SUBJECTIVITY AND SPACE IN HARUKI MURAKAMI'S FICTIONAL WORLD
SUBJECTIVITY AND SPACE IN HARUKI MURAKAMI'S FICTIONAL WORLD

Summary/Abstract: This essay explores the relationship between psyche and outer world in some of Haruki Murakami's major novels. The settings in which Murakami's characters appear abound in sterile, bleak and/or murky spaces (vacant plots of land, a Mongolian desert, a walled town called the End of the World, the sewers and the tunnels of the Tokyo underground, forests, dry wells that force characters to confront their inner demons). These spaces characterized by emptiness and darkness are not mere landscapes. Examples suggest that the scenes described are almost external manifestations of the emotional lives of his characters, more or less direct projections of the interior states of the characters; there is a fundamental nexus between interiority and exteriority (landscape). These landscapes are places of retreat where characters (who often feel like empty shells and are haunted by a sense of loss) enclose themselves inwardly and try to make sense of the senseless. Even if they are empty, they are spaces in which something creative can occur - such as the capacity to encounter undiscovered aspects of the self. These projected versions of states of mind are dangerous, but full of potentialities, being favorable for revelations, epiphanies, experiences of the numinous. The majority of these landscapes function symbolically as realms of the subconscious, where the ultimate source of the self is rooted. It can be said that the subconscious is the natural habitat of Murakami's characters.

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