Murakami Haruki and the cultural materialism of multiple personality disorder

Abstract

The execution of serial murderer Miyazaki Tsutomu in 2008 ended the local media obsession with Japan's most famous case of multiple personality disorder, but the riddle remains why fictional representations of MPD are so common in Japan, as well as the United States. Reviving the late Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structure of feeling’ to explore MPD/DID's suggestive relationship with late-model capitalism, this essay analyzes the dissociative motifs in Murakami Haruki's The wind-up bird chronicle (Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru, 1992–1995) as emblematic of everyday life in contemporary Japan.