In-between spaces in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the
Shore
Time and space in Japanese realism
In his 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore Haruki
Murakami (b. 1949) creates a ma (間, “in-between”) chronotope
through which he reconfigures European realist and Japanese fantastic modes of
representation to tell a uniquely Japanese story of the struggle to deal with the
memories and trauma of World War II, the 1945 atomic bombings and the civic conflict
of 1970. Through its alternating storylines and the juxtaposition of three
generations of protagonists, Kafka on the Shore brings the European
literary traditions of realism and the Kafkaesque into dialogue with the fantastical
of the medieval Japanese narrative tradition in which the real world and the spirit
world coexisted long before the advent of Latin American magical realism. The
examples analyzed in this essay show the ways in which the use of the
ma chronotope allows Murakami to create both a multiplicity and
mutual contamination of storylines and layers of representation that work to
destabilize the ostensible linearity, solidity and sovereignty of realist
temporality and spatiality.
Article outline
- 1.Realism in modern Japanese literature
- 2.Realist, surreal or fantastical: The stories of Kahuka, Nakata and Miss Saeki
- 3.The Kōmura Memorial Library
- 4.The cabin and the forest on the mountain
- 5.Conclusion
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Note
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Works cited