Realist Magic and the Invented Tokyos of Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana

Abstract

In recent Tokyo narratives, two improbable moments stand out. While searching for his missing cat in his suburban Tokyo neighborhood, Okada Toru discovers an old well in the backyard of an abandoned house.1 A few days later, he decides to enter the well. After the first four hours at the bottom of it, he reveals his reasons for being there: “Think about reality. Think about the real world. The body’s world. That’s why I’m here. To think about reality” (231). At this point in Murakami Haruki’s 1997 novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Okada has begun to understand that penetrating his own unconscious is the key to discovering the whereabouts of his wife Kumiko, who, like the cat, has recently left him. But in those first few hours in the well, he has not fully fleshed out the idea of entering his unconscious; he is relating space and interiority in more mundane terms: “The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible—a place like the bottom of a well, for example” (231). In the darkness, despite some nervous excitement, he is able to relax his mind. So relaxed is he that he notices a deeper change: