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

Ex Ponto nr.3, 2010
postmodern society replaced reality itself with a third-order simulation of
reality, that is, a simulation which precedes its original, and which discards the
real altogether. 14 Many of Murakami’s characters risk losing their very identity
since this identity is artificially constructed on a hyper-reality with no original
ground, but which seems real. This is why it is quite frequent in his novels
that female characters vanish, leaving behind what McHale called “ontological
uncertainty” and the pervasive question: Is this real or is it a dream? These
characters are engorged by the black hole of inexistence, which is not to be
mistaken for death. Existence must be recorded, or else it is dismissed as
a dream, as a phantasm; there must be an element to cling to so as to rest
assured reality is still at reach. Memory needs back-up, it is the only guarantee
for reality; if the pieces of evidence are gone, all that seemed real at a point
in the past becomes part of the imaginary realm. Hence, the sense of illusion,
hollowness, and the division of selves into the two ontological spaces. The split
is sometimes felt; characters often describe a feeling of something breaking
inside them, followed by a shock that leaves behind an emotional desert.
The hero of Norwegian Wood feels the need to write about Naoko so
that she won’t disappear from his mind and thus disappear completely from
existence. Even though she is dead, she exists in his memories, whereas
forgetfulness would really bestow a dreamy, unreal quality upon her. In The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Toru’s wife also disappears, with clear evidence that
she is still alive; yet the instances when he communicates with his wife acquire
a hyper-real dimension; significantly, their most intense dialogue occurs
through a computer, that is, through a simulation of words and face-to face
conversation. Eri Masai, in After Dark, gets transferred to a TV screen and
turned into an image which fades away and threatens to make her captive
in an electronic limbo. South of the Border, West of The Sun is basically, the
story of a chimera; the acknowledgement of this fact leads to something that
Hajime describes as a desert or as rain that is unfelt by the creatures of the
sea: “Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on
a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea,
yet even the fish don’t know it is raining”. (SBWS:187)
But one of the most conspicuous cases of personality split and trauma is to
be found in one of the female characters of Sputnik Sweetheart, Miu. According
to her confession, she was trapped in a Ferris wheel one night in a Swiss
town and looked through binoculars at her own self standing in an apartment.
She was having sexual intercourse with a Latin type of man, Ferdinando, whom
she had met in town. The experience made her feel debased and obscene,
and, as a result, she lost consciousness. After this odd incident, her hair went
completely white and she became an asexual being, entering a marriage
with the condition of having no sexual relations. 22-year-old Sumire, who is
in love with Miu, describes Miu’s present self as a shadow of her true self.
According to Sumire, Miu’s bodily persona was caught on the other side, yet
she loves both the Miu of the present and the Miu of the other side. A sense
of empathy makes Sumire relate to her beloved’s trauma: “I’m in love with
Miu. With the Miu on this side, needless to say. But I also love the Miu on
the other side just as much. The moment this thought struck me it was like
I could hear myself -with an audible creak—splitting in two. “ 15 What follows
immediately after this awareness of dissociation is an existential question,
one that Murakami’s characters are haunted by: “If this side, where Miu is, is
not the real world - if this side is actually the other side - what about me, the
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