

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, as another way to describe the core

identity: “the fact remains that most of Murakami's literature is concerned with opening
 20

up that ‘impregnable’ box of memories and experiences, and holding it up to the light for

analysis” (“Magical Realism” 271).

In this novel, boku’s movement towards his subconscious is linear, so his

connection to his core identity grows stronger as the narrative moves along. Although

this is not different from the protagonists’ journeys in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, boku’s case is unique in that he is unable to anticipate who

awaits him in his subconscious until he is on the verge of entering. This makes Sheep’s

plot structure easily the least complex of the three novels. The advancement from one

phase to the next is marked by certain events and characters that create sharp contrasts

against boku’s otherwise unremarkable and isolated life. Because Sheep is Murakami’s

first major novel, the author is perhaps self-consciously careful to delineate the steps of

boku’s progress in such fashion that the reader cannot help but notice. The protagonist’s

narrative style, which is directed at the reader as if confiding to a close friend, is much

more revelatory than his dialogue with actual characters.

Boku begins his psychological process in the awareness phase, which is initiated

from beyond his conscious control. Shimmers of the Jungian stranger first come to him

via specific memories: an emotionally-troubled girl he slept with in college who recently

died in a terrible accident, a strange and disturbing exhibit at the local aquarium when he

was a boy, and a neighborhood bar where he and the Rat used to have relaxed, idle

conversations with J, the Chinese owner. As he struggles to comprehend their

significance, his interpersonal barriers, marked by his passive and aloof stance, are

stronger than ever. They create his strained and cynical “personal”-level relationships,

namely his ex-wife, his partner, and J.

 21

His languid movement through the early chapters is marked by his mildly

bemused and slightly bored state of mind that brings his long-suffering wife to the end of

her patience. Similarly, his disillusioned business partner, who tries to lure boku back to

their work with wistful references to their happier days, has become an alcoholic. Boku

is affected by both of their pleas for communication and understanding, even to the point

of guilt and regret, but his lack of open empathy keeps them at arm’s length. After she

leaves him, his ex-wife becomes little more than a vacant chair in the kitchen: “this was

hardly what you could call a tragedy” (26). When she first threatens him with divorce, he

does not fight to keep their marriage intact:

“Either way is fine with you, then?” she asked, releasing her words slowly.
“No, either way is not fine with me,” I said. “I’m only saying it’s up to you.”
“If you want to know the truth, I don’t want to leave you,” she said after a
moment.
“All right, then don’t leave me,” I said. (Sheep 25)

Later on, he visits his business partner, whom he has known since college. Blaming his

partner’s alcoholism, boku says, “we just weren’t the friends we had once been” (54). As

they debate the overall merits of their small print and advertising business, boku tells

him: “Dull translation jobs or fraudulent copy, it’s basically the same. Sure we’re

tossing out fluff, but tell me, where does anyone deal in words with substance? C’mon

now, there’s no honest work anywhere” (58).

In both cases, boku is confronted with a choice, yet he is unable or unwilling to

commit to a decision. He will neither plead for his wife to stay nor agree to a divorce,

and he will neither acknowledge his partner’s misgivings nor offer a solution. “I’d lost

my hometown, lost my teens, lost my wife, in another three months I’d lose my twenties,”

he muses. “What’d be left of me when I got to be 60, I couldn’t imagine” (175). Feeling
 22

locked into his fate, he drifts along in a form of limbo, smoking cigarettes and downing

beers in solitude. When others attempt to know his thoughts, he rebuffs them, politely

yet firmly.

Such treatment extends even to those whom boku still considers his friends.

Despite his fond memories of his conversations with J and the Rat years ago, for different

reasons both are now excluded from his deeper feelings. J is a benevolent quasi-father

figure who probes boku’s mind for insight into his aimless life, but each time boku

deflects his questions with a simple, uncommitted answer. Perhaps it is because the Rat

is gone that boku cannot engage in the heartfelt talk with J that he needs; more likely, it is

the Rat himself whom boku misses. The Rat provides a ray of hope in the back of boku’s

thoughts, and it is their subconscious reunion at the narrative climax that signifies the

momentary achievement of boku’s psychological quest. Yet for most of the novel, the

Rat’s presence exists in only two forms: his letters to boku that reveal his deteriorating,

anti-social condition, and the Rat’s ex-girlfriend, who boku meets briefly to pass on the

letters. The Rat’s messages serve as a glimpse of boku’s possible future if he does not

escape his own shell. Because the letters lack a return address, boku is unable to respond

in kind—so his feelings remain blocked behind his façade.

It seems that boku has always been cut off from others, as his matter-of-fact

demeanor is a permanent element of his personality. His life has been a sad and lonely

struggle to discover meaning. With his marriage dissolved and his career outlook

darkened, he displays certain qualities that are consistent throughout the Murakami canon.

As Murakami translator Jay Rubin indicates, Murakami’s young male protagonists tend

to present “a generous fund of curiosity and a cool, detached, bemused acceptance of the
 23

inherent strangeness of life” (Rubin 37). Boku’s stance in Sheep allows him to show

emotion only in extreme cases, so his first-person narration serves as a window into his

true feelings and thoughts. His inability to proceed through the passageway to his

subconscious is not the only reason for his condition. He recalls when his former wife

insisted on the transience of knowledge and memory due to constant transformations.

“Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment,” she says.

“Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories” (197).

Boku realizes that one day his ex-wife will be reduced to the random memories that

appear in his mind at unpredictable moments. Although he feels renewed hope when he

meets his girlfriend, there is still a part of him that believes in the impossibility of true

communication or self-knowledge. Despite his sense that a deeper part of his Self is

trying to break through, nothing is true or constant.

This belief stymies his marriage, his career, and his ability to move forward; he is

mired in a mixture of nostalgia, frustration, and regret. Yet although he takes no real

action, action is thrust upon him by external forces. Such forces appear in the second, or

encouragement, phase of boku’s psychological journey in the form of two major

characters: his psychic girlfriend and the Boss’s secretary. Both of them lead him to

believe that the subconscious is accessible, and so he begins to sense that the passage to

his core identity is beginning to open. Their influence is so strong that they propel boku

through the longest portion of the novel, from his first meeting with his girlfriend to their

arrival to the Rat’s house in northern Hokkaido. While his girlfriend and the secretary

have vastly different motivations, the proximity of their appearance in his life is a sign

that neither boku nor the reader can resist noticing.

 24

The first instance of his encouragement begins when he is assigned to write ad

copy to accompany close-up photos of a young woman’s ears. Hoping for inspiration, he

pins the images above his desk and, over the course of a week, gradually becomes

enamored of their contours. Soon they begin to have a profound impact on his mind:

They were the dream image of an ear. The quintessence, the paragon of ears.
[…] They were like some great whirlpool of fate sucking me in. One
astonishingly bold curve cut clear across the picture plane, others curled into
delicate filigrees of subtle shadow, while still others traced, like an ancient mural,
the legends of a past age. But the supple flesh of the earlobe surpassed them all,
transcending all beauty and desire. (Sheep 34)

This passage marks the beginning of boku’s awakening from his perennial boredom, and

his focus on these ears is exactly what he needs to thrust both him and the narrative into

his larger, subconscious journey that will make up the majority of the book. Arranging to

meet the girl for dinner at a fine French restaurant with his confession that “I had to see

your ears,” he finds that she is not disarmed by his honesty (36). Bored and detached, she

presses him for an explanation of his sudden fixation: “Tell me straight, because that’s

my favorite angle” (37). Midway through their awkward conversation, boku makes a

direct allusion to the Jungian stranger:

“I turn a corner…just as someone ahead of me turns the next corner. I can’t see
what that person looks like. All I can make out is a flash of white coattails. But
the whiteness of the coattails is indelibly etched in my consciousness. Ever get
that feeling?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, that’s the feeling I get from your ears.” (Sheep 37)

His confession to this young woman is significant, because thus far he has not

demonstrated such openness to anyone. This gives his girlfriend a firm position in the

“profound” category of the relationship table on page 19; his identification of something

special about her ears revives the hope he had lost at the end of the 1960s.
 25

Where does boku’s description of the Jungian stranger originate? It comes

without warning, as if both Murakami and boku are still unsure of what is being said or

where the narrative and conversation are going. Indeed, the author admits that he

“groped my way through the first few chapters, still uncertain what kind of story would

develop…like feeling my way through the dark” (qtd in Rubin 81). Like Murakami,

boku maneuvers somewhat blindly through this meeting with the girl, with her ears

having triggered the beginning of his inner transformation from boredom to passion.

Overwhelmed by his lack of familiarity with this sensation, throughout their conversation

he is unable to articulate the inner changes taking place. At various points in their dinner,

he acknowledges to the reader, “I couldn’t figure how to get out of that” (36), “I forgot

what I was about to say” (37), and “Now I was completely lost” (38). Regardless, she is

intrigued by his fascination with her ears, pressing him for more details on “the

relationship between my ears and your feelings” (38). His attempt to move beyond his

barricaded exterior is what motivates her to become “very close friends” (39), making her

the ideal medium for boku’s psychological quest to begin in earnest.

With her revelation that there is a “passageway between [my] ears and [my]

consciousness” (40), she demonstrates a power that boku cannot understand. Her ears

signify exactly what he lacks himself—a conduit or portal to his subconscious, a device

that no Murakami protagonist will possess until The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. He refers

to his “utterly ordinary” life, but it is because she feels his life is not boring (and, in fact,

full of potential) that she decides to reveal (and unblock) her ears in the middle of the

restaurant (41). Her doing so produces the following dramatic effect:

I swallowed my breath and gazed at her, transfixed. My mouth went dry. From
no part of me could I summon a voice. For an instant, the white plaster wall
 26

seemed to ripple. The voices of the other diners and the clinking of their
dinnerware grew faint, then once again returned to normal. I heard the sound of
waves, recalled the scent of a long-forgotten evening. Yet all this was but a mere
fragment of the sensations passing through me in those few hundredths of a
second. (Sheep 44)

Despite the comic nature of this scene, with other restaurant patrons and the waiter all

“staring agape at her” (45), it confirms the existence of a new reality that boku can now

access (or at least observe) via his new girlfriend’s exquisite, unblocked ears. “Blocked

ears are dead ears,” she tells him. “I killed my own ears. That is, I consciously cut off

the passageway” (40). Yet now, in their temporarily unblocked state, boku sees a

possible route to his subconscious mind, and his perennial state of boredom and

detachment is shaken for the first time.

The dark-suited secretary is the other character to materialize during boku’s

encouragement phase. Despite his antagonistic qualities and lack of psychological

resonance (making him a “basic” level relationship), he is critical for driving boku into

the novel’s physical action of the wild sheep chase; without this progress, boku cannot

reach the consummation of his psychological journey. The dark-suited secretary, the

Boss, and the mysterious sheep together represent the malaise that has infected Japan

since the end of the 1960s. Boku capitulates to the secretary’s demands in the same way

his generation had given up to the authorities a decade earlier, bringing in the period of

mass disillusionment in which boku now lives. The secretary and another basic-level

character, the Sheep Professor (whom boku meets later), are instrumental in providing the

background of the novel’s plot as well as boku’s objective focus in his mission.

The Jungian stranger takes the form of the Rat, yet looming behind boku’s old

friend is the nebulous influence of the sheep. Boku learns that during World War II, the
 27

sheep had “found its way into” the Boss, who was an ultra-nationalist member of the

Japanese Army (144). Using an ill-gotten mass of riches from the war in Manchuria, the

Boss built up a powerful and influential “underground kingdom” that is, by the time of

the novel, already well entrenched in Japanese society and government (139). Murakami

acknowledges that “sheep are a kind of symbol of the reckless speed with which the

Japanese state pursued a course of modernization” (qtd. in Rubin 91), and in both Hard-

Boiled Wonderland and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, different incarnations of this

malevolent, all-encompassing force will be portrayed. Boku’s initial attempt to rebel

against this authority is his ineffective revival of the spirit of the previous decade.

One may wonder, however, why a sheep? The sheep lies at the heart of boku’s

growing intrigue. Does it have significance in Japanese culture and history? Would

analysis of ovine origins and connotations bring us, as Western readers, any closer to

comprehending Murakami’s intentions? As the secretary points out, the sheep is a

member of the twelve-animal Chinese zodiac, and the ancient astronomical symbols had

been adopted into Japanese culture centuries before. Before delving too much into his

choice of imagery, however, it is important to acknowledge that Murakami himself has

said very little. He states:

I made no story outline for A Wild Sheep Chase other than to use “sheep” as a
kind of key word and to bring the foreground character “I” [boku] and the
background character “Rat” together at the end. That’s the book’s entire
structure…And I believe that if the novel does succeed it is because I myself do
not know what the sheep means. (qtd. in Rubin 90)

Strecher offers, however, that the sheep symbolizes the Japanese state, which is “a

sinister presence that seeks to promulgate a sense of collective identity, a dictatorship

over the mind, among members of contemporary Japanese society” (“Magical Realism”
 28

279). Because of boku’s connection with the idealism of the 1960s, this is the true source

of his disquiet. By unblocking the passage to his subconscious (like his girlfriend can via

her ears), he succeeds in completing the Rat’s mission of destroying this malignant aspect

of society. However, in order to keep the way unblocked, boku must remove the

impenetrable barriers he has built around his persona. Without doing so, the path will

close forever, leaving him once again in solitude; this is the unfortunate fate he meets at

the novel’s conclusion.

The supernatural sheep is a malicious entity seeking world domination. It

selectively “enters” a human host so as to accomplish a precise set of objectives; once

these goals are accomplished, the sheep abandons its host in favor of another person

better suited for the next step. Yet those it abandons are never returned to their prior state,

for the vastness of the sheep’s own being replaces the host’s mind with its own.

Therefore, “the host enjoys the contentment of luxury, and freedom from the tediousness

of thinking, but no longer enjoys the personal fulfillment of an individual identity”

(Strecher, “Magical Realism” 279). The so-called “sheepless,” as the Sheep Professor

later calls them, are left behind as little more than empty husks of their original selves

(222). This ravaged condition will be visited again in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, which

introduces the technological ability to tinker with the “black box” of one’s consciousness

(255); it is also an important theme of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where the

protagonist’s nemesis has the malevolent means to “defile” one’s core identity (41).

The corruption that Murakami notes in the Japanese state is crystallized in what

the dark-suited secretary reverentially calls the Boss’s single minded “Will,” to which he

attributes the Boss’s massive, fraudulent success (140). This Will, the secretary explains,
 29

is “a concept that governs time, governs space, and governs possibility”—all the while

keeping mediocrity at bay (141). He adds:

“If the Boss dies, it means the end of everything, inasmuch as our organization
was not a bureaucracy, but a perfectly timed machine with one mind at its apex.
Herein is the strength and weakness of our organization. Or rather, was. The
death of the Boss will sooner or later bring a splintering of the organization, and
like a Valhalla consumed by flames, it will plunge into a sea of mediocrity.”
(Sheep 140)

In the cold, stern eyes of the secretary, boku epitomizes mediocrity, and for this reason he

is despised. “People can generally be classified into two groups: the mediocre realists

and the mediocre dreamers,” the secretary tells him. “You clearly belong to the latter”

(127). Boku is forced to acknowledge that bad word of mouth would ruin his modest

business, and the secretary both knows this and has the means to bring such ruin to

fulfillment.

