The Historical Narrative Of Haruki Murakami's Literature

Since the end of the Second World War,Japanese people have been posing an ambiguous historical attitude towards the fact that they have launched an aggressive war.They have been reluctant to admit or even deny the historical facts such as the Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women.Haruki Murakami,known as the most representative writer nowadays,has shown his desire to write about history in his early-days works.The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,showing his courage of facing the history of aggressive war,has been considered to be a turning point of Murakami's career to “involve” the human society "into" his works.Afterwards,his two long novels,the Kafka by the Sea and the 1Q84,continued to show a great number of historical narrations,showing his persistence about writing historical narratives.Although Murakami has bluntly talked about the historical facts of the aggressive war waged by Japan in his works.However,judging from the entire text,Murakami's historical narratives have always centered on a topic which considered the Japanese as "the injured ones”.And these works are considering how Japanese people have been inspired by history to implement the construction of themselves.This thesis consists of three parts:The first part is the introduction part,including one-by-one explanation of origins,prior researches,researching ideas and methods.This part illustrates current researches' status of Murakami's historical narratives at home and abroad.The main body consists of five chapters.The first chapter analyzes Murakami's motivation for historical narratives--the traumatic memory of his growth and the creative experience of writing abroad.And the middle part of the dissertation from the second chapter to the fourth chapter analyzes three novels--The Wind-up Bird Chronicle,Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84--combined with the contexts and history successively.In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle,the story is advanced by the implicit “historical clew”integrated with the “Nomonhan” narrative together with “Hsinking Zoo”,the explicit“realistic clew” that narrates “Okada” how to seek his wife.The historical narrative in Kafka on the Shore focuses on an event,known as the “Rice Bowl Hill incident”,where Murakami demonstrated that “Nakata” lost many of his mental faculties during World Wall II,as well as on the setting of two characters-the old imperial army deserters,who led the way for “Kafka”.In this section,intricate and subtle metaphors were sophisticatedly used.In the part of the historical narrative in 1Q84,Murakami mainly told the sarin attack on the Tokyo underground,occurring at the end of the last century and directed by the heresy,“Sakigake Cult”,the archetype of which refers to Japanese Aum Doomsday Cult.It also recurs to stories related to Manchuria,which mostly narrates that “Aomame” read books about Manchuria railway after she committed murder and “Tengo” 's father experienced reclamation in Manchu and Mongolia when he was young.It finally introduces “Tamaru” to educe the story of forcibly soliciting Korean laborers during the war.In the fifth chapter,the historical narratives of these three full-length novels have been respectively and further analyzed,making contributions to summarizing the features and purposes of historical narratives in literatures written by Murakami.In conclusion,the paper points out that Murakami's historical narrative is self-reflxive from the perspective of Japanese themselves whatever in war narrative or religious narrative.And Murakami's focus is not on the historical event itself,but the reality,which is to realize Japnese self-construction from the history.