Murakami’s Sheep and Post-War Japanese Ideology

Murakami Haruki is one of the most well-regarded yet controversial authors in contemporary Japanese literature. Being the son of two literature professors in postwar Japan, his writing covers a variety of topics from politics, economics, and pop culture. Before he is the author we know now, he dabbled in translation work for Western novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Murakami kept a sense of Japanese locality in his novels with a Western atmosphere which is the base of the paradoxical East-West. For Western readers, the text offers a unique read with a slight touch of nostalgia and for Japanese readers it is a familiar setting with an unexpected twist. Initially aspiring to become an international writer, Murakami soon realized that he had to find his voice in Japanese literature eventually leading him to his unique style of magic realism or whatever.

Magic realism has always been an elusive term; The term itself was first coined by a German historian Franz Roh when he used the term in a piece about a post-expressionism and this magic realism is expressed through the variety of the strange or fantastic ways in which an otherwise mundane object can be presented. He himself wrote in his book German Art in The 20th Century “of course not in the religious psychological sense of ethnology” to assess the confusion. Several writers have tried explaining it and every explanation has seemed to always come out contradictory to the others which may be why most scholars hesitate to define the concept. A criticism against magic realism as an academic concept is its lack of definition, which has resulted in ambiguity. Hjorvardur Harvard Arnason wrote in his encyclopedic book, History of Modern Art, a definition of magic realism that encompasses almost every other explanation of it. As noted by Arnason & Mansfield, “In general, the magic realists, deriving directly de Chirico, create mystery and the marvelous through juxtaposition that are disturbing even when it is difficult to see why.” 

In other words, magic realism writers are not looking to create a new realm of strangeness but, instead to translate the mundane world into one. Different from the ontological approach to magical realism above, epistemological magical realism is distinguished not from its connection to cultural beliefs but to the aspects of knowledge. This allows writers like Jose Luis Borges and Alejo Carpentier to use the genre as an amalgamation of several smaller terms unique to the history and surrounding different cultural regions. In Japan, writers such as Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, and Ryu Murakami weave the struggles that the Japanese public faces as they adapt to an increasingly global culture. Unlike their predecessors, who are slaves to the material expectations of their society, Goto-Jones suggests that they were free to define the meaning of their lives for themselves. 1980s Japan sits in a blend of East-West beliefs as internationalization became the focus of a lot of different aspects of life including consumerization, which is often found in Murakami’s writing by being a familiar yet disconnected writing style that has a distinct American feel in their Japanese writing, as suggested by Rubin (writing in Snyder's Oe and Beyond). Lost in the duality, works from authors like Murakami became increasingly embedded in the 1990s, sometimes known as the "lost decade," that caused Japanese youth to seriously reevaluate what made them Japanese.

Magic Realism was not an outlier in contemporary Japanese Literature; Many authors such as Murakami Haruki, Banana Yoshimoto, Ryu Murakami, and Kenzaburo Oe have dabbled in the genre putting their experiences and beliefs to a more fictional setting. Stylistically, the framework of magic realism allows authors such as Murakami Haruki to experiment with genres while retaining some coherence when his narrative breaks “reasonable expectations.” But this style of writing is what pushes Japanese literary critics to categorize his work as bungaku instead of the well-respected junbungaku. As Japan works its way to change from its neo-Confucianist traditional ways to a more Westernized one it creates a gap. Magical realism had always been an amalgamation of several smaller terms unique to the history and surrounding different cultural regions. Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase expresses Japan’s ideological evolution from the second World War to present day while posing interesting questions of Japan’s future.

Just like authors who come after Murakami in the genre, much of A Wild Sheep Chase has symbolism embedded in between words. He told the story of his protagonist that was set on a mission to find a demonic sheep that was possessing people, using the sheep as a bridge connecting the concept of this world to the other that Murakami often uses. The book earned him the Noma Literary Award for New Writers but was criticized for its “fragmented, discontinuous structure” by the critic Iwamoto. Just like all of his other writings, the hero/narrator’s name is never named, he instead referred to it as “I” or “Boku” in Japanese.

Murakami reflects on his own work: “I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I’d been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill.”

Boku, like a lot of university students in the middle of the upheavals of the 1960s, confesses to not having a purpose in life. 1960s Japan was marked by the failed student activism (Zenkyoto Movement) and other riots towards opposition to American imperialism as well as Japanese monopoly capitalism. The young generation grew up into a country that was in the midst of rapid growth, in contrast to the previous generation that had  witnessed the Second World War. This bred a feeling of discontent among the young Japanese at the time who were confused and not being able to choose their own paths. The new generation was stuck with the social pressure from the  older generations to do a certain job and devote themselves to a certain company just as the individuality and anti-nationalism that the riots bred had been beaten out of them. Boku was left in a state of ambivalence as a personification of the apathetic attitude of an entire generation left afloat as well as ignorance to the world around him.

Nonetheless, Boku soon saw the “fruit of many years of pointless self-discipline” describing how he had increasingly become more of a corporate drone. He is still as before despite the changes that the world has gone through, just as his younger self was, he fell into the corporate 9-to-5 routine.

Boku takes on the role of a listener and tells the bizarre tale of the sheep. The most prominent magical realist element of the book, the sheep, is as bizarre to “Boku” as it is to readers. A popular critic of Murakami, Kojin Karatani, suggests that the sheep as a symbol of contradiction to Western ideology meaning instead of a uniform and certain world it gravitates more towards an individualistic world. The sheep resists the idea of “Western humanism,” against uniqueness and unpredictability as it progressively inhabits different characters throughout post-war Japan. Its first victim was a professor who was tasked to establish a self-sufficiency program based on the sheep for a large-scale North China campaign. The second person to fall prey was a rightwing Boss who grew up suppressed as an Ainu. The sheep entered him as he got released from prison and became the Boss afterwards. The third prey was Boku’s friend Rat, a copywriter who later killed himself along with the sheep as he valued the things that would have been lost if the sheep had won.

Considering the character’s relationship with the sheep, the sheep is not confined to only the modern ethos but also the change into a modernist thinking. The evolution starts with the Sheep professor who was an ambitious man working on uniting East Asia (unity), then a person who came from an alienated culture in his own country who grew up as a right-wing Boss that took control of politics for his riches (consolidation and defense of culture), and ends with the son of a merchant who became rich by taking advantage of the wars (future of conceptual unity). Tracing the path of the sheep through these three figures, Murakami’s genealogy of Japan’s modern ideology is thus presented to the reader through his effective use of magic realism.

[This essay is by Rani Putriarni Taulu. It's based on her graduation thesis in Culture, Society and Media at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. Together with literature and history, she's interested in language studies.]