What the man does not comprehend is that, as boku tells him, “mediocrity takes

many forms” (145). The protagonist has nothing to lose, and his act of rebellion against

the secretary “is thematically vital, necessary to demonstrate his independent, self-

interested stance toward the mystery” (Strecher, “Beyond” 359). With this understanding

somewhere in his subconscious, boku maintains his defiant attitude, even turning their

conversation into a kind of game: “Everything was a bluff, but it made sense the way

things were going. The uncertainty of the silence that followed showed I had earned

myself a few points” (129). Later, however, boku acknowledges to his girlfriend that “If

we don’t find that sheep we’ll be up to our necks in it…if those guys say they’re going to

get us, they’re going to get us” (202). This revelation shows that the gravity of his task

has registered. He is “threatened with his own erasure from society, with the implicit
 30

understanding that his friend Rat will suffer the same fate,” and this knowledge propels

him wholeheartedly into his mission (Strecher, “Beyond” 359).

This is the encouragement that boku needs to step into action. He is motivated to

prove to the secretary the power of mediocrity. Yet because boku lacks empathy, it is

much simpler for him to refuse blind obedience to the secretary’s demands than to

accomplish his twofold quest for the sheep and his Self. He knows that the Boss’s

egotistic Will bears responsibility for the boredom and detachment he has felt since all

hope collapsed in his college days. His cool attitude with the secretary is a boon in this

case, for it buffers him from any personal display of fear, anger, or regret. Yet this

condition also prevents him from demonstrating his love and appreciation of his

girlfriend; it does not allow boku to live as a normal human being. Underneath his

bravado he is shaken by the secretary’s warning. He cannot fully exist on the peripheral

of his feelings; he must find a way to clear the route to his subconscious and identify the

hidden stranger in order to maintain his momentum towards feeling complete.

To be sure, boku is never entirely cut off from the rest of the world. As the

relationship table on page 19 indicates, throughout the novel he engages in a number of

serious conversations that address intellectual, philosophical, and personal matters.

Throughout his entertaining and insightful discourse he effortlessly demonstrates his wit

and intelligence. Even in his most unguarded moments, however, he has trouble

articulating his ideas and feelings. Before long he grows confused, bored, or anxious

about a pressing situation, and he closes himself off again. It is only via the motivation

and guidance of others that, at the novel’s climax, he is able to arrive at the doorstep of

his unknown Self. Boku’s ability to proceed through the door on his own is short-lived,
 31

but it is just enough for him to succeed. However, when he reemerges from his

psychological journey he is utterly alone, as his social barriers prevented him from

reciprocating to others in kind. In other words, he has taken too much and given too little

in return.

Despite his initial resistance, boku sees his new sheep-hunting mission as an

important opportunity, and his girlfriend is enthusiastic about the prospect of their

impending journey to Hokkaido. The psychic abilities she receives from her ears provide

boku a vantage point that potentially gives him a direct link to his own subliminal needs.

As if to mark this transformation, the Boss’s limousine chauffeur cheerfully informs boku

that he possesses “God’s telephone number” and can call him anytime he wishes: “All

you have to do is to speak honestly about whatever concerns you or troubles you. No

matter how trivial you might think it is” (150). Although the driver is a minor character,

his statement penetrates boku’s exterior and establishes a brief profound connection. It is

not as meaningful as the relationship boku has developed with his girlfriend, but it is clear

that his two conversations with the chauffeur provide him with more encouragement. He

does not take the chauffeur seriously, but the man’s timely hint about divine intervention

is something that boku could use. Fortunately, his girlfriend’s ears are a suitable

consolation. Always one step ahead of him in their mission, she keeps him focused

whenever he begins to drift off course. Her unblocked ears maintain their power as a

beacon that both gathers his attention and anchors him in confidence as their travels take

them further and further north.

Yet after they meet the Sheep Professor and learn more about the sheep and the

precise location where the photograph was taken, her influence and importance begin to
 32

fade. As a sign that his own faculties are becoming more reliable, boku recalls that the

Rat’s father had a vacation villa in the mountains of Hokkaido. This coincides with the

Sheep Professor’s instructions, so boku and his girlfriend take a long train ride from

Sapporo and pass into the desolate north, where the relentless snow will soon cut off the

roads until the spring thaw. The further they push from civilization, the more focused

boku grows on his task, for he is drawing into his identification phase. She asks him,

“You still like my ears?” (277); although he answers yes, her role has diminished. By the

time they reach the abandoned two-story house in the barren wastes, where the Rat has

been living a monastic existence, she becomes little more than a distraction. He cannot

rely upon her psychic powers any longer, for she claims that “if I open my ears, I get a

headache” (283). There is nothing more she can offer him in his psychological quest. As

if coming to this conclusion by herself, she finds her escape route when boku takes a nap

on the Rat’s sofa. He awakens to find dinner prepared and his girlfriend gone. As one

critic writes, “the act [of her disappearance] keenly brings out how little either the reader

or the protagonist knows about her” (Cassegard 86). Despite her crucial role in

motivating boku forward, in this novel she is no longer relevant. 2 She serves as the first

of several such female vanishings in the three novels; they either stir the protagonist into

action or allow the momentum of his actions to be completed.

Sheep depicts the latter case. For a moment, boku feels loss and desolation: “the

vacated atmosphere of the house was final, undeniable” (286). However, in this new

phase he has identified the house as the physical site of his subconscious confrontation.

He refocuses his mind on the Rat and decides to wait for the Jungian stranger to make
                                                            
2
In the novel’s sequel, Dance Dance Dance, boku embarks on a search for his girlfriend (whose name is
revealed as “Kiki”), whom he can subconsciously hear “softly, almost imperceptibly, weeping. A sobbing
from somewhere in the darkness. Someone is crying for me” (2).
 33

another sign from within. The Sheep Man is such a sign; his purpose is to replace boku’s

girlfriend by “provid[ing] a line of communication between the protagonist and the sheep”

(Strecher, “Beyond” 360). He also scolds boku for neglecting her. “You confused that

woman,” he says in his strange accent. “All you think about is yourself” (298). Boku is

unperturbed by these words, for he is more interested in the whereabouts of the sheep and

the Rat. Even as his connection to his core identity grows stronger, his self-centeredness

and lack of empathy for others have never changed. He does not consider these

shortcomings to be relevant for his present goal, but by the novel’s end the full force of

his actions will overwhelm him with grief. 3

Over the next few days, boku comes to understand that the Sheep Man will never

answer all the questions that boku is anxious to ask. Without the perceptive powers of his

departed girlfriend’s ears, boku struggles to finalize the link to his subconscious—until he

realizes that the Sheep Man’s appearance means that he already has succeeded. It is now

only a matter of time before the Jungian stranger emerges. Understanding that the Sheep

Man is the Rat in disguise, boku initiates a purification process to encourage him to make

his appearance. He says:

The more I thought about it, the more difficult I found it to escape the feeling that
the Sheep Man’s actions reflected the Rat’s will. The Sheep Man had driven my
girlfriend from the mountain and left me here alone. His showing up here was
undoubtedly a harbinger of something. Something was progressing all around me.
The area was being swept clean and purified. Something was about to happen.
(308)

In preparation for his anticipated visitor, boku takes brisk morning jogs through the field

surrounding the house, cooks healthy meals, showers regularly, and scrubs the entire
                                                            
3
Boku’s counterparts in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle will demonstrate two more attempts by the Murakami protagonist to move beyond the borders of
their selves and show compassion to others. The extent of their success is directly relevant to their
psychological journeys.
 34

house. Rubin points out that this purification process has a traditional religious

connotation: “Murakami uses an archaic expression, atari ga hakikiyomerareru: ‘the

area was being swept clean and purified,’ much as the sacred space of a Shinto shrine

would be ritually purified in preparation for the appearance of a god” (Rubin 87). This

“god” may not be divine, but boku’s psychological transformation has reached a nearly

spiritual level. Focused on his new ritual, he “feels everything ‘flowing’ on without him

and, as if becoming a part of the flow, he proceeds with an almost poetically described

ritual of cleaning” (Rubin 88).

Having arrived at the threshold of his core identity, he begins the final stage of his

psychological process, fulfillment. In the cold blackness of night, his reclusive friend at

last makes his presence known: “May I say my piece?” the Rat asks (325). Boku

embarks upon a subconscious dialogue with the Rat’s ghost; while the Rat is not real in

the physical sense of the term, boku has created his friend from the depths of his newly

unblocked subconscious mind. While his meetings with the Sheep Man were largely

imaginary, they had a basis in the real world, since the Sheep Man is a visible entity who

interacts with the physical environment. Yet boku’s conversation with the Rat takes

place in utter darkness, where the borders between the conscious and subconscious

worlds can no longer be discerned. Darkness will be shown to have a similar function in

both the vast Tokyo subway system in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and in the deep dry well

of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The deeper boku progresses into his subconscious, the

darker and colder it becomes. Yet his psychological progress sharpens his senses, so he

understands that his friend has already committed suicide. “I died with the sheep in me,”

the Rat explains. “I waited until the sheep was fast asleep, then I tied a rope over the
 35

beam in the kitchen and hanged myself. There wasn’t enough time for the sucker to

escape” (332).

Boku’s conversation with the Rat revives their long-lost comraderie. They drink

beer and converse in such a casual manner that his friend remarks that it “seems like the

old days” (326). It takes boku some time to ask, “You’re already dead, aren’t you?”

(330). His assertion signifies his full recognition of his core identity; in the form of the

Rat, the Jungian stranger is forced to reveal what is at stake if the sheep—and by

extension, the Boss—wins. “Give your body over to it and everything goes,” the Rat

explains. “Consciousness, values, emotions, pain, everything. Gone” (335). The loss of

these vital personal qualities is demonstrated in both Hard-Boiled Wonderland (via the

residents of the dreamlike Town) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (via the savage

defilement of someone’s identity). Sheep foreshadows the inevitability of “total

conceptual anarchy,” as the Rat calls it (335). With his subconscious conversation, boku

learns the means to put a temporary hold upon the surging chaos that later Murakami

protagonists will have to face directly.

Jung wrote that “whoever attains individual consciousness must necessarily break

through the frontiers of the unconscious, for this contains what, above all else, he needs

to know” (Psychological Reflections 205). The Rat has told boku the true nature of the

“hair-raising evil” that he is up against; what boku needs to know at last is how to finish

the task that his friend had started with his suicide: destroying the sheep, whose power

still lingers in the house (335). He follows the Rat’s instructions and sets off a bomb

whose explosion disintegrates all remnants of the Boss’s revered Will, including the
 36

sheep and the secretary. By extension, as the secretary had predicted, the Boss’s entire

organization will soon crumble away into the void.

Or will it? As will be shown in the next two novels, boku’s triumph is short-lived.

Reminding us that the “adversary State” against which boku had battled in the 1960s has

become “more powerful, and, indeed, more deadly, than ever,” Strecher writes, “Against

such an opponent, what real hope can there be for a satisfyingly conclusive ending?”

(“Beyond” 360-361). Boku echoes this sentiment on a personal level when he moans to

the Sheep Professor, “I’ve lost practically everything” (349). This includes his career, his

twenties, his wife, his best friend, his girlfriend, and also, as he soon will discover, the

subconscious link he had struggled so hard to obtain. “You’ve got your life,” the Sheep

Professor replies, but this does nothing to comfort boku’s sense of defeat (349). His

newly forged path to his subconscious is meaningless without a sociological connection

to the outside world. Boku is more alone than ever before.

In his desire to purge his mind of his wild sheep chase, boku focuses himself once

again on the steady passage of time. “In just this way,” he says, “one day at a time, I

learned to distance myself from ‘memory.’ Until that day in the uncertain future when a

distant voice calls out of the lacquer blackness” (350). He has learned how to identify

this voice if it should reappear, but the route has already closed again. With the Rat now

truly gone, boku’s last chance to reopen that passage is to renew his personal

relationships, so he visits the bar owner J once more in the novel’s epilogue. To boku, J

embodies “forgiveness, compassion, and acceptance,” and he is the best person to lure

out boku’s feelings (303). Yet the only way he can reciprocate J’s quiet acquiescence is

to give him the check he received as payment from the secretary—a check valued enough
 37

to take care of all the bar owner’s debts, “with change to spare” (352). This gift is all

boku can do to compensate for his typical lack of communication, and when he leaves,

there is no guarantee that he will ever see the bar owner again.

In the novel’s final scene, boku finds his way to a tiny beach, where the sea had

once dominated the view before being pushed back to allow for the development of new

houses and apartment buildings. Truly alone, he cannot suppress his emotions any

longer: “I sat down on the last fifty yards of beach, and I cried. I never cried so much in

my life” (353). His solitude offers no comfort to his overwhelming sense of loss and

despair. His idealistic years have long been over, and the bitter days of disappointment

ahead have no foreseeable end. The world has moved on, like the human body’s

constantly replicating cells, leaving all memory and relationships behind. Nostalgia is

meaningless, as it grasps nothing but ghosts—feelings that once existed but cannot be

adequately resurrected.

“Every progress of humanity, every achievement in the field of perception, has

been bound up with progress in self-realization,” Jung claimed, but boku has fallen short

of that goal (Psychological Reflections 204). Without the ability to demonstrate his

empathy for others, boku will never be able to maintain a connection with his

subconscious. “I brushed the sand from my trousers and got up, as if I had somewhere to

go” (353). He has nowhere to go, but he knows that he must keep moving. And although

he will learn a new strategy to carry him forward in the sequel Dance Dance Dance, for

the purpose of this paper the boku of A Wild Sheep Chase must pass the baton of hope to

his counterpart in Hard-Boiled Wonderland to renew his attempt at individuation. Yet

 38

boku is still determined to push ahead somehow, until his own opportunity, whatever it

may be, returns.

 39

Chapter Two

Making the Best of Both Worlds: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
(Sekai no owari to Haadoboirudo Wandaarando)

In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Murakami expands the

scope of his narrative into a parallel, dual-layered reality consisting of both the physical

world and the subconscious nestled within. Each realm, presented in alternating chapters,

is depicted from the first-person perspective of the formalized watashi in the former and

the more casual boku in the latter. Although some critics have labeled the novel as

“cybernetic fiction” in a vein similar to William Gibson and certain works by Italo

Calvino, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and many others, Murakami himself has

refused to classify it (Porush 45). At its heart is a continuation of the themes he

introduced in A Wild Sheep Chase: the protagonist’s attempt to establish a firm

connection between his conscious and subconscious selves. Because of the dual narrative

structure in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, however, this connection can only be established

at the very nexus of the two interlocking worlds, where the Jungian stranger resides.

