ABSTRACT
In Murakami Haruki's Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), the brilliantly insightful sixteen-year-old shōjo, Kasahara Mei, is the most important and complex companion to the protagonist, Okada Tōru, in his orphean search for his wife. As pointed out by Murakami himself (Murakami 1995b: 274), 1 Mei plays multiple roles in Tōru's journey, and I will argue here that she challenges the novel's conventional genderization of the psychic journey, whereby the unconscious, irrational, bodily, corrupt, cyclical “other” is female to the rational, cerebral, clean, linear time-oriented consciousness of the male.
