The Lost ‘Boku’ in Post-Disaster Literature：Haruki Murakami’s “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo”

Abstract

This paper examines the shift in the first-person narrator from the ‘boku’ to the ‘watashi’ in Haruki Murakami’s short story “Kaeru-kun, Tokyo wo sukuu” [“Super-Frog Saves Tokyo”], a shift that characterizes his work. In this way it aims to clarify the meaning of the post-disaster world in Murakami’s work.</br>This short story consists of a dialogue between the ‘boku’ and the ‘watashi’, and describes the process of the ‘watashi’ taking on the mystery of the ‘boku’, who calls himself “the un-me”. The ‘boku’ is a giant frog in the imaginary world, and the ‘watashi’ refers to the protagonist, Katagiri, an “ordinary person” in the real world. The frog’s ‘boku’ is transformed into countless insects after a battle with a “gigantic worm” called Mimizu-kun, who wants to destroy Tokyo.</br>The story of the ‘boku’, or the lost frog, is told by the ‘watashi’ Katagiri who survived the battle between the frog and the worm, and is now in the post-disaster world. Murakami’s work has found a point of view from which to retell the story of the ‘boku’ based on the perspective of the ‘watashi’, that is, the point of view in which the ‘watashi’ is rendered animal-like, like the frog and the worm.