Both watashi and boku progress towards the unknown aspect of their selves in a

linear path similar to that of the protagonist in the previous novel, but because of the split

narrative these routes move in converging directions. In this novel, boku is not the

cynical, emotionally-guarded man readers had grown familiar with in A Wild Sheep

Chase; he is instead much more earnest and solemn—yet not completely real. Watashi,

however, has a personality very similar to that of boku in A Wild Sheep Chase, and he

occupies a world that is both credible and familiar. Both narrators are faced with

dilemmas that, while reminiscent of the psychological quest established in the previous

novel, extend into unexplored territory regarding the replicable nature of one’s
 40

consciousness and constructed impressions of reality. Their narratives present the two

interconnected storylines of the novel: the “hard-boiled wonderland” of watashi’s near-

future Tokyo, and the man-made “end of the world” in which boku dwells that exists

within watashi’s subconscious.

While in the previous novel the protagonist attempts to strip away the layers of his

consciousness in order to reach the core of his identity, in Hard-Boiled Wonderland the

main protagonist is a man whose brain is lobotomized into two separate selves that are at

best only dimly aware of the other. Instead of the one-way path that A Wild Sheep

Chase’s boku carved towards his subconscious, Hard-Boiled Wonderland presents a two-

way street, with two “I”s trying to meet at the point where their paths intersect. Their

methods may differ, but the process in which they seek out the Jungian stranger in one

another follows the same four-phase system already introduced: awareness,

encouragement, identification, and fulfillment. As before, their relationships with other

characters, primarily female, have direct bearing upon their progress. Yet because the

two narratives depict very different environments, I will now provide a brief synopsis of

the novel.

It begins with watashi, who works as a cerebral data processor/number-cruncher

called a Calcutec. His near-future, alternate-reality Tokyo is the backdrop of a vicious

cybernetic war over information. He and his fellow Calcutecs are at odds with the

underworld Semiotecs, who are depicted as violent, yakuza-like thugs known to use

unorthodox methods in retrieving the information they seek. Watashi makes his way to a

secret underground lab to meet an old Professor, who gives him secret data to decode via

a special technological device implanted in watashi’s brain. The data can only be
 41

manipulated through a complicated mental process called “shuffling” (31). As watashi

prepares to return home to complete the job, the Professor’s teenage granddaughter gives

him what appears to be a unicorn skull. Watashi enlists the help of a young woman at the

library to identify the skull’s true identity, and the two become lovers.

Meanwhile, watashi’s subconscious counterpart boku arrives at a dreamlike

pastoral community called the Town, which is surrounded by a high, impenetrable Wall.

Before he is allowed to enter, the burly Gatekeeper cuts away boku’s sentient shadow,

which is then forced to help the Gatekeeper keep watch over the Town’s numerous

unicorn-like “beasts” (12). Telling boku that everyone in the Town has a specific role,

the Gatekeeper assigns him the task of “Dreamreader” (39). Boku meets the Librarian, a

demure young woman who assists him in his work, which consists of releasing dreams

from beast skulls. His shadow, now a prisoner of the Gatekeeper, asks boku to create a

map of the Town so that the two of them can escape; if boku does not complete the task

soon, his weakening shadow will die at the coming of winter. Boku begins the mission in

earnest, but the mysteries of the Town, particularly the Librarian, stimulate his own

fading sense of mind. He begins to wonder if there is any way to get through the Wall,

and whether he possesses the full desire to do so.

Watashi is woken in the middle of the night by the Professor’s granddaughter,

who fears that her grandfather is in trouble with the rival Semiotecs. When she fails to

meet him at an all-night snack bar, watashi returns home and is accosted by Junior and

Big Boy, two Semiotec thugs. They appear to be after the unicorn skull, which watashi

had safeguarded in a locker at the train station. After they wreck his apartment and slash

his stomach, watashi returns to the Professor’s office to meet the granddaughter. She
 42

leads him into the depths of the vast Tokyo underground in order to reach her

grandfather’s secret laboratory. She hopes to rescue him from marauding Semiotecs and

monstrous subterranean creatures known as INKlings, but watashi’s main objective is to

learn more about the unicorn skull, what the Semiotecs are looking for, and the reason for

his feelings of déjà vu.

Back in the Town, boku is alarmed at the deteriorating condition of his shadow.

Despite the shadow’s desire to escape, boku admits that he has fallen in love with the

Librarian. His shadow explains that all the inhabitants of the Town, being without their

own shadows, have lost all memory and feeling; boku will meet the same fate unless he

and his shadow can get away and be rejoined. Boku and the Librarian meet the Caretaker

of an old power generator in the forest; his task is monotonous and lonely, and boku fears

that if he stays too long he will grow the same way. The Caretaker gives him an old

accordion that no one knows how to play, and boku rediscovers music. He decides to

apply his improved dream-reading powers to help the Librarian restore her mind.

Watashi and the granddaughter encounter numerous horrors on their dark route to

the Professor’s lab. The Professor has retreated further into the tunnels to a safe location,

and when they find him he tells watashi about the experiments that he had done on his

brain. The Professor had implanted a constructed consciousness there, called “the end of

the world,” and in a short time this hidden world is set to kill watashi’s body and pull his

identity into its lifelike yet artificial reality. Because the Professor’s lab was destroyed,

there is no way to reverse the process. In bitter resignation, watashi makes his way back

to the world above and meets his librarian girlfriend. He passes his remaining hours of

life at the waterfront alone in his car, where he falls asleep to the music of Bob Dylan.
 43

Having succeeded in piecing together the Librarian’s mind, boku knows he can

never abandon her. He frees his shadow from the Gatekeeper’s prison and leads him to

the Pool, which is the only possible way through the impervious Wall. His shadow

pleads him to come as well, but boku has found his place in the Town and has begun to

sense the Librarian’s feelings for him. After his shadow slips into the Pool, boku trudges

back through the snow to remain with her forever.

The two narrators move through their four stages towards self-realization on

separate paths that coincide at key points. As in A Wild Sheep Chase, their psychological

quests can only be accomplished with the assistance of other characters. Their success is

thus critically dependent upon their emotional involvement with others—particularly a

love interest. Watashi is more open and generous with his librarian girlfriend than A Wild

Sheep Chase’s protagonist is with the psychic ear model, but it is the boku of Hard-

Boiled Wonderland who is the most heroic. His desire to restore the Librarian’s mind,

despite his feeling that “I belong in that [other] world” with his shadow, is a significant

progression from the selfishness of the previous boku (349). However, in this novel

Murakami only implies the nature of watashi and boku’s ultimate fates. It can be

presumed that watashi’s conscious world is obliterated by his internal “end of the world,”

but as the old Professor assures him, “You’ll be losin’ everything from here, but it’ll all

be there” (274). Therefore, it would seem that, despite the psychological and social

barriers boku has penetrated, he will be lost when his own identity is swept away by—or

merged into—watashi’s. While not ideal, watashi’s fate is preferable to that of the

protagonist in A Wild Sheep Chase, for he will not be alone. Taken together, the fates of

the two narrators are ambivalent instead of pessimistic.

 44

The structure of Hard-Boiled Wonderland’s dual psychological process works a

bit differently than in the previous novel. Watashi and boku’s converging paths, in which

each serves as the other’s Jungian stranger, can only be perceived and aligned by the all-

knowing reader. Their separate journeys correspond in the following manner:

(1) Awareness: Watashi and boku encounter clues—centered on unicorn skulls,

librarians, and the phrase “end of the world”—that suggest their counterpart’s

existence.

(2) Encouragement: With greater understanding of their respective situations,

both narrators join with a female companion and undergo an active quest for

more answers.

(3) Identification: Having achieved their immediate goals, they are faced with a

new reality that indicates at long last what they need to do in order to

complete their psychological journeys.

(4) Fulfillment: The conscious and subconscious worlds converge. Boku is swept

away as watashi takes his place in the End of the World.

Before exploring these phases in detail, it is important to acknowledge the

relevance that Jung’s Shadow archetype plays in this novel. Murakami’s inclusion of the

shadow character as the representation of boku’s fading memories and identity does not

have any intentional Jungian significance, but there are some notable points to make. In

Jung, the Shadow serves as the counterpart to the Self. He wrote, “Everyone carries a

shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and

denser it is” (Jung, P&R 93). In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, of course, the shadow is

literally cut away from boku’s body, and it fades from black and dense to a pathetic,
 45

“haggard [figure], all eyes and beard” (245). This is the opposite of Jung’s archetype;

Murakami’s shadow begins to die from corporeal malnourishment the longer it is isolated

from the conscious mind. The twist is that because the End of the World is not physically

real, boku is not truly conscious; instead it is watashi whose waking mind is represented

by the shadow in this realm. Because boku cannot rejoin his shadow, he must find a

different path to unite with watashi. Likewise, watashi is not aware of the contents of his

subconscious implant, which the Professor calls a “black box” (255). Being the one who

created the End of the World in the first place, the Professor is watashi’s link to any

direct knowledge of that unknown world.

The Jungian Shadow, while different from the hidden stranger, represents one’s

repressed desires and fears. When it remains concealed, it “does more harm than good”

and appears in extreme cases as one’s “unconscious contents which then project

themselves spontaneously into incongruous…doctrines or practices” (Jung, Science of

Mythology 104). Therefore, as the “repressed parts of ourselves,” shadows are “not

inherently evil, but may become so if left unclaimed” (Keller 51). Jung’s Shadow is the

origin of malevolence, while Murakami’s shadow is a voice of rationality and sense.

Boku, as will be shown, seeks to restore this part of his mind, just as watashi stumbles

through the dark tunnels of his subconscious, represented by the Tokyo underground.

Although Jung and Murakami have opposing views of the nature of shadows, on one

point they would agree. “If it comes to a neurosis, we have invariably to deal with a

considerably intensified shadow,” Jung wrote. “And if such a case wants to be cured it is

necessary to find a way in which man’s conscious personality and his shadow can live
 46

together” (Jung, P&R 93). Such a solution is not viable for boku, despite his shadow’s

urgent situation, so he needs to find another way to restore his mind.

As in A Wild Sheep Chase, the relationships that the two narrators have with other

characters play a critical role in merging their worlds into one. Based on boku and

watashi’s interior monologues and actual conversations, again the four-category table of

relationships helps to define the significance of their interactions as they move through

their psychological processes. As before, characters classified as basic, personal, and

profound enable the narrator to confront his subconscious Jungian stranger at the novel’s

climax. For the sake of comparison, I have included the relationships from A Wild Sheep

Chase as well.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and

Relationship A Wild Sheep
the End of the World
Type Chase
boku watashi
The Basic The Rat’s ex- The Caretaker Junior and Big Boy
girlfriend
the black-suited
secretary
the Sheep
Professor
The Personal the Chinese bar The Colonel The Professor
owner J The Gatekeeper The Professor’s
boku’s business granddaughter
partner
boku’s ex-wife
the owner of the
Dolphin Hotel
The Profound the limousine The Librarian librarian girlfriend
chauffeur boku’s shadow
boku’s girlfriend
The Subconscious the Sheep Man/the watashi (the outer boku (the inner self)
Rat self)

Female roles, shown in boldface, represent the most important relationships

overall. All three—the granddaughter, the librarian girlfriend, and the Librarian—
 47

motivate the narrators to struggle beyond their perceived boundaries. They also change

their attitudes. The librarian and granddaughter penetrate watashi’s hard-boiled

emotional shell, “one that finds concrete representation in the impenetrable walls that

surround the town as well” (Strecher, “Magical Realism” 286). The Librarian helps boku

awaken the faded areas of his mind that were in danger due to his separation from his

shadow. This correlation between the women who exist in “real-world” Tokyo and those

occupying the “imaginary” Town is significant. Murakami explains:

My protagonist is almost always caught between the spiritual world and the real
world. In the spiritual world, the women—or men—are quiet, intelligent, modest.
Wise. In the realistic world…the women are very active, comic, positive. They
have a sense of humor. The protagonist's mind is split between these totally
different worlds, and he cannot choose which to take. I think that’s one of the
main motifs in my work. (Murakami, qtd. in Wray 134)

As will be shown, the three women characters of Hard-Boiled Wonderland fit into these

two categories. Watashi’s librarian girlfriend and the granddaughter assert themselves

into his life with humor and action, while boku’s Librarian is a calm, steadying force.

Because watashi and boku are two halves of the same physical person, the distinct

narrative style of the alternating chapters represents watashi’s split mind; it is the reader’s

key to understanding the two disparate realities. Whereas the Japanese original uses the

watashi/boku duality to accomplish this, the novel’s English translator, Alfred Birnbaum,

chose to use varying verb tenses in order to form “a distinction between the two narrators’

worlds that…imparts a timeless quality” (Rubin 117). Use of the present tense in the

boku chapters instead of the traditional past tense suggests “a perpetual narrative ‘now’

outside of the flow of history” (Hantke 16).

As I delve into the narrators’ four stages towards self-realization, it is important to

introduce the differences in their respective environments and personal traits. Much like
 48

the protagonist of A Wild Sheep Chase, watashi “is characterized by a sense of

rebelliousness and marginality, and his principle talent is dealing with unusual—

especially dangerous—situations” (Strecher, “Beyond” 362). This “talent” is derived

from his hard-boiled persona, in which some of his personality traits superficially

resemble those of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Professor William Marling sums up the

traditional hard-boiled protagonist as:

…usually a detective of the “private eye” variety…[who] used special expertise to

restore a loss…for little or no money, often simply for justice. They met
challenges, trials, obstacles, and temporary defeats ... [and] also [carried] on the
tradition of verbal prowess: he or she [could] use language against opponents and
[was] conscious of words and their effects. (Marling, “Hard-Boiled Fiction”)

Watashi exerts much of this attitude, particularly in his verbal interactions and narrative

asides—but he is not particularly tough or brave. Nor are the two female characters he

depends on reminiscent of the femme fatales often found in the dime store pulp detective

novel. Instead, they help him navigate through confounding and hostile situations.

Without them, he cannot achieve understanding of his ultimate destiny.

At first glance, the world portrayed in the watashi chapters might seem familiar to

the modern reader, yet there are grave dangers just beyond the borders of the narrative.

Tokyo is rampant with corruption and violence; it is an extreme rendition of the Boss’s

Will, fueled by the power of the malevolent sheep, that was only a vague suggestion in A

Wild Sheep Chase. On the surface, this high-tech, postindustrial realm contains some

science-fiction elements not unlike the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson (despite

Murakami’s denial of such influence) 4 . It becomes apparent, however, that aside from

some advances in technology and a greater sense of urban menace, little in watashi’s

                                                            
4
Rubin testifies to Murakami’s denial of using Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic” as a resource on
p.121 of Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words.
 49

Tokyo differs from the real thing. Working for a powerful quasi-governmental

organization called the “System,” watashi was technologically-implanted with unique

“laundering” and “shuffling” abilities (31). These skills makes him invaluable to both the

System and his rival Semiotecs. He explains, “The more we Calcutecs up our

technologies, the more [the Semiotecs] up their counter-technologies. We safeguard the

data, they steal it. Your classic cops-and-robbers routine” (33).

