The Study Of Death Consciousness In Haruki Murakami’s Works

Haruki murakami is a famous contemporary Japanese writer, his works have a widerange of readers and great influence in Asia and even the world. Haruki murakami, who wasborn in1949, grew up in Japan’s post-war cultural environment which eastern and westerncultural conflicting and blending. The special situation helped him to developed his uniquecharacteristics of ideology, the concept of literature and language style. Death is one of themost obvious characteristics of murakami’s works, his works inherited and developed thetradition of description of death in Japanese literature. In the death consciousness of his works,we can feel his concerning and thinking of death problem and the mental status of individual,also include the constant pursuit of freedom of the individual spirit. This thesis mainlychooses haruki murakami’s novels as a research object and focus on the writer’s personalideas and creative processes, adopt the method of close reading, social criticism mode,systematically and deeply have a research and summary in the novels’ death consciousness,and further explore its cultural meaning and social meaning.In this paper, the major structure is divided into four chapters: the first chapter analyzesand summarizes the perspective of murakami’s works first, generalized the death image, Thesecond chapter analyses the death consciousness in murakami’s works, analyzes its works bydescribing the state of existence of individual loneliness, helplessness and lose the meaning oflife, people are dying in the spiritual world of modern society, mining the social significanceof the death consciousness; The third chapter, the changes of his thought and creation are usedas clues, through concretely analyses the psychology and behavior changing of the maincharacters in the works of different period, presents murakami’s death consciousness’positiveattitude towards life;The fourth chapter analyzed haruki murakami’s social culturalenvironment and his special thoughts and literary ideas, then explore why he express hisattention to modern mental condition through describing death.Through the unique death consciousness in Haruki murakami’ works, he illuminates thatpeople should have a positive attitude when they facing death, and facing all things thatthreatened individual independence and freedom of spirit, and he also emphasize theimportance of individual independence and freedom. Through describing death, thefundamental question, murakami is trying to build a independent spirit space for people in themodern society. Murakami’s thoughts and exploration of the individual spirit value andfreedom is worth us to learn.