Imagining the Contour: Japanese-ness in the Fiction of Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro

• Main Authors: Yu-lun Hsiao, 蕭煜倫
• Other Authors: Lili Hsieh
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/17399114861058009644

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 英美語文學研究所 === 98 === Abstract Identity problems have always been beleaguering people. In the present mainstream configuration of the Nation State, it is facing a predicament: on the one hand, it is tied with the conception of nationhood; on the other, the promise of a national identity is being tattered by globalization and leaves people in the state of uncertainty. Concerning this, the present study intends to examine the identity crisis in fictional literature, as it is often adopted or interpreted as a representation of the spirit of a nation. My targets of research focus on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Japanese setting English novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), and the English translation of Haruki Murakami’s Japanese work, The wind-up Bird Chronicle (1994-5). Although such choices do not accord to the “standard” of national literature, which demands the fulfillment of pure nativism, it is exactly their outside-ness that would help to demystify the notion of national literature and provide another possibility for thinking about national boundary. Following a Deleuzian philosophy, it would be argued that the identification and sense of belonging would always be an ongoing process instead of a fixed solution for its rhizomatic quality. In the meantime, although national boundary is no longer reliable, it is still one of the key factors in people’s conceptual frame of self-recognition and therefore should not be disposed at this stage. The confidence of the certainty about a clear-cut contour, now shattered, has turned into an emotional symptom of melancholia. As a result, the second part of this paper would dedicate to engaging this Freudian psychoanalytic entity in a political way to interpret the failed promise of identity as the loss of the loved object and propose a resistance to the naïve dream of returning to the origin for a more productive identity making, which does not treat the past as a fixed reference but a part of its continuing interaction with the present, to come. In the end, it is still possible to form a sense of belonging, but only achieved by incessant revision with the acknowledgement of the impossibility of accounting the historical totality, instead of the recourse to reterritorialization.