ABSTRACT
Two of the most consistent tropes in Murakami Haruki’s fictional landscape throughout his career have been his employment of a metaphysical, timeless ‘other world’ of archetypes; and his fixation on history, particularly that of Japan during the Second World War. This chapter explores how Murakami’s fictional texts represent major historical epochs and events, now in the abstract, now in more concrete terms, utilising the temporally and spatially liberated perspective of the ‘other world’. Covering works from Hitsuji o meguru bōken (1982) to his most recent novel, Kishidanchō goroshi (2017), the chapter argues that Murakami connects concrete historical events with their archetypal groundings in the ‘other world’, creating a complex web of signifiers which may mitigate how we ‘read’ events of the past, encouraging us to rewrite those narratives from our own unique experiential point of view. Our purpose, in part, is to clarify why Murakami’s historical references are simultaneously unsettling and enlightening to readers. For within Murakami’s abstract, metaphysical histories, we are apt to find more personal histories that are, finally, about ourselves.
