Nr. 3 (28) anul VIII / iulie-septembrie 2010 - ROMDIDAC

literatură universală
CRISTINA-MIHAELA LAZĂR
The Japanese Madeleine: Memory and
Trauma in Haruki Murakami’s novels
I
f there were a single statement that would run through Murakami’s fiction,
it would be a film line: This is the stuff dreams are made of, or to adapt it,
Memory is the stuff dreams are made of. The border between sleep and
waking life often ends up in a hazy confusion, and most of the times, it
leads to a dissociation of identity and recurrence of Doppelgänger imagery.
As in Proust, memories are triggered by an element tinged with emotion
and psychological pain, leading back to a deep-seated moment of trauma,
unleashed from the “id” with unrecoverable damage and social scars.
Scars that, eventually, allow a Munch-like scream of loneliness and void
to hover over the characters and their Japanese silences.
Proustian territory is a beaten track in most of Murakami’s novels,
but it is only made obvious and somehow paid tribute to in Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and The End of the World. The protagonist is made to wander
a long and dark corridor, where the odour of cologne stirs a strange sense
of nostalgia in him and prompts an exploration of the unknown recesses of
his mind. When the woman who is walking him down that corridor seems
to say the word Proust, the “I” tries to understand the connection between
that corridor and Proust. He can only come up with the explanation that
the corridor is as long as a book by Proust, but no literary gimmick can
take away the fact that a link had been more or less indirectly established
between Proust and the dark, long corridor of memory. In this case, it was
a smell that unloosed the hidden nooks of memory.
Yet Murakami’s favourite “Madeleine” is, by far, music. Norwegian
Wood, for instance, opens with the protagonist, Watanabe Toru, seated
in a plane and waiting to land on Hamburg airport. His personal trauma is
reactivated while listening to a muzak orchestra rendition of the Beatles’
Norwegian Wood, which sends him back to a meadow in Kyoto, and
brings back the memory of his girlfriend Naoko. The evoked image is
laden with romantic clichés, as the two lovers make promises to each
other and indulge in the illusions and naïveté of youth. What is interesting
is that Naoko’s greatest wish is for Toru to always remember her. The
romantic dream is, however, broken by the postmodern fragmented self.
Paradoxically, eighteen years from that moment, Toru confesses he can
Ex Ponto nr.3, 2010
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