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

urning his palm after the concert, and Noboru Wataya, his malevolent and
charismatic brother-in law that draws the power of empathy and violence by
means of symbolic incest. 9 Mutual sharing and violence are also intertwined
in the story of Mamiya, whose long story might be seen as a form of therapy,
of letting out the trauma and thus curing it, according to psychoanalytical
theory. The same goes for May Kasahara’s letters and long conversations
with Toru; the interaction between them could be construed as a model for
the psychotherapeutic relationship. 10 Mamiya’s account and his war memories
might spring from a “repetition compulsion”, a concept explained by Freud in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle through a metaphor, according to which the
compulsion to remember unpleasant events is just like something that breaks
through the membrane of a cell, producing a hole and flooding the organism
with a foreign material. The compulsion to re-live the traumatic moment could
be a way of attempting to control the event after it happened, as if afterwards
we could build a barrier to defend us before the event actually occurred. 11
Underlying Murakami’s fiction is not only this repetition compulsion, which
naturally involves a sense of communion and sharing the trauma, but also
alienation and split personality. Sleeping and dream are sometimes corollary
phenomena, as seen previously in the story of the boy witness in The Wind-
Up Bird Chronicle. In After Dark, Eri Masai is a girl who has been sleeping
for two months on end, without interruption. During the night, the TV in her
room turns on by itself and it projects the image of a faceless man staring
at the sleeping girl. Eri’s bodily and spiritual self disappear into the screen
of the TV, where she wakes up in the confinement of an empty room. As the
signal weakens, her image starts to quiver and her own being appears to be
in danger of disappearing.
As the TV shuts down, the sandy instability of existence is brought into
focus.
Sleep produces a bridge between two irreconcilable sides of our being;
the inability to decide for one of them risks to tear apart one’s very identity.
Eri’s long sleep could be interpreted as a rebellion against waking life, yet the
danger she is exposed to, the possibility she faces of being trapped in a hyperreality
and converted to a mere pixel, brings her back to consciousness. On
the other hand, there are suggestions that the faceless man behind this odd
switch is Shirakawa, an apparently dull and unnoticeable clerk, who leads a
double life, that of a criminal who brutally aggresses prostitutes at night, and
that of a respectable pater familias at dawn. His image in the mirror indicates
the existence of a Dr Jekyll and a Mr Hyde within him: even after he leaves
the lavatory, his image persists in the mirror and moves as if it had its own
life: “Eventually, however, as though giving up, it relaxes, takes a deep breath,
and rolls its head. Then it brings its hand to its face and rubs its cheek a few
times, as if checking for the touch of flesh.” 12 It is tempting to see Eri Masai’s
experience, Shirakawa’s double identity and this recurrent “Murakamiesque”
theme of vacillation between two worlds through psychological and
psychoanalytical lens, but they might also allude to the void which hyperreality
offers contemporary world. In this sense, Baudrillard’s definition of the
simulacrum might shed a different light on Murakami’s fiction.
In the very beginning of his Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard quotes
from Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truthit
is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true. ” 13
The implications of this quote run deep, given that Baudrillard argues that
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