The Fantasy Style Of Hiromi Kawakami’s Novels

Hiromi Kawakami (1958～) has graduated from Ochanomizu Univercity. Due to her representative works, like "God" "Step on Snake" "Wallow" "Teacher’s Bag", She has won many prestigious awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Ito Sei Literature Prize, and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize. She has become one of the representative women writers in today’s Japanese literature world. Kawakami often brings the fantasy world into everyday life which is close to the reality in her novels. She called her novels "lies", through one and another wonderful stories, she leads the readers into her "kingdom of lies" and makes the readers feel sorrowful and happy. This unique writing style makes her popular in Japan and in China. With her works chosen as textbooks and successively translated into Chinese in recent years, we can see the influence of her works is very deep. On the other hand, in Japanese literature world, some critics offered criticism, pointing out that the fantasy of Kawakami’s works dose not exist.There are many prior studies about Kawakami’s works. Japanese scholars mainly focus on the relationship of the odd protagonist and others, while Chinese scholars focus on Alienated characters in her works. However, few scholars studied Kawakami’s works from the aspect of fantasy. Therefore, this thesis try to research Kawakami’s works from the aspect of fantasy.The methods in this thesis are text analysis and induction. This thesis is to help understand the works of Hiromi Kawakami, especially the fantasy of her works.It is elaborated with three chapters.Chapter One introduces fantasy. It is divided into two sections, dealing firstly with concepts and secondly with genres. The concept of ’fantasy’ is clarified from three aspects:its etymology, its definitions in Chinese and Japanese dictionaries, and its relation to imagination.Chapter Two concerns three points of the fantasy in Kawakami’s works.(1) The alienation. As the key feature, the alienated characters are pervasive in her works, including thoughtful bears, manipulative snakes, stunning mermaids, romantic puppets, other non-human beings with traits of humans as well as human beings who do live in society yet feel alienated from the social institutions that surround them.(2) The classical atmosphere. We can see Kawakami’s writing techniques pertaining to the fantasy by analysing her artistic features. Hiromi Kawakami’s delicate use of Japanese, which inherits from the elegant and implicit Japanese tradition, gives her fantasy world a classical touch.(3) The mysterious atmosphere. In her novels, she creates an atmosphere of obscurity and eeriness for the novel as a whole, which makes her works mysterious.Chapter three discusses the function of the fantasy. For one, it’s a reflection of rethink to Japanese social problems. Her novels pay attention to things like being indifferent to each other, modern women’s self awareness and their brave pursuit in romantic relationships, and families seemingly in harmony but actually at variance. Relationship, love, and family run through Hiromi Kawakami’s novels, hence they can be classified as three themes of her works. Her attention paid to social problems reflects her sense of responsibility as a writer. For another, she creates a new style of novel writing. Different from traditional romantic literature or realistic literature, Hiromi Kawakami combines the fantasy and the reality, which makes the readers feel sorrowful and happy. This unique writing style makes her different from other writers in Japanese literature world.In conclusion, this thesis analyzed Hiromi Kawakami’s novels, make it clear that the Fantasy style of Kawakami’s novels and further researched the value of this Fantasy style.