No data is more top secret and precious than the End of the World, which was

designed by the Professor and placed into a coding/decoding device “only the size of an

azuki bean” fixed inside watashi’s brain (259). This black box, in a society of vicious

info-wars, is considered more secure than a computer; it prevents all unauthorized

access—even by watashi himself. As he comes to learn, the Professor had conducted

experiments with watashi’s brain. He had mapped watashi’s core consciousness, fed the

various patterns into a supercomputer, and “rearrang[ed] everything into a story” (262).

This story, or rendered “visualization” (262), is depicted as the dreamlike Town full of

beasts and people without shadows and surrounded by an impenetrable Wall.

Yet early in the novel, in his awareness phase, watashi knows nothing of the

Professor’s involvement with his brain, nor of the world that is implanted there. This is

the knowledge that he seeks, and his acquisition of that knowledge will carry him to his

final merging with the subconscious boku. Amidst all the imagery of high-tech data

processing, the unicorn skull watashi receives from the Professor stands out in stark

contrast, giving him “the sneaking suspicion that I’d seen [it] before” (71). The research

that he and his librarian girlfriend conduct suggests that the skull is the remnant of a “lost

world” discovered by a Russian scientist during World War I (103). He believes that the
 50

skull is linked to the encoded information that the Professor has given him to secure in

his computer-like brain. The password that watashi uses to process the data is “End of

the World,” which to him is “the title of a profoundly personal drama” (112). Yet

because the exact contents of this drama “transpire in a sea of chaos in which [he]

submerges empty-handed and from which [he] resurfaces empty-handed,” only the

Professor can explain what it signifies (114).

From the beginning, watashi’s dependence on female characters is divided

between the Professor’s granddaughter and watashi’s librarian girlfriend. Although he

meets the granddaughter first, her only role during his awareness stage is to direct him

silently into the subterranean darkness for the first time and to give him the unicorn skull.

Watashi then solicits the librarian for help in deciphering the skull’s significance. She

and the protagonist form a profound bond that grounds him in his conscious reality,

demonstrating what he stands to lose when the End of the World wipes away his physical

realm. He needs this stability, since his world soon becomes topsy-turvy with

unannounced visits by hostile Semiotecs and long treks through the Tokyo sewers.

Although she vanishes from the narrative during the novel’s middle section, watashi

rejoins with her towards the end in order to complete his psychological journey;

thereafter, when he merges into boku’s world, her presence will be assumed by boku’s

Librarian. It is significant that she and the granddaughter never appear together, since

they represent watashi’s active desires and subconscious needs, respectively. The

manner in which they do this will be explained in greater detail later in this chapter.

Unlike watashi, the boku of Hard-Boiled Wonderland is marked by an earnest

idealism and modesty that is drawn from his alienation from his shadow, which is
 51

associated with his “memories and identity, his past and thus his mind” (Strecher, Dances

280). Without a shadow, he has no mind, memories, or identity; he is known only as the

Dreamreader. Such an existence is not without its merits; some aspects of no-mind

“suggest the taste of a development toward higher states of consciousness” (Haney 140).

As his shadow languishes in the Gatekeeper’s prison, boku is able to expand his spiritual

nature, and his love of the Librarian grows. Unlike Jung’s Shadow archetype, which only

grows stronger when blocked from the conscious mind, neither boku nor his shadow can

“survive” for long without each other. Boku comes to learn that the townsfolk have

likewise given up their shadows in order to settle within the Town, and they have become

little more than ghosts. This quality affects the Town’s atmosphere, which seems “post-

nuclear…[with] vague reminders of a past receding from a consciousness losing its grip

on reality” (Haney 134). Although the sense of danger in and around the Town is not as

pervasive as that presented in watashi’s Tokyo, there are consequences to boku’s actions

in his surreal realm, and as his shadow dies he faces the possibility of being trapped in the

End of the World forever.

Boku uses a sincere and solemn narrative style that counteracts watashi’s

bemused cynicism. In Japanese, his term of self-reference is used most often by young

boys, so it has a childish connotation that Murakami refines to suggest a perspective that

is idyllic, sincere, and prone to whimsy and fantasy. Boku is idealistic in his attempts to

understand the Town, free his shadow, and receive the Librarian’s love. However, when

juxtaposed with the more realistic realm of watashi, the End of the World is little more

than an incredibly rich and potent dream. It is one that boku cannot “awaken” from

unless he can make contact with his alter-ego living within the conscious world. Because
 52

boku and watashi are the same person, their search for one another ultimately forms a

nexus point, which is represented both as the ominous Pool in the End of the World and a

brain that is about to be shut down by watashi’s black box. If boku cannot anchor the

remnants of his fading mind, he will lose all feeling and hope, just like the others living

in the Town.

His stage of awareness occurs over a prolonged sense of time. Although both his

and watashi’s narratives take place during the same five-day period in real life, for boku

this corresponds to the passing of autumn into winter. When he is first separated from his

shadow by the Gatekeeper, his shadow says, “It’s wrong, I tell you. There’s something

wrong with this place” (63). Yet boku believes that this condition “is only temporary, not

forever” (ibid.) Such is his state of ignorance—until he meets the Librarian, when he

realizes that “her face comes almost as a reminiscence…I can feel some deep layer of my

consciousness lifting toward the surface” (41). When the young woman teaches him how

to read dreams from old beast skulls, he thinks, “I am overcome with a strong sense of

déjà vu. Have I seen this skull before?” (60). His nightly efforts at his new task bring

him closer to the Librarian, but he is also compelled to search for a way out of the Town

and bring his shadow with him. Yet the Gatekeeper senses boku’s plans from the

beginning. Pointing out the Wall with unabashed pride, the Gatekeeper advises him,

“You have to endure…This is the End of the World” (109).

The awareness stage has alerted both narrators of something beyond their

immediate understanding, and they have fastened upon a female character to guide them

further. The encouragement phase takes them through the main action of the novel,

where important revelations provide greater incentives to progress to their respective

 53

destinies. The hard-boiled watashi finds himself the target of both information

organizations, and he can no longer trust either. The surprise appearance of two rival

Semiotecs, whom he calls “Junior” and “Big Boy,” begins an intense confrontation in

which he struggles to counter with his wits; but unlike boku’s defiant discussion with the

black-suited secretary in A Wild Sheep Chase, watashi is outmatched by Junior’s cunning

and Big Boy’s muscle. Wary of their intentions, he wants more information from them

than he will give in return, and his attempts to toy with them are thwarted when they

demonstrate their physical and psychological dominance. Although watashi’s “calmly

self-reflective response to the physical danger…places Big Boy and Junior in a line of

noir thugs reminiscent, for example, of Moose Malloy in Chandler’s Farewell, My

Lovely,” he soon finds that neither he nor his possessions will survive the encounter

unscathed (Hantke 9).

By fleeing into the subterranean city sewers with the Professor’s granddaughter,

he not only strives to protect his black box, but also to demand that the Professor explain

to him “what is it you were trying to do? What did you do? What was the result? And

where does that leave me?” (253). The Professor awaits them in the inner sanctum of the

underground catacombs, so watashi’s proactive movement through the darkness is a

symbol of his subconscious journey. The further they delve, the more intense the danger

becomes, and the closer watashi draws to boku’s realm. Reflecting this gradual

transformation, their odyssey begins to feel nearly as dreamlike as boku’s experiences in

the End of the World. Watashi imagines the “conscious” world above as he moves along

his murky path, half-pushed and half-dragged by his young female companion. “The

further we traveled in the darkness, the more I began to feel estranged from my body,” he
 54

says. “I couldn’t see it, and after a while, you start to think the body is nothing but a

hypothetical construct” (211). This feeling of physical separation foreshadows watashi’s

ultimate removal from his body and integration into the hidden side of his Self; in The

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the protagonist will learn how to take control of this experience.

The real danger lies in watashi’s conscious mind fading away too soon, for although he

feels “the urge to look up at the sky,” there is no way to liberate his body from their

frantic descent (216). This predicament mirrors that of boku, who is trapped within the

walls of the Town and is in danger of losing his identity forever once his shadow dies. A

random series of images and sounds begin to float through watashi’s mind as his own

memories and identity fade, and, half-dreaming, he imagines his footsteps sounding like

Finnish; without warning the sounds transform into a Faustian scene in which “A Farmer

met the aged Devil on the road” (217).

Although Murakami is clearly having fun with the sheer absurdity of watashi’s

unanchored mind, this scene is reminiscent of boku’s severing from his shadow by the

cruel Gatekeeper. Once separated, the body and shadow cannot be rejoined. Similarly,

watashi is beginning to lose his shadow—ironically in the shadowy depths of the Tokyo

sewers. The granddaughter, however, displays her ability to save him in time:

Something struck my cheek. Something flat, fleshy, not too hard. But what? I
tried to think, and it struck my cheek again. I raised my hand to brush it away, to
no avail. An unpleasant glare was swimming in my face. I opened my eyes,
which until then I hadn’t even noticed were closed. It was her flashlight on me,
her hand slapping me. (Hard-Boiled Wonderland 218)

Her intervention is part of the “very active, comic, positive” characteristics that

Murakami has attributed to females based within the realistic world. Watashi is

dependent on these traits, in the same manner that the protagonist of A Wild Sheep Chase
 55

relied on the powers of his psychic girlfriend to choose the Dolphin Hotel and locate the

Rat’s distant abode. Watashi’s librarian girlfriend keeps him centered on his conscious

world, thus linking him to the only reality he knows: that of the literal, waking world.

The granddaughter, like Virgil guiding Dante through the three realms of the afterlife,

prepares watashi for his inevitable migration to his subconscious. When watashi’s mind

wanders too far off track, she pulls him back to his senses until the Professor can

bequeath his knowledge about the world that awaits him.

However, the granddaughter’s protective powers are limited to the underground.

She frequently asks him to describe the normal world in which he lives and works. She is

obsessed with sex, despite her inexperience. Yet watashi cannot explore these areas with

her, neither consciously nor subconsciously, and so his relationship with her cannot

progress beyond the “personal” level as represented in the table on page 46. This is not

only because she is 17 and he is sexually involved with the librarian, but also because of

a strong sense that both women are so integrated in their own environments that they

could be polar opposites of each other. The librarian has access to books and cerebral

knowledge, and the granddaughter possesses physical abilities such as horseback riding,

mountain climbing, and spelunking. The granddaughter demonstrates surprising skills in

the subterranean dark, and she leads watashi straight into the dreaded INKling lair in

order to secure their escape route.

Her weakness is the world above, which confuses and frightens her; she loses her

way trying to meet watashi at a coffee shop. She would be his ideal companion only in a

world removed from waking reality, and she suggests to him that they remain together.

First she offers to take him with her to Greece, and then, close to the end of the novel, she
 56

flirtatiously squeezes watashi’s wrist and makes an even more compelling suggestion:

“Know what I’m thinking? … I’m thinking it would be wonderful if I could follow you

into that world where you’re going” (304). It would seem fitting if she were able to

follow watashi to the End of the World, as her ability to navigate the black underground

suggests her familiarity with the subconscious mind. Yet watashi’s noncommittal

response implies that her role is already reserved by another: boku’s Librarian, who will

become the true love interest of both narrators, once they are unified.

In the End of the World, it becomes clear that a man without his shadow can

substitute his loss with only one thing: the love of another. This is boku’s stage of

encouragement, in which he falls in love with the Librarian, who is the doppelganger of

watashi’s girlfriend. Yet his priorities are divided. His shadow has pleaded boku to draw

up a map of their environs to find a weakness in the Wall so that they can escape, for the

veneer of peace and happiness that the Town promotes is due to an utter lack of “mind”

in all its people. Boku completes the map-making mission but day by day feels less

certain that escape is possible or even desirable. His shadow, in the throes of death due

to the severity of the winter and its separation from boku’s body, explains to him:

“…the absence of fighting or hatred or desire [in the Town] also means the
opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there
is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the
despair of loss, there is no hope. […] Love is a state of mind, but [the Librarian]
has no mind for it. People without a mind are phantoms.” (Hard-Boiled
Wonderland 334)

This description recalls the Rat’s words about his short-term possession by the evil sheep;

the sheep turns its human hosts into virtual phantoms, just like those who have been

robbed of their shadows or, as will be seen in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, of their core

identities. His shadow’s desperate plea temporarily renews boku’s dedication to his
 57

mission; he determines to free his shadow and flee via the Pool, whose powerful

undertow serves as their only hope as a route to the outside.

These plans would seem to be the logical response to boku’s understanding of the

Town’s nature, but his shadow has receded too much from his active thoughts. Its

connection with his original identity has faded away, to be replaced gradually by the

Librarian, with whom boku associates his future. It is telling that boku begins his

narrative only after his bond with his shadow has been severed; at the moment when the

Gatekeeper breaks their natural bond, a psychological and spiritual rift opens as well. He

starts to drift away from his anchored identity—signified by his shadow—just as his

shadow loses its physical stamina and ability to outlast the coming winter. With the

knowledge that an irreplaceable piece of himself is gone, boku is motivated to seek out

someone to take his shadow’s place. The Gatekeeper is fearsome and cruel, the Colonel

is kind yet complacent, and the Caretaker is something of a forlorn outcast. None of

these townspeople have “minds” and are hence focused upon their only designated task.

This is also true of the Librarian: “I have a mind and she does not,” boku says to the

Colonel. “Love her as I might, the vessel will remain empty” (169). Despite this

realization, boku believes that her mind can be restored and she may love him in return.

Rather than escape with his shadow or let his shadow die so that he is trapped forever,

boku decides upon a compromise: freeing his shadow, finding the Librarian’s mind, and

remaining with her in the End of the World. It is a heroic goal, one which boku in the

previous novel could never have imagined, for it requires the selfless baring of one’s

heart for the sake of another. This refined sense of purpose is the core theme of The

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which will be explored in the next chapter.

 58

Having accompanied the granddaughter through the underground’s chilling

darkness, rushing floods, precipitous cliffs, killer leeches, and savage INKlings, watashi

completes the encouragement stage of his psychological process by meeting the Professor

for the second time. His identification phase begins when the Professor explains in

detail the reality of the world locked inside watashi’s head. He learns that the unicorn

skull was a red herring—the Professor had “made it up on a phrenological whim” (270)

to distract the marauding Semiotecs and to help watashi draw connections to his

subconscious. The Professor admits that the skull was “modeled after a visualized image”

(270) that arose from within the End of the World, but he says that watashi has already

begun constructing mental bridges in his conscious mind to link to these implanted

memories:

“You may have experienced it as a memory, but that was an artificial bridge of
your own makin’. You see, quite naturally there are going t’be gaps between your
own identity and my edited input consciousness. So you, in order t’justify your
own existence, have laid down bridges across those gaps.” (Hard-Boiled
Wonderland 265)

These bridges exist due to boku’s actions within watashi’s subconscious. For the first

time watashi understands the nature of the subtle clues—paperclips, libraries, unicorns—

that his alter-ego has been unknowingly leaving behind. Once this revelation comes to

him, his world begins to exert subtle influence on boku’s in return. Hard-Boiled

Wonderland never declares which of these realms is more “real”; as Strecher observes,

“we are confronted with the suggestion that the so-called ‘fantasy’ world is in fact not so

divorced as we might like to imagine from the ‘real’ one” (44). Although boku and

watashi move independently of one another at first, their merging completes the Self and

becomes their true reality.

