Murakami Haruki and the Naturalization of Modernity

Abstract

Walter Benjamin famously portrayed the shock sensation as the cause of a “heightening of consciousness” in modernity, a process which in turn causes the disintegration of the “aura” and the suffocation of “experience” under the “protective shield” of consciousness. When applied to the cultural space of Murakami Haruki's novels a discrepancy comes into view that calls for sociological elucidation. Here modernity is a “naturalized” space characterized by tranquillity and stillness, a low consciousness, and a fusion of reification with re‐enchantment. This naturalization is made possible by a process of privatization whereby libidinal energy becomes transferred from objective human relations to the interior of the self. Murakami struggles with the dilemma of how to affirm naturalization while counteracting privatization. While the prime cultural contradiction according to Benjamin was the conflict between “the aura” and the heightening of consciousness, in the naturalized modernity portrayed by Murakami another contradiction emerges which revolves around the conflict between painless solitude and the struggle to regain auratic human relations.