The Strange Characters of the Night of the Milky Way Railway: An Attempt at Interpretation from the Point of View of Shamanism
The Strange Characters of the Night of the Milky Way Railway: An Attempt at Interpretation from the Point of View of Shamanism

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, I will concentrate on the main part of Miyazawa Kenji’s Night of the Milky Way Railway, which corresponds to the adventure of the main character, Giovanni, on a galactic train in a dreamlike state. During his fantastic voyage, Giovanni encounters various strange personae such as ‘the Bird Catcher’, ‘the three youths’ or ‘Professor Bulcaniro’ (the last being erased from the fourth and last versions of the work), each of them being small puzzles in themselves, with a role difficult to define. There was a tendency in previous research to focus on searching for the source of inspiration for these characters, when they were to be examined. However, the literature has not yet given an answer to the obviously necessary question regarding the role of these characters in the general context and why Giovanni needs to encounter them. Here, I will consider Giovanni's dream journey on the ‘Milky Way Railway’ as a shamanic initiation ritual and I will categorise the characters he encounters by their role as conferred by the theory of shamanism. I will suggest a guiding theory to shed light on the mysteriousness of the characters in the story, stressing in this way the neglected importance of shamanism in Kenji’s works.

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