 59

As the Professor makes his revelations, watashi’s hard-boiled nature is in full

force. It is similar to that of the protagonist in A Wild Sheep Chase, but it can be argued

that watashi requires these personality traits for survival in his harsh world. Brought

about by what the Professor muses could be his “childhood trauma, misguided upbringin’,

over-objectified ego, guilt,” they have enabled watashi to bolster his emotional shell, thus

giving his subconscious mind the ability to create and maintain a coherent fantasy world

unhindered by the external bombardment of reality (268). As the Professor explains,

“It’s as if you descended to the elephant factory floor beneath your consciousness and

built an elephant with your own hands. Without you even knowin’!” (268). The elephant,

as an “inscrutable master of memory,” represents boku’s efforts to make sense of the

artificial reality that the Professor had created (Rubin 119). Therefore, the odd sense of

déjà vu that watashi experiences in his awareness stage are not true memories, but merely

brief points of contact between his conscious and subconscious selves. Murakami’s

rationale for their separation, according to Rubin, is “the inability of the individual to

know his own inner mind” (118).

Watashi comes to this realization when the Professor explains that there is no way

to prevent his black box, or core identity, from fusing itself permanently to his brain,

essentially killing him but shifting his actual consciousness into the End of the World.

His psychological quest now at a dead-end, watashi identifies the futility of chasing after

his Jungian stranger on his own. Instead, he is told that the stranger will come to him—

or, more accurately, he will be automatically thrust into the stranger’s world. The

Professor attempts to assuage the damage, but watashi cannot help but express his anger

and sense of betrayal:

 60

“As far as I can see, the responsibility for all this is one hundred percent yours.
You started it, you developed it, you dragged me into it. Wiring quack circuitry
into people’s heads…putting the Semiotecs on my tail, luring me down into this
hell hole, and now you’re snuffing my world! This is worse than a horror movie!
Who the fuck do you think you are? I don’t care what you think. Get me back
the way I was.” (Hard-Boiled Wonderland 274)

Watashi is forced to live what short time he has left under the inflexibility of these

regrettable consequences, and from this point on he must come to terms with his twist of

fate. His struggle to resist the inevitable merging of consciousnesses serves as the

novel’s “moral fantasy,” which Strecher describes as being “to explicate the mysterious,

and to thwart death” (“Beyond” 39). This fate provides a more conclusive ending than

the previous novel, as the self-realization that both boku and watashi are seeking,

contained within the nexus of their conscious and subconscious worlds, is more tangibly

attainable even though both are forced to make unhappy sacrifices.

The identification stage of boku’s journey, like watashi’s, represents his last

opportunity to make a decision that could affect the final, inevitable outcome.

Determined to allow the Librarian to feel and reciprocate his love, he tells her,

“Something in you must still be in touch with your mind! Although it is locked tightly

and cannot get out” (351). He achieves his breakthrough when the Caretaker gives him

an old accordion; those lacking minds have no means to understand the instrument’s

purpose. Yet boku, in his desire to find his mental link to the world beyond the Wall,

uses the accordion to recall the lost notes and chords of an old song (“Danny Boy”). He

rediscovers music, and as a result:

The whole Town lives and breathes in the music I play. The streets shift their
weight with my every move. The Wall stretches and flexes as if my own flesh
and skin. I repeat the song several times, then set the accordion down on the floor,
lean back, and close my eyes. Everything here is a part of me—the Wall and Gate
and Woods and River and Pool. It is all my self. (Hard-Boiled Wonderland 369)
 61

This psychological breakthrough is comparable to the Professor’s revelations to watashi,

but boku’s epiphany is much more profound because of his direct influence upon his

destiny. The identification of his true reality enables him to prepare for the final step of

his psychological quest. Boku uses this knowledge to undertake the noble task of finding

the Librarian’s mind by piecing it together strand by strand. Having accomplished this,

he knows he cannot abandon her with his shadow—but he also cannot allow his shadow

to perish. His sense of sacrifice, therefore, extends to both of his “profound”

relationships. Although the Librarian has replaced his shadow as boku’s anchor to his

chosen world, his dedication to saving both characters is a portent to The Wind-Up Bird

Chronicle, in which Murakami will identify what is most significant in the Jungian quest

for the Self.

For watashi, the fulfillment of his search for the Jungian stranger has been placed

on automatic. He has no control over it, but at least he has fair warning of the imminent

transformation. The Professor’s intimate knowledge of watashi’s mind due to his

experiments might suggest that the relationship between the two men would become a

profound one—yet because of the Professor’s direct complicity in watashi’s unfortunate

fate and his inability to correct it, watashi cannot forgive him for such transgressions.

The Professor admits his carelessness, which was never meant as malevolence, but he is

responsible for watashi’s physical death—or, more accurately, “not death but a

transposition” (341). Watashi’s consolation is that his life can resume in the End of the

World, albeit in that dreamlike environment. Therefore, he returns to the world above—

as if awakening from a dream—and reunites with his librarian girlfriend. The

 62

granddaughter’s importance declines as soon as they emerge from the darkness; just like

the girlfriend in A Wild Sheep Chase, her existence is largely reduced to an afterthought.

Perhaps because of his understanding that everything will “all be there,” or

because he lacks the ability to move beyond his emotional shell, watashi does not inform

his girlfriend of his pending fate (274). Addressing the latter case, one critic suggests

that “contemporary man is now capable only of relationships with passive objects”

(Kuroko Kazuo, qtd. in Strecher, “Magical Realism” 285). This observation has merit

when describing someone who has lost command of his destiny—like watashi—but

boku’s case is different. Boku openly addresses his objectives to the Librarian because he

believes that he has some control over their collective fate; watashi, on the other hand,

has given up and accepted his outcome.

Boku learns that his mind is something he possesses and can retain despite the

absence of his shadow. He finds he can even restore the Librarian’s mind, even though

she had lost it long ago. Bringing his shadow to the Pool, he urges it to leave the End of

the World without him: “This is my world. The Wall is here to hold me in, the River

flows through me, the smoke is me burning. I must know why” (399). His realization of

the truth—that the Town is merely a construction of watashi’s mind—brings him to the

verge of fulfilling his psychological journey. His new self-awareness penetrates to the

real world beyond, where watashi resides. Despite his shadow’s statement that boku

“will never know the clarity of distance without me” (399), boku’s decision to stay

behind is final. He is not aware that the convergence of watashi’s mind with boku’s

world means that boku, in his current state, will be erased; he is losing one set of

memories and identity (his shadow) to replace it with another (watashi). The merging of
 63

worlds marks the completion of the Self, yet the novel ends before either of the narrators

make direct contact with the other. Not until The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle will we see in

concrete terms an achievement of the protagonist’s quest for his core identity and its

aftermath. However, true enlightenment (and its association with supreme knowledge

and bliss) remains elusive in Murakami. Although the conscious and subconscious

worlds that make up watashi’s brain are eventually rejoined together, what effect this

produces can only be surmised.

Critical interpretation suggests a general consensus that, once again, neither

watashi nor boku achieve lasting individuation in Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Referring to

the novel’s ending, Philip Gabriel, one of Murakami’s English translators, writes, “the

narrator wind[s] up trapped in the walled-in world of his unconscious, his shadow

attempting an escape from this seemingly idyllic, yet dystopic realm” (156). This

entrapment may be true from the perspective of his shadow, but not necessarily from that

of boku, since he has learned that it is possible to make small changes for the better in

this world. Another critic darkly contends that, “When the last barriers between ego self

and the dream self dissolve, with the aid of that clever cybernetic hardware, Words and

Worlds end” (Porush 38). Yet another claims that watashi is “stranded” inside his

subconscious (Keller 55). Strecher sums up the conclusion in more general terms by

distinguishing Murakami protagonists between those who are locked within their own

barriers and those who possess the ability to open themselves to other people:

Murakami's protagonists try to solve this dilemma first by seeking the Other
within themselves, with predictably unsatisfactory results, and more recently seek
a similar solution through their efforts to reach out to others. All the while such
attempts are hindered by a social system that encourages people to accept an
identity bestowed through participation in the consumerist economic utopia of late
 64

twentieth-century Japan, rather than by seeking something unique within

themselves. (Strecher, “Magical Realism” 295)

While watashi serves as the former, selfish style of narrator, boku provides a glimpse of a

Murakami protagonist’s potential to commit himself to others. Yet because boku must

share his Self with watashi, his achievement is incomplete. In The Wind-Up Bird

Chronicle, the “more recent” form of Murakami protagonist to which Strecher alludes

has an entire novel to himself.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World demonstrates a clear

progression from A Wild Sheep Chase regarding the protagonist’s ultimate ability to

identify himself and bring his two disparate selves fully together. He has grown from the

self-interested, solitary hero who must be pushed into action by others (i.e. the secretary

and his psychic girlfriend) to one whose aspirations entail a greater measure of personal

sacrifice and volition (i.e. watashi’s wounded stomach and nightmarish trek through the

sewers as well as boku’s reassembly of the Librarian’s mind and rescue of his shadow).

While the hidden side of the protagonist’s self was only revealed in the climax of A Wild

Sheep Chase, in Hard-Boiled Wonderland Murakami explores both sides, maintaining

that relationships with other characters (especially women) are crucial to self-realization.

Thus joined, it can be presumed (though not proven) that boku and watashi enjoy some

measure of accomplishment, one that lasts far longer than the first boku’s brief

conversation with the Rat. Hard-Boiled Wonderland ends with the potential of

permanent happiness, in which watashi resumes boku’s relationship with the Librarian,

who becomes his substitute for the “real” librarian he had left behind. While love may

only be peripheral to the novel’s themes, it does not make a bad consolation prize. The

Jungian stranger, for the moment, is appeased. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, we will
 65

see how Murakami’s protagonist, finally receiving both a name and a stronger sense of

identity, will continue the search for his subconscious mind and attain greater, more

demonstrable success. The sacrifices he makes will bring him closer not only to his own

self, but also to another woman character: his wife.

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Chapter Three

Achieving a New Breakthrough: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Nejimaki-dori

Kuronikuru)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle marks a major shift in the identity of the Murakami

protagonist, as he moves beyond the borders of his own self and strives to save another,

freeing himself in the process. While he is not entirely heroic, he has developed beyond

the selfish, impassive personality of boku in A Wild Sheep Chase. He has also come to

possess a broader sense of perception and feeling than the watashi/boku combination of

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is thus

the novel in which the traditional Murakami protagonist breaks the bonds constricting his

Self and finds a new sense of purpose; as Rubin writes, boku “finally abandons his stance

of cool detachment to embrace commitment” (Music of Words 205). Whereas

Murakami’s earlier works present the reader with “a comfortable yet mindless and

antievolutionary world” in which the barriers to communication and self-knowledge are

too overwhelming, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the protagonist’s next step to

confronting the Jungian stranger and thereby unifying his Self (Murakami Fuminobu

139).

Without a doubt, due to the protagonist’s expanded sensitivity and consciousness,

Wind-Up Bird depicts his most successful quest among the three novels discussed. The

aloof and cynical narrator of A Wild Sheep Chase rebels against authority and neglects

those who need him (such as his business partner) or try to help him (such as his psychic

girlfriend) when he feels they are no longer relevant to his goals. The split-mind of

watashi in Hard-Boiled Wonderland is torn between two conflicting desires: his

subconscious love of the Librarian and his conscious need to preserve his core identity.
 67

The protagonist of Wind-Up Bird, however, is more mature, empathetic, and determined;

his triumph in breaking through to his subconscious and freeing his wife from the

manipulation of her brother requires greater sacrifice than any Murakami novel has

shown thus far. The number of important characters—as always, particularly female—

coming to his aid along the way is even greater than before. Once again, they guide him

through the four key phases of his psychological process—but this time his journey

moves along a circular path that leaves lasting, tangible benefits in his life. The stages

are broken down, once more, as:

(1) Awareness: The influence of psychic or otherwise intuitive characters warn and

guide the protagonist (often in cryptic fashion) towards an understanding of the

dual conscious-subconscious nature of reality;

(2) Encouragement: After hearing one man’s tragic yet powerful story, the

protagonist gains confidence that he can achieve his own glimpse of the

subconscious and its resident Jungian stranger;

(3) Identification: He discovers a physical device that will serve as a gateway to his

subconscious and allow his ambitious spiritual journey to take place; and finally

(4) Fulfillment: His encounter with the Jungian stranger in his subconscious causes a

major change in the physical world, thus enabling him to resume his status as a

normal man and husband who no longer possesses special powers.

In this way, the circle prescribed by his Self is accomplished. 5 While this new and

improved boku still receives more assistance for his quest than he gives in return, his

ultimate achievement is not only for his own benefit. This is another departure from the

                                                            
5
As quoted in the introduction, Jung writes, “The self is not only the centre, but also the whole
circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious” (qtd. in Colman 157, my emphasis).
 68

other two novels, as will be shown in the following plot synopsis. The protagonist’s new

altruism enables him to counteract the sociological deficit incurred by his predecessors. 6

For the first time, the protagonist has a name. Toru Okada is an unemployed

Tokyo suburbanite who spends his days at domestic leisure while his wife, Kumiko,

works long hours. One morning, while cooking, he is interrupted by the phone call of an

oddly familiar yet unknown woman. Pleading for ten minutes of his time, she soon turns

the conversation sexually obscene, and he hangs up. Pressed by his increasingly distant

wife to look for their missing cat, Toru makes a circuit through his quiet neighborhood

and meets May Kasahara, a teenage outcast possessing a morbid fascination with death.

He is later approached by a psychic named Malta Kano, who offers cryptic information

about the lost cat. When Kumiko never returns from work, both Malta and her sister

Creta provide their guidance. Creta tells Toru about her life of never-ending pain, which

led her to attempted suicide, prostitution, and an encounter with his malevolent brother-

in-law, Noboru Noboru Wataya, who both physically and psychologically “defiled” (41)

her. Now a psychic “prostitute of the mind” (212), Creta enters Toru’s dreams and

causes him to believe that Kumiko has been spirited away by her brother and is losing her

identity. His suspicions intensify his identification of Noboru Wataya as his mortal

enemy.

However, Toru lacks a plan to bring Kumiko back, and the psychological

assistance he receives from May Kasahara and the two sisters is worthless without a

means to take action. His breakthrough comes when he meets Lieutenant Mamiya, an

elderly veteran haunted by memories of extreme suffering during his years as a soldier in

                                                            
6
The heroism of boku of Hard-Boiled Wonderland may be the exception, but he is only one “half” of the
narrative duo.
 69

Japan’s ill-fated Manchurian campaign and later as a prisoner of war. Lt. Mamiya

describes a life-changing experience he had at the bottom of a well in the middle of the

Mongolian desert. It is this story that prompts Toru to believe that he needs a place to

focus on his thoughts. He goes to the lot of a nearby abandoned house (the same place

where he met May Kasahara), uncovers the lid of its deep dry well, and climbs to the

bottom. Submerged in total darkness and with little food or water, he opens a portal to

his subconscious, which is depicted as a dreamlike hotel with winding corridors. He

realizes that this unknown side of his dual Self holds the key to locating and rescuing

Kumiko. When he emerges from the well days later, he discovers a dark blue mark on

his face: a symbol of his passage into the subconscious realm.

