ABSTRACT
Almost from the very beginning of his career, Murakami Haruki has expressed a palpable sense of disquiet in reaction to the tearing down and building up that have been vastly changing the Tokyo cityscape. Collectively, Murakami’s fiction offers a powerful response to and critique of Tokyo’s ongoing spatial transformation and accompanying sociocultural displacement, disconnection, and disorientation. Images of the city’s enormous scale and 24/7 dynamism – contained in repeated references to areas such as Shibuya, Shinjuku, Aoyama, and Akasaka – are integral to Murakami’s work. He also depicts a less visible, more anonymous Tokyo – manifested, for example, in a closed-off alleyway, the stairway of a luxury condo building, and the city’s sewer system – that is equally fundamental to his cityscape settings. Familiarity with those less visible, more anonymous spaces – together with the city’s better-known ones – contributes to a nuanced understanding of Tokyo urban space in Murakami’s fiction for readers both in Japan and beyond its borders. Those ever-transforming spaces illustrate, to quote Frog in Murakami’s story ‘Super-frog Saves Tokyo’, ‘what a fragile condition the intensive collectivity known as “city” really is’ – and, by extension, also illustrate the fragile condition of characters whose lives are inextricably linked with that intensive urban collectivity.
