Sartre's second century

186 Chapter Twelve
imaginatively recreated by Gustave Flaubert in his La Tentation de Saint
Antoine (1874). The archetypal nineteenth-century novelist was a life-long
preoccupation for Sartre—culminating in his monumental three-volume
critique of Flaubert, UIdiot de lafamille (1971-72)—a fact surely not lost
on Murakami, who amuses himself elsewhere in this collection with an
oblique and facetious allusion to Flaubert's masterpiece, Madame Bovary
(1857):
She gets married a virgin. And once she's somebody's wife she has an
affair. Sounds like some classic French novel. Minus any fancy-dress ball
or maids running around. 36
However that may be, there is less tenuous and tangential evidence of
an affinity between Sartre and Murakami, whether conscious or unwitting,
to be found in a single sentence just a few lines from the end of the latter's
disturbing little tale. The author is warning his nameless protagonist to
beware that his bizarre and unexplained malaise might just as inexplicably
return: "Next time it might not end in forty days. Things that start for no
reason end for no reason. And the opposite can be true." 37 That almost
poetically balanced phrase—"Things that start for no reason end for no
reason"—chimes conspicuously with one of Roquentin's most arresting
formulations: "Every existent starts life for no reason, persists out of
weakness and dies by accident." 38 Admittedly, Murakami might not have
had this very sentence of Sartre's novel in mind, nor is he saying exactly
the same thing. Nevertheless, Roquentin's ontological observation about
generic existence is here transposed to the more dynamic plane of a
personalised narrative history, and it is clear that Murakami is applying the
same principle as Sartre—namely that of contingency—even if he does not
use the term itself.
Such evidence of Murakami's affiliation with Sartre is strengthened by
the hypothesis that the author himself advances for his character's
condition, namely that his forty-day torment of vomiting and anonymous
phonecalls might in fact be psychosomatic manifestations of repressed
guilt for his promiscuous and treacherous seductions:
Murakami, "A Folklore for My Generation: A Prehistory of Late-Stage
Capitalism", in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, 74.
37 "Nausea 1979", 152.
38 'Tout existant nait sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par rencontre"
(Sartre, La Nausee, 158).