May Kasahara is the first to react to this mark, but soon she retreats to a remote

region of Japan; the series of letters she sends him have no return address. Toru’s mark

then draws the attention of the wealthy Nutmeg Akasaka, whose father sported a similar

one before his death on a Manchurian battlefield. Under her employment, Toru uses his

newfound powers to restore the lost and shattered identities of women seeking his

services. Nutmeg and her mute son Cinnamon take control of the abandoned house and

give Toru daily access to the special well, which he continues to use as a gateway to his

subconscious in his quest for Kumiko. Noboru Wataya, whose political power and

influence have been rising, allows Toru to hold a computer “chat” with Kumiko—but this

is only his cunning way to gain information about the Akasakas’ business and their secret

well. Via his brief electronic exchange, Toru confirms his suspicions about Kumiko’s

desperate situation, so he refuses to believe that her resistance to his rescue attempts is of

her own volition. He tries many times to reach her through his subconscious, and at long
 70

last he penetrates her dark hotel room and insists he has finally recognized her as the

mysterious telephone woman. Noboru Wataya enters the room, wielding a knife, and

Toru kills him with a baseball bat. At the same time, the “real” Noboru Wataya collapses

from a cerebral aneurysm, and some time later the vengeful Kumiko is arrested for

murdering him in his hospital bed. The novel concludes with Toru’s reunion with May

Kasahara, where he explains his hopeful plan to wait for Kumiko to recover her original

identity and return home.

The fact that Wind-Up Bird is the first Murakami novel to use personal names for

both the protagonist and most of the other characters is further testament to its

psychological advancement. It is the culmination of the protagonist’s worldview that

begins with the cool and detached boku in A Wild Sheep Chase and progresses to the

“hard-boiled” watashi and compassionate boku in Hard Boiled Wonderland. These

earlier protagonists keep others at a subjective distance; although their levels of empathy

vary, they imply that others are expendable and interchangeable by referring to them with

such names as “the Sheep Man,” “the Rat,” the “man in black,” “my girlfriend,” “the

Gatekeeper,” “the Librarian,” and “the Professor.” With Wind-Up Bird, however, the use

of personal names helps the identity of the protagonist and his supporting characters

become “stable and individualized,” a quality that cannot be conveyed by common nouns

(Seats 204).

Names are also Jungian symbols, functioning as “interconnecting links between

the conscious and the collective unconscious, as they bring into consciousness in

representable form the otherwise unknowable archetypes” (Shelburne 43). These

archetypes were never represented so clearly in the previous two novels. Toru’s name
 71

means “passing through” to refer to his new-found ability to traverse the wall of his

subconscious, which is symbolized by the well’s stone wall. At best, this feat is

accomplished by his predecessors only at the climax of the other novels, and with more

effort and less elegance. Kumiko’s name, as Rubin explains, has “overtones of neatly

bundling things together, arranging things, or, from another ‘kumu,’ to draw water from a

well” (208). Noboru Wataya’s first name pertains to “climbing” or “ascending,” which

corresponds to his rapid rise to political power. Other characters, notably the sisters

Malta and Creta Kano and the mother-son duo Nutmeg and Cinnamon Akasaka, use

aliases. Such created identities either relate to the characters’ sense of purpose or ensure

their public anonymity, yet as proper names they “must be seen as [Murakami’s] attempt

to combat exchangeability and hold fast [their] uniqueness” (Cassegard 88). This quality

ensures that names, like Toru’s well, are also potential passageways to the subconscious.

They have “a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that is never precisely defined or fully

explained…As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp

of reason” (Jung, Man and His Symbols 4).

Without the support and motivation of the other characters, however, the

associations to the “wider ‘unconscious’ aspect” that proper names provide would be

wasted. Like his counterparts, Toru is guided towards his core identity via a number of

different people. They act as collective enablers “for Toru to bring himself into direct

contact with [Kumiko’s] hidden, unrecognizable ‘core consciousness,’” but to reach her

consciousness he must first navigate through the dim, haunted corridors—represented as

an empty, sprawling hotel—of his own (Strecher, “Magical Realism” 89). The

abruptness of her vanishing and his decision to find her motivates him not only to
 72

collaborate with those who offer him clues, but also to reveal his feelings far more openly

than ever before. As always, women play the strongest, most pivotal roles and take

special pains to help him to his goal. Toru’s progress, which I will once again examine in

terms of the four-step psychological process, is dependent upon the collective

information and support they provide. With only one exception, these women fade from

the narrative when their work is done—another Murakami characteristic. 7

The paranormal realm of Wind-Up Bird is the most tangible of the three novels.

Even in their physical absence, certain female characters—like Creta Kano, May

Kasahara, and especially Kumiko—maintain a strong psychological connection with the

protagonist. His empowered sense of commitment is thus a product of Wind-Up Bird’s

stronger sense of the supernatural. Toru’s interaction with that hidden world gives him

the determination to push onward not only for himself but also, most importantly, for

Kumiko. Instead of accepting “loneliness as [his] sad but also sentimentally sweet fate”

like his counterparts, he decides to fight” (Cassegard 83). His willingness to step beyond

the bounds of himself allows both his personal and profound connections with other

characters to be broader and more penetrating than ever before. To help demonstrate this,

I have added a new column to the relationship table featured in Chapters 1 and 2. Once

again, to illustrate the importance of the female characters, their names are displayed in

boldface:

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and

Relationship A Wild The Wind-Up Bird
the End of the World
Type Sheep Chase Chronicle
boku watashi
The Basic The Rat’s ex- The Junior and Big Toru’s uncle

                                                            
7
In A Wild Sheep Chase, the most notable disappearance is boku’s girlfriend. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland,
watashi’s librarian girlfriend vanishes for the middle part of the novel, and the professor’s granddaughter
is missing when he waits for her at the café. In the end, however, it is he who leaves her behind.
 73

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and

Relationship A Wild The Wind-Up Bird
the End of the World
Type Sheep Chase Chronicle
boku watashi
girlfriend Caretaker Boy Realtor
black-suited Mr. Honda
secretary Ushikawa
the Sheep
Professor
The Personal J, the bar- The Colonel The Professor Lieutenant Mamiya
owner The The Malta Kano
boku’s Gatekeeper Professor’s Cinnamon Akasaka
business granddaughter
partner
boku’s ex-
wife
owner of the
Dolphin
Hotel
The Profound the limousine The Librarian May Kasahara
chauffeur Librarian girlfriend Creta Kano
boku’s boku’s
Nutmeg Akasaka
girlfriend shadow

The the Sheep watashi (his boku (his inner Kumiko/the

Subconscious Man/The Rat outer self) self) Telephone Woman
Noboru Wataya

The subconscious relationships displayed in the table—the protagonist’s suicidal

friend the Rat, the alternate side of his Self, and his wife Kumiko—lie at the very end of

his psychological journeys. As always, the basic, personal, and profound relationships

act as enablers for the subconscious ones. However, in Wind-Up Bird, the specific

purpose of the four categories has again changed; Toru’s open and honest nature is very

different from the social aspects of his counterparts. In A Wild Sheep Chase, boku’s

hierarchal relationships were important to demonstrate how difficult it was for anyone but
 74

his long-departed friend to penetrate his tough exterior, and in Hard-Boiled Wonderland

the table depicted how other characters made the protagonist’s split selves gradually

aware of one another as their worlds converged. While both previous novels depict the

protagonist’s penetration to the other side of his Self, Wind-Up Bird offers the most

dramatic example of his ability to affect direct change upon one world via the other. 8 His

ability is enabled partially by his willingness to listen—and the novel is full of characters

telling him their stories. More honest and receptive almost from the start, he no longer

needs to “rank” his relationships as he commits himself to his goal. Despite his greater

impartiality, some characters nonetheless have more influence than others. The deeper

the relationship, as presented in the table, the more Toru gains. By embracing not only

his commitment to Kumiko but also the stories and assistance of others, he transcends his

Self and becomes a better friend, husband, and person.

This quality, once again, makes Wind-Up Bird the most optimistic of the three

novels. Toru’s empathy brings his reality from physical to subconscious to physical

again, thus denoting wholeness. Unlike boku in A Wild Sheep Chase, Toru’s return to

normalcy does not leave him isolated. He resumes his unremarkable life with no further

need of sacrifice, which is a large contrast to the losses that both boku and watashi incur

in Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Although Toru’s four-step psychological process follows

the same general route as the previous protagonists, his quest reveals a circular nature

that is demonstrated most notably via the return of Kumiko to the conscious, physical

world. The appearance of his mysterious facial mark after his first successful “passing

through” to his subconscious and its later disappearance after he completes his mission is
                                                            
8
It is true that boku of A Wild Sheep Chase learns how to destroy the sheep via his subconscious interaction
with the Rat, but the novel’s pessimistic ending effectively negates any sense of real triumph. This is
particularly true due to the resurgence of dark and evil forces in the next two novels.
 75

another indication of his rounded path. Yet his progress could not exist without the help

of other characters. By sequentially providing awareness, encouragement, identification,

and fulfillment of Toru’s fight for Kumiko’s return, they play a critical role throughout

the phases in awakening his mind towards his ultimate confrontation with Kumiko and

Noboru Wataya in the dreamlike hotel. As I move through each of them, I will also

touch upon the significance of Toru’s relationships with the major characters from the

table on pages 72-73 and identify those who enable the steps of his journey. In this way,

his relationships are intricately connected to his Jungian psychological process.

The awareness phase of Wind-Up Bird, unlike that in the previous novels, is the

most complicated of the four. It introduces several characters, two of whom (the

telephone woman/Kumiko and May Kasahara) maintain their influence until the novel’s

conclusion. Yet it all begins with Mr. Honda. Toru recalls how, early in their marriage,

he and Kumiko were ordered by her family to visit the old man, a veteran of the

Nomonhan Incident of 1939, to “receive his teaching” (53). Mr. Honda had been a

member of the Japanese army that was annihilated by the Soviets during a bloody, four-

month battle in the vast border region between Manchuria and Mongolia. Japan’s final

stand in this bleak location brought a disastrous end to its attempt to extend its forces

westward through China and Russia, as nearly 45,000 Japanese were killed (Neeno,

“Nomonhan”). Mr. Honda survived due to his special precognitive abilities, but the

tremendous waste of human life for no gain weighed heavily on Japan in the ensuing

years. Toru explores this hidden repository of guilt and horror-ridden memories as his

own extraordinary powers take form. Despite his claim that their visits with Mr. Honda
 76

“were not prompted by a belief on our part in his spiritual powers,” the old man’s

enigmatic words of warning are remarkably prescient (49):

The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and
down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find
the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find
the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If
you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is
darkness. (Wind-Up Bird 51)

This piece of advice foretells Toru’s heeding of the “flow” marked by the unseen wind-

up bird’s unique call. This strange creature has the power “to wind the spring of our

quiet little world,” thus “[keeping] time flowing forward, creating temporal distance

between past and present” (9; Strecher, Reader’s Guide 61-62). Those who can perceive

the wind-up bird’s resonant call have latent paranormal gifts such as precognition,

clairvoyance, or the ability to seek out and isolate the core identities of others as actual

physical entities. Toru comes to possess this final ability after his descent into the well—

after perceiving the right time to “go down,” as Mr. Honda predicts.

Yet Toru admits that, at the time, he and Kumiko had attributed Mr. Honda’s

mystic warnings and war stories as “fairy tales” and hence eventually forgot them, only

to dredge them up again years later as their relevance becomes clear (53). By this time,

in the novel’s present period, his life has begun to take a downward turn: he is jobless,

the cat is missing, and his wife has grown more distant and volatile. As the relationship

table indicates, due to his late awareness, Toru’s association with Mr. Honda has never

broken out of the basic category. It takes the collective influence of four different women

as well as an encounter with Mr. Honda’s old war colleague Lt. Mamiya to push him

closer to the conviction that only by focusing on his inner Self will he make sense of the

external world.
 77

The appearance of these women, all somehow connected to Toru’s troubling

situation, is what convinces him that Mr. Honda’s powers were real and that it is possible

to tap into the subconscious realm. Notably, the unnamed “telephone woman” holds the

greatest secret. Her plea for his time and attention violates Toru’s quiet little world, thus

extending his awareness stage from his meetings with Mr. Honda into the present day.

Her initial tool for alerting him is the telephone, which is “merely one more version of

the ‘tunnel’ that always separates the internal and external minds of the Murakami

protagonist” (Strecher, “Magical Realism” 288). When Kumiko vanishes and Toru

ventures into room 208 of the subconscious hotel, it dawns on him that this woman is

actually Kumiko herself. From the dimness, she pleads:

“Toru Okada, I want you to discover my name. But no: you don’t have to
discover it. You know it already. All you have to do is remember it. If you can
find my name, then I can get out of here. […] You don’t have time to stay lost.
Every day you fail to find it, Kumiko Okada moves that much farther away from
you.” (Wind-Up Bird 246)

The telephone woman/Kumiko utilizes the voice of the Jungian stranger, trying to

establish a bridge to Toru’s conscious mind from within by asking him to realize her

name (and identity) by giving it physical form. This is the essence of Toru’s quest, and it

resembles the manner in which watashi’s hidden black box tries to link itself to his

consciousness in Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Due to Noboru Wataya’s brutal removal of

her core identity, Kumiko cannot cross the gap to her husband on her own, and nor can

Toru pinpoint her precise location without the help of others. He draws closer to her both

physically and subconsciously, but in her scrambled state she alternately resists and

beckons him. Just like boku in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, writes Strecher, “the longer she
 78

is separated from her ‘black box,’ the less likely she is to understand the means to

reconnect with it or, for that matter, to care about doing so” (“Magical Realism” 293).

For this reason, Toru must become proactive, aggressive, and even violent in

order to bring her back. His predecessors are too detached from their respective worlds

to feel that their actions have any effect. They only penetrate to their unknown selves

because they have no other choice: boku of A Wild Sheep Chase is menaced by the

Boss’s secretary, and the dual narrators of Hard-Boiled Wonderland are motivated by

threats of violence and death as well as the impending obliteration of their worlds.

