Storytelling with Actional Function in Haruki Murakami’s Hypertexts: Yesterday and Scheherazade

Abstract

Haruki Murakami uses hypertextual elements as a narrative strategy and frequently represents storyteller characters whose embedded stories have critical –and core– roles in the frame narrative. This article analyses Murakami’s fictional narratives Yesterday and Scheherazade, the hypertexts of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” and One Thousand and One Nights, from the perspective of hypertextuality, actional storytelling and narrative therapy. Drawing on narrative theories of Genette and Rimmon-Kenan, it examines how the implied author explores actional function in two hypertextual narratives, making references to the previous texts (hypotexts) and representing the storytellers in search of narrative relief in a far-fetched world of everyday life with seemingly trivial problems. The discussion focuses on two storytellers: the characternarrator as the second self of the implied author and a female storyteller living on the experiential tales of life. It argues that both storytellers exhibit a desire to narrate to transform their experiences into verbal expression and to repair their episodic memory through the act of storytelling. The study shows that the characters’ stories and the references and allusions to other texts are essential parts accounting for the character’s motivation beneath the storytelling and presents the central theme of the narratives. These stories additionally explore the power of storytelling as to whether storytelling can transform the everyday experience into something special worth telling.