The Emergence of Violence and the Terror of Being Born in Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies

Florina Ilis

doi:10.24193/mjcst.2021.11.16

Abstract

Modern poetics imposed the image of Nietzsche’s split Subject, with the disaggregated self-emerging as dilemmatic subjectivity and its aesthetic culmination in the “dehumanisation of art.” Nietzsche’s philosophy provided postmodern poetics with the Subject as “fiction,” subjected to a complex process of self-multiplication and self-reflection (Ihab Hassan). The loss of the autonomy of the Subject as a “fashionable theme” (Frederic Jameson), combined with its multiplication into simulacra (Jean Baudrillard) and the abolition of reference, allow the Object to storm the places of its absence. The multiplicitous nature under which the image of subjectivity is formed is a possible solution for the issue of the Subject. Another solution would be inflicting violence upon the Subject, replaced by the corporeality of the Object, by the body, to the point of its destruction, or to the ultimate point of abjectness. My essay will use Murakami Ryū’s novel Coin Locker Babies to examine its author’s views on the Object-Subject relation, on the Subject as an Object (corporeality) and on the forms through which the Object inflicts violence upon the Subject.

Highlights

From his very debut in 1976, with the novel Almost Transparent Blue (Kagirinaku Tōmeini Chikai Burū限りなく透明に近いブルー), Ryū Murakami surprised both critics and readers with the direct and free manner in which he approached sexuality and its excesses
The subject of sexual violence, of orgies and of the desire to surpass all of the body’s limitations or even the borders of sexuality, a main theme of his debut novel Almost Transparent Blue, can be found in his later novel, Coin Locker Babies, but in a manner that was more sophisticated than the transparent style by which the subject had been approached in his first novel
From Almost Transparent Blue, to Old Terrorist (Ōrudo Terorisuto オールドテロリスト), from 2015, Ryū Murakami’s novels aimed to represent the new – and uncosmeticized – expression of a Japan that was deeply influenced by the American pop culture

Summary

Introduction

From his very debut in 1976, with the novel Almost Transparent Blue (Kagirinaku Tōmeini Chikai Burū限りなく透明に近いブルー), Ryū Murakami surprised both critics and readers with the direct and free manner in which he approached sexuality and its excesses.

Results

Conclusion