Toru’s precarious situation is not a threat to his own livelihood, but on Kumiko’s. His

mission to free her is based both on his love for her—a love he admits—and on his desire

to put an end to the continuum of historical violence of which Noboru Wataya is a

malevolent part. The exchange below comes from his final subconscious encounter with

Kumiko, where he insists that he has finally “discovered” her name, just as she had

requested:

She released a little sigh in the darkness. “Why do you want so badly to bring me
back?”
“Because I love you,” I said. “And I know that you love me and want me.”
“You sound pretty sure of yourself,” said Kumiko—or Kumiko’s voice. (Wind-Up
Bird 575)

His identification of Kumiko and profession of love bring about the final transformation

of his connection to his wife. Comparative literature scholar Michael Seats writes,

“Boku’s relation with Kumiko moves from a highly corporeal to an auditory one,

conducted over the telephone—and then finally, to a ‘disembodied’ modality: a series of

virtual dialogues conducted via the ‘e-mail’ format” (283). Yet due to the novel’s

circular nature, in which Kumiko moves from reality to the subconscious and finally back
 79

to reality again, their computer “chat” is not the final stage of their relationship. By

confronting Kumiko in her psychological prison and killing the wordless and faceless

Noboru Wataya, Toru heals her identity and brings her back to the corporeal world. His

final thought as he leaves the hotel of his subconscious is, “I’ll never come back here

again” (587)—meaning his powers have been spent. Despite Kumiko’s liberation,

however, she is not guaranteed to return to normal. This will be discussed at the end of

this chapter.

Chronologically, we have moved from Toru’s basic-level relationship with Mr.

Honda to his subconscious-level relationship with his wife, which itself has come full-

circle. Yet before he can proceed to the next phase of his journey, Toru meets three other

women who help convince him of his own potential paranormal abilities. May Kasahara

presses Toru into an evolving state of awareness of Kumiko’s fate and what he must do to

be reunited with her. By introducing him to the well in the abandoned lot and later

trapping him within it, she plays among the most important roles in Wind-Up Bird.

According to Strecher, she has “a central, even critical role…by expressing directly much

of what we, the reader, might wish Toru would understand on his own” (Reader’s Guide

27). Like Kumiko, she accompanies Toru through all four stages of his quest with her

astute and blunt observations. She recognizes the heroic and empathetic elements of his

character that neither of the other two protagonists in A Wild Sheep Chase or Hard-Boiled

Wonderland fully possess. May tells him:

“You’re falling all over yourself, trying to wrestle with this big whatever-it-is, and
the only reason you’re doing it is so you can find Kumiko. […] In a way, you
probably are fighting for a lot of other people at the same time you’re fighting for
Kumiko. And that’s maybe why you look like an absolute idiot sometimes.”
(Wind-Up Bird 324-325)
 80

Although she disappears from the narrative midway through, the detailed letters that she

sends to him serve as her way of maintaining her psychological presence. She is also the

first person to be affected by Toru’s mark; in the same manner as the female clients Toru

meets via Nutmeg Akasaka, May Kasahara kisses his mark and feels a charge of energy

that both fascinates and scares her. As she writes, in one of her letters:

“That mark is maybe going to give you something important. But it also must be
robbing you of something. Kind of like a trade-off. And if everybody keeps
taking stuff from you like that, you’re going to be worn away until there’s nothing
left of you.” (Wind-Up Bird 463)

May’s accurate predictions and observations (whether in person or from afar) serve as a

constant stabilizing, validating force for Toru. Her intrinsic understanding of his new

abilities is only matched by that of Nutmeg Akasaka. Her resumption of physical form in

the novel’s last scene runs parallel to Kumiko’s return, reestablishing her significance

and helping to close the circle of Toru’s four-step psychological process.

The Kano sisters are the other two women who motivate Toru in his initial period

of discovery about the dual nature of the Self. Malta Kano first uses her psychic powers

to provide insight on the whereabouts of the missing cat, but this is merely her pretext for

becoming involved in the case of the missing Kumiko as well. Yet because Toru is still

reeling from his newfound solitude, his relationship with Malta does not move beyond

the personal level. It is her sister Creta Kano, however, who takes Toru much more

deeply into his quest. Her invasion of his dreams and her revelation about Noboru

Wataya both serve as jarring events in Toru’s awakening. From her ordeal with his

brother-in-law, Creta gained the ability to “divide myself into a physical self and a

nonphysical self” (306), which is what Toru seeks to do in the well. Yet the horrible

manner in which this is done to Creta is a chilling sign of how Kumiko’s identity is
 81

savaged by Noboru Wataya. The “dismantling of [Creta’s] identity…marks [her]

personal transformation—a becoming someone other than herself,” and via her tale Toru

understands the severity of his mission (Seats 294). His mind is not focused, however, at

this point. He and Creta have sexual relations and she wears his wife’s clothes, both in

his dreams and in reality, only adding to his confusion: “Several times the illusion

overtook me that I was doing this with Kumiko, not Creta Kano” (313). All the same,

when Creta asks him to travel to Greece with her, Toru gives it serious thought—a

testament to how close their relationship has become. Yet, as is often the case with

female characters in Murakami, Creta’s role thereafter becomes negligent, and when she

disappears Toru has already dedicated himself to his wife.

Together, the telephone woman/Kumiko, May Kasahara, and Malta and Creta

Kano continue the role of their female counterparts in the previous novels: to guide boku

closer to the Jungian stranger. Yet none of them can do the actual work for him, and

despite his growing understanding, in the awareness phase he has not yet reached his

feeling of empowerment. His self-appointed task of freeing Kumiko is still almost

insurmountable, and he knows little of how to proceed or whether his efforts are

worthwhile. As discussed in the previous chapters, there is at best only a limited sense of

spiritual and psychological fulfillment in Murakami. The identification of the Jungian

figure is only the discovery of one’s personal, relative truth (and is hence not

enlightenment in its pure, spiritual sense). Yet this is the motivation that drives the

Murakami protagonist. Writes book critic Francie Lin, they “know there is no absolute

truth…but that does not stop [them] from seeking one” (“Break on Through”). In the

previous two novels, the narrator undergoes severe psychological and emotional tolls as
 82

he realizes the shortcomings of his success. In A Wild Sheep Chase, boku unblocks his

mind so as to communicate with the Rat, thus enabling him to destroy the evil sheep and,

by extension, the Boss’s secret organization. Yet he accomplishes this only after his

neglected girlfriend disappears, and he becomes as alone and desolate as ever. In Hard-

Boiled Wonderland, the unstoppable fusion of watashi and boku’s consciousnesses

results in the physical death of the former and the psychological obliteration of the latter,

even though watashi’s own consciousness presumably remains intact within boku’s world.

Yet, there being no absolute truth, his actual fate is never revealed.

While this psychological ambivalence lingers in Wind-Up Bird, it is reduced. In

the second phase of Toru’s psychological awakening, that of encouragement, Toru comes

to believe that truth is attainable—that the Jungian stranger will lead him to Kumiko—

when he listens to Lieutenant Mamiya’s story. It is a detailed personal account of his

experiences as a mapmaker for the Japanese Army during the Nomonhan Incident and its

aftermath half a century ago. The tale is a harrowing one told over several chapters in

both conversation and letter form, and its impact on Toru is substantial. Lt. Mamiya

explains that after witnessing the horrifying spectacle of one of his companions being

skinned alive by Mongolian soldiers, he is beaten and thrown naked into a deep well in

the middle of the desert, left to die alone. However, during his time in this dark pit, he

experiences a revelation that will dwell within him for the rest of his regretful, empty life.

Two days in a row, for just a few brief seconds, Lt. Mamiya is bathed in a ray of light

when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky—and then something miraculous

happens:

I was able to descend directly into a place that might be called the very core of my
own consciousness. In any case, I saw the shape of something there. Just
 83

imagine: Everything around me is bathed in light. I am in the very center of a

flood of light. My eyes can see nothing. I am simply enveloped in light. But
something begins to appear there. In the midst of my momentary blindness,
something is trying to take shape. Some thing. Some thing that possesses life.
Like the shadow in a solar eclipse, it begins to emerge, black, in the light. But I
can never quite make out its form. It is trying to come to me, trying to confer
upon me something very much like heavenly grace. I wait for it, trembling. (208)

Yet to his endless regret and chagrin, Lt. Mamiya never gains another glimpse at

what the light possesses, and his perceived ascendance towards celestial paradise is cut

short when the sunlight disappears. His plight is typical in Murakami. The most life-

affirming, spiritually-enriching experiences tend to come at a severe cost, for despite Lt.

Mamiya’s desire to die at that rapturous moment, he will not die even years later as a

prisoner-of-war in a brutal Siberian gulag. When he finally is freed and returns to Japan,

he has no family waiting for him, and he spends the rest of his life alone. In this way he

resembles boku in A Wild Sheep Chase. 9 This is the cost of glimpsing the truth; it reveals

a world that is not cognizant of right or wrong, where one cannot always choose the best

moments to live, die, or kill. The horrendous acts of cruelty and violence that Lt.

Mamiya witnessed have proven this to him, and his account serves as a reminder of

Japan’s inability to reconcile its dark and violent past.

The “thing” that Lt. Mamiya struggles to identify is the Jungian stranger—the

unknown element of his own Self. Yet to Toru, his close encounter shows that the

subconscious can be reached—if not wholly grasped. Toru is encouraged of the

possibility of replicating, and perhaps surpassing, Lt. Mamiya’s experience. The story

(as well as another told to Toru by Nutmeg Akasaka) draws Toru into the continuity of its

reality, from the past to the present. For the first time he realizes that he has become a

part of the unbroken stream of historical violence that Mr. Honda, Lt. Mamiya, and
                                                            
9
Recall the final scene on the beach, in which boku says, “I never cried so much in my life” (353).
 84

Nutmeg’s father had witnessed. Yet rather than despair at the overwhelming sense of

futility, he seeks to transcend the purported barriers and preserve the beam of sunlight for

both himself and Kumiko. Once again, this is his most laudable endeavor, showing that

he “has shifted his moral consciousness from leaving the moral void as it is in

[Murakami’s] early novels to fighting it in this novel” (Murakami Fuminobu 139). While

the other two novels also deal with the moral void (i.e. the Boss’s cruel “Will” of A Wild

Sheep Chase and the brutal information wars in Hard-Boiled Wonderland), it is

Murakami’s raw historical portrayal in Wind-Up Bird that helps to propel Toru forward.

The encouragement that there is a way to find Kumiko gives Toru an urgent moral

epiphany in the middle of the novel, in which he abandons detachment and embraces

commitment: “I had to get Kumiko back. With my own hands, I had to pull her back

into this world. Because if I didn’t, that would be the end of me. This person, this self

that I think of as ‘me’ would be lost” (338). With this bold goal now set in place, he

becomes a “questor seeking not merely romantic and nostalgic connections to the past

but also a more active means of making sense of [his life] and the bewildering plurality of

hyperrealities around [him]” (Gregory, et.al.). Having listened to Lt. Mamiya’s

harrowing account, Toru must delve into not only his subconscious but also that of

Japan’s collective identity so as to uncover the root cause of society’s woes.

In the awareness phase, the female characters demonstrated to Toru that there

exists a world beyond the consciousness, and that it can be accessed and manipulated; Lt.

Mamiya’s story in Toru’s encouragement phase proved that this other world contains the

essence of what he is seeking. Now, in the identification phase, Toru shakes off his

passivity. Wasting little time preparing himself for that hopeful experience, he stashes
 85

some supplies in a knapsack and climbs down into the well of the nearby abandoned

house. He views the well as a physical conduit, or portal, to his subconscious mind.

Such devices exist in other forms throughout Murakami’s body of work, as the author

admits: “Subterranean worlds—wells, underpasses, caves, underground springs, and

rivers, dark alleys, subways—have always fascinated me and are an important motif in

my novels” (Murakami, qtd. in Matsuoka 307-08). It could be argued by extension that

the Rat’s abandoned house in A Wild Sheep Chase and the vast Tokyo underground in

Hard-Boiled Wonderland also serve as conduits, but Wind-Up Bird’s well is the first

conduit in Murakami to be used expressly for that purpose. 10

Toru enters the well in order to begin his first proactive “passing through” to his

core identity, where the Jungian stranger lurks.

Taking a breath, I sat on the floor of the well, with my back against the wall. I
closed my eyes and let my body become accustomed to the place. […] Here in
this darkness, with its strange sense of significance, my memories began to take
on a power they had never had before. The fragmentary images they called up
inside me were mysteriously vivid in every detail, to the point where I felt I could
grasp them in my hands. (Wind-Up Bird, 221-222)

Unable to distinguish himself from the viscid blackness, Toru’s penetration, both

figurative and literal, takes him through the stone wall and into the dim corridor of the

eerie, dreamlike hotel. In this transcendental state he moves from his subjective, “self”-

centered perspective closer to the embodiment of his full Jungian Self. He passes into a

“state of undifferentiation, a state of abjection, where he is only flesh and no-subject, or

where the borders of his subjectivity are at best elusive and tenuous” (Seats 291). It is a

paradoxical moment that embodies both the Eastern, Zen notion of the self as nothingness

                                                            
10
Proper names, due to their stabilizing and individualizing (to paraphrase Seats) tendencies on a person’s
identity, are another conduit linking them to an underlying meaning. See page 70.
 86

and Jung’s Western concept of the archetypal Self as completeness: the unified

consciousness and unconscious of a person. Ironically, both concepts are symbolized by

a circle, which is the “universal pattern for the symbolic expression of the archetypal self

or what Jung calls ‘the God within’” (Golden 220).

Already Toru is much better-equipped for his attempted journey to the other

world. May Kasahara, not realizing that he has descended into the well, pulls up the

ladder; later, when she is not convinced of his fear of being trapped and abandoned, she

closes the well cover and seals him in complete darkness. With these actions she helps

Toru consummate this stage of his psychological process; Toru narrates, “my conscious

mind began to slip away from my physical body. I saw myself as the wind-up

bird…Someone would have to wind the world’s spring in its place” (256). In this

dreamlike state, he enters the subconscious hotel, encounters the telephone

woman/Kumiko, and reemerges into the physical world with the facial mark as evidence

of his psychological breakthrough. His relationship with both May Kasahara and Creta

Kano deepens, as they both recognize the mark’s significance in their own ways: Creta

desires to have sex with him in order to “be liberated from this defilement-like something

inside me” (312). May kisses the mark and has Toru touch her face, and he detects that

“the waves of her consciousness pulsed through my fingertips and into me” (326). In

addition, the mark leads Toru to Nutmeg Akasaka, who sees it as a symbol of Toru’s

power to heal fractured identities. It is “a sign of his mystical power, but also a living

presence, an external emblem of the ‘black box’ that lurks inside his mind” (Strecher,

“Magical Realism” 291). Together, these three women demonstrate that Toru’s brief

passage into his subconscious has given him paranormal abilities.

 87

The protagonists of A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland are

entrapped within their worlds and identities, as they possess no physical device upon

which they can exert their subconscious energies. Boku of A Wild Sheep Chase is too

cynical and aloof, and watashi/boku of Hard-Boiled Wonderland are alienated from the

other side via, respectively, the black box implant and the Wall surrounding the Town. In

Wind-Up Bird, however, Toru learns that he is not only living in a world where

penetration to the subconscious is possible, but that such “passing through” is also an

inherent part of the livelihood of several characters offering assistance. During the

novel’s first half his role is passive—not just socially, but sexually as well. Strecher

observes, “There is a link between the ‘core identity,’ sexuality, and violence, one which

is perhaps inevitable given the fact that coitus itself involves a penetration and is thus

innately a violation, a literal invasion of the body” (“Magical Realism” 290). Toru is

penetrated by the erotically charged words of the telephone woman, by Creta Kano’s

appearance in his dreams, and by the lips and tongues of female clients probing his mark

for psychological healing. In these ways he himself serves as a conduit for these women;

his passivity “proves liberating to those with whom he comes into contact, as a means of

recovering their own sense of active selfhood” (Strecher, Reader’s Guide 32).

