Sartre's second century

Contemporary Perspectives 185
character is a collector of "jazz from the 50s and early 60s", a mutual
interest shared with his creator and interlocutor. Moreover, their respective
experiences of "nausea", while different, mirror each other: Roquentin's is
a sensation of sickness without vomiting, whereas his Japanese
counterpart's involves real vomiting without the sensation of sickness.
Furthermore, Murakami's diarist reveals that his nausea lasts exactly forty
days—from 4 June to 14 July 1979—a period embracing almost at its midpoint
Sartre's birthday (21 June), as it happens, and concluding on Bastille
Day. Roquentin's diary, although less punctilious, covers a comparable
period from "early January 1932" 30 to approximately 18 February
(reckoned from the first dated page of "Monday 25 January 1932", 31 plus
twenty-four days, by my calculation). This period embraces the start of
Lent, indicated by the record of "Mardi gras", 32 a penitential phase in the
Christian calendar of forty days' fast and abstinence, commemorating
Jesus's exile in the desert—an association of which Murakami can hardly
have been unaware when he chose his hero's precise quarantine.
It remains to be seen, however, whether these structural resemblances
are more than merely superficial and coincidental. What significance, if
any, should we attach to the hypothetical time lapse in La Nausee, for
example? Is there, in fact, any more to this transcultural intertextuality
than meets the eye? I suspect there is, chiefly because Murakami appears
to have embedded, within a very small space, a number of other more
subtle and cryptic clues. For instance, like Roquentin—"Maybe, after all,
it was a brief bout of madness" 33 —Murakami's sick man fears for his
sanity: "When you start having thoughts like this, it's the first sign of
schizophrenia, you know". 34 Also, he shares with Sartre's Antoine a
profoundly solitary life:
The calls came only when I was alone. Same with the vomiting. So then I
began to wonder: how come I'm alone so much? In fact, I probably
average a little over twenty-three hours a day alone. 35
Another notable "Antoine" spent abundant time in solitude, namely Saint
Anthony, whose eremitical isolation and diabolical trials had been
29
Murakami, "Nausea 1979", in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, 143-53 (144).
30
"[...] vers le commencement de Janvier 1932" (Sartre, La Nausee, 3).
31
Ibid., 8.
32
Ibid., 72.
33
"Peut-etre bien, apr£s tout, que c'dtait une petite crise de folie" (ibid., 6).
34
Murakami, "Nausea 1979", 149.