ABSTRACT
Murakami Haruki’s fiction has two distinct features. First, there is the
recurring hero with a reliable method of life, which achieves the remarkable
coincidence of affirmation (he never says no) and repetition (he never
aspires to change). Second, this hero rarely fails to encounter women, who
cause him to go down the rabbit hole of fantasy, which is frequently
extraordinary and occasionally tempestuous. I read these textual warp and
weft through the psychoanalytical concept of the subject with a Lacanian
focus on desire and sexual difference. Taking the recent short story
collection, Men Without Women (2014), as a notable
instantiation, and indeed culmination, of Murakami’s textual investment in
sexual relationship, I identify the specific notations whereby this last is
shown to be impossible. Simultaneously, there are intimations of an
Other possibility that shifts the subject's relation to
the impossibility, and they are situated at the crossroads of the
extraordinary conjunction of the hero’s phallic organ and incapacity to
desire on the one hand and, on the other, rare instances of woman's
ex-sistence vis-à-vis the phallic function – that is,
Woman. The upshot is the quintessentially Murakamian
textual articulation of the masculine lack, from which man might relate
differently to woman – a possibility appearing precisely amidst the
postmodern conditions of desexualisation.