Yet it is Nutmeg Akasaka who allows Toru’s personal quest for Kumiko to

proceed from the submissive role to the active one. The first three phases of his

awakening are but a prelude to his final task of enacting his wife’s rescue. He has

achieved his ability to pass into the other world but is still struggling with navigating its

subliminal corridors. His freedom to keep utilizing the well is endangered until Nutmeg,

taking advantage of her vast financial resources, purchases the property and gives him
 88

discreet daily access. The well is the foundation of his subconscious struggle, and

because Nutmeg is aware of his special abilities, she joins May Kasahara and Creta Kano

as the third member of the profound triumvirate from the relationship table. Over the

course of several chapters, she tells him her story about her father’s demise as a cavalry

veterinarian in Manchuria during the war, her subsequent upbringing in Japan by her

mother, and the gruesome and senseless murder of her husband. Her narrative, along

with the writings of her mute son Cinnamon, is also important in providing further insight

in the historical continuum of which Toru has unknowingly become a part. Within his

new employment as an identity “healer,” Toru’s identification phase of his journey is

nearly complete.

One last element remains, however. Although Toru knows that the well provides

him subconscious access to his wife, on a physical level he is still lost. It is not his overt

mission to find her in the physical world, but during his trials in the well he is stymied by

his lack of direct interaction with Kumiko. His meeting with the shady and cunning

Ushikawa, who works for Noboru Wataya, provides the opportunity he needs. The typed

computerized conversation that Ushikawa arranges for Toru and Kumiko—who, of

course, responds to him only from the other side of the screen—allows Toru to “tell” her,

“Slowly but surely…I am getting closer to the core, to that place where the core of things

is located. I wanted to let you know that. I’m getting closer to where you are, and I

intend to get closer still” (491). Despite her resistance, he knows that her mind has been

forcibly transformed by her brother. His electronic vow serves its purpose: to make his

ongoing psychological process real—not only to her, but also to Noboru Wataya. Both

of them wait for him in the subconscious hotel, where his journey ends, and his bold
 89

declaration of commitment brings about the next and final phase: fulfillment. He has

been given all the knowledge and tools he requires to find Kumiko, and unlike his

counterparts in the previous two novels, his access to a dedicated conduit gives him a

tremendous advantage. In the well, he creates his own metaphysical space, a sanctuary in

which he recharges, refocuses, and relaunches his mind for his mission. As he explains

to May Kasahara: “This way, you can really concentrate. It’s dark and cool and quiet”

(253).

Toru lives in the 1980s, which demonstrates Japan’s suffering from “information

overload, the irrelevance of human values and spirituality in a world dominated by the

inhuman logic of postindustrial capitalism, and the loss of contact with other human

beings” (Gregory, et.al). This is the aftermath of the world depicted in A Wild Sheep

Chase, where the corruption of the Boss’s covert organization has emerged into the light

of society. As Toru’s alienation from his “vacant, stagnant, dissatisfying” physical world

grows, the well aligns him with the subconscious world “just beneath the surface…

[wherein] lurks a violent history” (Rubin 213). By focusing on this underworld, Toru

commits himself to “the restoration of destroyed communication with his wife”

(Cassegard 88) and saves her from the all-encompassing, authoritative evil that he

understands is responsible for everything that has gone wrong in modern Japanese

history: from the wartime atrocities against the Chinese, to the senseless sacrifice of

Japanese soldiers, to the suppression of idealism and hope in the 1960s, to the mind-

numbing frustration and boredom of the 1970s, and at last to the soul-draining capitalism

and consumerism of the 1980s.

 90

The present state of darkness is personified by the inexplicable rise of Noboru

Wataya, who represents “the driving force of evil…embedded in capitalism…[who

would be] most likely to direct [Japan] on the course of violence it once took” (Matsuoka

308). He is the human embodiment of the malevolent sheep of A Wild Sheep Chase, as if

it has taken possession of Noboru’s body as it had dominated the Boss; he also possesses

the cunning, power, and malice of both the Semiotecs and the Gatekeeper of Hard-Boiled

Wonderland. The evil and corruption that Mr. Honda, Lt. Mamiya, and Nutmeg’s father

had encountered in the war have become authority figures who now propel the country

even further along the dark trajectory initiated by its imperialist past. While Noboru’s

origins are only implied, so much about Japan’s violent history has been revealed to Toru

that he knows Noboru Wataya to be his—and society’s—ultimate enemy. As such, he

provides a focal point for Toru to defeat, while his counterparts merely faced nebulous

antagonists such as sheep, INKlings, and nameless thugs, none of whom had any personal

connection to them. As Creta Kano tells Toru, “In a world where you are losing

everything, Mr. Okada, Noboru Wataya is gaining everything. In a world where you are

rejected, he is accepted. And the opposite is just as true. Which is why he hates you so

intensely” (312). And which is why Toru must overcome him.

Because of Toru’s fixation on his goal, he is the only protagonist of the three

discussed in this paper to be aware of the clear separation between the external and

internal worlds, and with a stronger grip on this distinction he is the only one equipped to

transcend one to the other. Wind-Up Bird does not clarify the distinction between the real

and the imaginary, but after Toru receives the mark on his face he becomes aware that his

passing through is not his imagination. His actions in both worlds have real
 91

consequences. He can only recover Kumiko’s shredded identity after he has entered her

hotel room, recognized her voice in the darkness 11 , and killed Noboru Wataya, who

himself is waiting for the opportunity to destroy him. Yet even with these obstacles

overcome, and Kumiko returned to the conscious world, for some time thereafter her Self

will remain in tatters. Having been arrested for murdering her brother, she does not make

an actual appearance; the reader cannot ascertain her state of mind and whether her

marriage to Toru will hereafter reflect the many transformations he has undergone for her.

This is, no doubt, Murakami’s intention. The novel’s conclusion is ambiguous,

with the completion of Toru’s four-stage quest falling a bit short of the goal line. Indeed,

despite Wind-Up Bird being the most positive of the three novels, Murakami denies the

reader’s absolute assurance that all is well and that the Jungian circle has indeed been

completed. Instead, the author gives this final exchange between Toru and May

Kasahara so the reader can draw his or her own conclusions:

“And you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird—you’ll stay home and wait for Kumiko again?”
I nodded.
“That’s good…or is it?”
I made my own big white cloud in the cold air. “I don’t know—I guess it’s how
we worked things out.”
It could have been a whole lot worse, I told myself. (Wind-Up Bird 605)

“A whole lot worse,” as has been seen in the previous two novels, is indeed a distinct

possibility. Toru is neither alone, nor have his world and identity been ripped away. He

still lives in a realm of rich possibility and hope, and he may soon learn the full

consequences of his noble actions. As Strecher comments:

We might well imagine that Toru's power as a mystical healer would save
[Kumiko], but, unfortunately, with the destruction of Noboru Wataya, Toru's
                                                            
11
He must remember and speak her name, which again demonstrates why proper names have become so
significant in this novel, as compared to the others.
 92

connection with the “other world” of the unconscious disappears, and with it his
ability to heal. He can now only wait for his wife to rediscover her individual
identity, now that he has helped her to rediscover her name. (“Magical Realism”
293)

He lingers at the perimeter of his Self’s circle, unable to close it fully but patient enough

to remain there for Kumiko and hope for the best. As Jung wrote, “[The subconscious] is

and remains beyond the reach of subjective arbitrary control, a realm where nature and

her secrets can be neither improved upon nor perverted, where we can listen but may not

meddle” (Jung, Psychological Reflections 26). By altering the physical world from

within his subconscious, Toru has meddled to a certain degree, but upon achieving his

selfless objective, his ability and desire have both vanished.

In this sense, Toru is back in the awareness phase once again—aware that his

powers have brought Kumiko back, but aware also that he no longer possesses those

same abilities. The well is filled with water, his mark has disappeared, and every

character except for May Kasahara has faded into obscurity. Although all three

protagonists realize that “an act is needed to open up and to be linked with the other

world,” only Toru has found the means to do so (Kawai, qtd. in Singer & Kimbles 94-95).

Because he has traveled back to the beginning again, he can afford to wait—not only for

Kumiko’s recovery, but also, if necessary, for another chance to perceive the wind-up

bird’s singular call.

 93

Conclusion: Hope for the Future

The overall positive feeling at the conclusion of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is

the proper way to end this lengthy Jungian analysis, as Jung believed in the potential for

everyone to reach a higher state of consciousness. His optimism is not a quality that

Murakami shares. However, when A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and

the End of the World, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are examined as a continuum of

the soul’s search for itself, there is an intensifying sense of hope. Although Murakami’s

protagonists “are mourning…something less specific than the body, the disappearance of

some essential vision, some unified concept of the world in which to place themselves,”

with each novel they grow closer to attaining that vision (Lin, “Break on Through”).

They also increasingly understand the value of reaching out to share that vision with

another person.

The evolution of the Murakami protagonist is especially striking when the scope

of the author’s work is widened to include novels written both before and after the trio

discussed here. Pinball 1973 was published before A Wild Sheep Chase, and Norwegian

Wood emerged between A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End

of the World. During this period, Murakami transitioned from the “conflict between self

and environment in terms of daily, surface reality” to “a kind of ‘simulation approach’ in

which the conflicts existing within his protagonists' personal consciousnesses were

simulated and then projected into the surreal, labyrinthine regions of dream and

personalized, Jungian unconsciousness” (Gregory, et.al., “It Don’t Mean a Thing”). This

expanding vision of the Jungian Self allowed him to explore it in symbolic, dyadic terms:

conscious vs. subconscious, external vs. internal, light vs. dark, and good vs. evil.
 94

Over time, his protagonists grew from the selfish and isolated boku of the early

novels to the fully named and sympathetic heroes of more recent works. Particularly

since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, these characters display a deepening sense of hope

and fellowship. Kafka on the Shore, whose English translation was released in 2006,

provides “a happily ending saga of maturation, of ‘a brand-new world’ for a purged

[protagonist]” (Updike, “Subconscious Tunnels”). 2007’s After Dark also offers a

positive outlook, for “amid the alienation are flickers of hopefulness springing from

seemingly random, serendipitous human interactions and connections” (McAlpin,

“Search”). Although the “moralism [of these novels] can be heartening,” Murakami’s

core themes of alienation and the anti-establishment are unaltered (“Wind-Down Bird”).

Like the three novels of this analysis, even the optimism of his latest works contains an

undercurrent “of nothingness, of emptiness, of blissful blankness” (Updike, ibid.).

Nevertheless, against whatever odds, his protagonists persist in their efforts to overcome

their psycho-social barriers, thereby transcending the borders of their selves and

approaching—without quite reaching—a level of spiritual transcendence.

Jung confronts this very issue, taking it to a level of explicitness that Murakami,

so far, has refrained from exploring. In the passage below, Jung asserts that the

individuation of the Self should not only be a private spiritual quest, but also, in fact, a

moral duty that all of humanity shares. By failing to complete our Jungian circle, we will

never fulfill our human potential of full consciousness. He wrote:

“But why the deuce”—you will certainly ask—“should one at all costs reach a
higher state of consciousness?” This question strikes at the core of the problem,
and I cannot easily answer it. It is a confession of faith. I believe that finally
someone had to know that this wonderful universe of mountains, seas, suns and
moons, milky ways, and fixed stars exists. Standing on a little hill on the East
African plains, I saw herds of thousands of wild beasts grazing in soundless peace,
 95

beneath the breath of the primeval world, as they had done for unimaginable ages
of time, and I had the feeling of being the first man, the first being to know that all
this is. The whole world around me was still in the primeval silence and knew not
that it was. In this very moment in which I knew it, the world came into existence,
and without this moment it would never have been. All nature seeks this purpose
and finds it fulfilled in man and only in the most differentiated, most conscious
man. (Jung, Psychological Reflections 35)

The closest that Murakami comes to Jung’s “confession of faith” is Lt. Mamiya’s

experience in the well, when he is confronted with the shadow in the midst of the

blinding light. Although I have depicted it as the psychological Jungian stranger, Lt.

Mamiya’s term “heavenly grace” also implies a spiritual Other. Addressing his own

pitiable condition, he states that such a glimpse will never last for very long: “The light

shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment…once it is gone and one has failed

to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance” (Wind-Up Bird 209).

Murakami’s protagonists discover this brevity of opportunity for themselves; it is one

thing for them to confront their subconscious selves and yet another to turn this

accomplishment into an enduring benefit.

As mentioned in the introduction, Murakami, along with many Japanese, does not

consider himself religious. 12 It is unlikely, therefore, that he intends to provide a

confession of his own anytime soon. Instead, he puts himself in his protagonists’ shoes.

As Gabriel observes, the author’s autobiographical travel writing is “inextricably linked

to a lonely struggle for self identity,” in which Murakami depicts himself undergoing

many of the same kinds of struggles as his fictional protagonists (Gabriel 155). In one

such kind of excerpt, Murakami writes:

In the mornings when I woke up, I first went to the kitchen and filled the kettle,
and turned on the switch on the electric heater. In order to make coffee. And
                                                            
12
Although Buddhism and Shinto are the dominant religions of Japan and are the basis of countless
historical traditions, most Japanese live a more secular lifestyle than those of many other cultures.
 96

while I waited for the water to boil, I prayed: “Please—let me live a little bit
longer. I need a little more time.” But who should I be praying to? My life up
till now had been too self-centered to allow me to pray to God. (Murakami, qtd. in
Gabriel 156)

His invocation of God is certainly not an admission of faith, but it suggests that at the

very least Murakami is also engaged in his own psychological quest—one in which he

looks to the Jungian stranger for guidance and inspiration in his writing:

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me
intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today,
something you can't normally do in everyday life. It's also a way of descending
deep into my own consciousness. So while I see it as dreamlike, it's not fantasy.
For me the dreamlike is very real. (Murakami, qtd. in “Haruki Murakami”)

This is Murakami’s observance of what Jung called “the spiritual adventure of our

time…the surrender of human consciousness to what is undetermined and

undeterminable” (Psychological Reflections 322). To Murakami, the possibility of self-

discovery in his writing presumably ensures that each of his novels allows him to draw

nearer to his Jungian stranger. Despite his claims of the subconscious being “terra

incognita,” it seems undeniable that from novel to novel, protagonist to protagonist, he is

uncovering more and more of that precious, hidden space. Even though neither he nor

his protagonists have complete and perpetual control of a conduit (like Toru’s well) that

could fully expose the Jungian stranger, core identity, black box, or “rooms in ourselves”

to the light, Murakami believes in the value of such efforts—as wayward and misguided

as they may be.

 97

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