Politics in/of transmediality in Murakami Haruki’s bakery attack stories

Abstract

As one of contemporary Japan’s most famous authors, Murakami Haruki’s stories have inspired many producers of various media and genres. In this transmedial process where creative content is transposed between textual and other media forms, the content of a literary work inevitably has to change to suit the new aesthetic form due to the specific conventions of the target media and genre. This article uses Murakami’s works to address such concept of transmediality, which reflects our contemporary cultural and literary environment where boundaries between media types and genres have become more blurred. Specifically, we examine Murakami’s short stories, ‘Panya shūgeki’, ‘Panya saishūgeki’, and the movement of these stories from literary text to other mediums, in order to explore what sort of politics is involved in the transmediation. Focusing on three themes – ideology, race and gender – and their representations across different genres and media, we see transmediality as a process whereby a nexus of possible interpretations can be opened up through rearranging different elements of a story and negotiating with different aesthetic features of the new platforms.