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261
Florina ILIS
Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ilisflorina@gmail.com
THE EMERGENCE OF VIOLENCE AND THE TERROR OF BEING BORN
IN MURAKAMI'S COIN LOCKER BABIES
Recommended Citation: Ilis, Florina. “The Emergence of Violence and the Terror
of Being Born in Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies.” Metacritic Journal for
Comparative Studies and Theory 7.1 (2021):
https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2021.11.16
Abstract: Modern poetics imposed the image of Nietzsche’s split Subject, with the
disaggregated self-emerging as dilemmatic subjectivity and its aesthetic culmination
in the “dehumanisation of art.” Nietzsche’s philosophy provided postmodern poetics
with the Subject as “fiction,” subjected to a complex process of self-multiplication and
self-reflection (Ihab Hassan). The loss of the autonomy of the Subject as a “fashionable
theme” (Frederic Jameson), combined with its multiplication into simulacra (Jean
Baudrillard) and the abolition of reference, allow the Object to storm the places of its
absence. The multiplicitous nature under which the image of subjectivity is formed is
a possible solution for the issue of the Subject. Another solution would be inflicting
violence upon the Subject, replaced by the corporeality of the Object, by the body, to
the point of its destruction, or to the ultimate point of abjectness. My essay will use
Murakami Ryū’s novel Coin Locker Babies to examine its author’s views on the Object-
Subject relation, on the Subject as an Object (corporeality) and on the forms through
which the Object inflicts violence upon the Subject.
Keywords: Object, Subject, Violence, Material imagination (busshitsuteki),
Animality (dōbutsusei)
From his very debut in 1976, with the novel Almost Transparent Blue (Kagirinaku
Tōmeini Chikai Burū限りなく透明に近いブルー), Ryū Murakami surprised both
critics and readers with the direct and free manner in which he approached sexuality
and its excesses. For this novel, the writer received the Akutagawa award, and the
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262
success of the book was reflected by the approximately 1.400.000 copies sold by the
end of 1976. Born on February 18th1952, in Sasebo, Ryū Murakami was part of a
generation of writers who had grown up watching American western movies,
passionately reading science fiction, as well as listening to jazz music and keeping up
with comic book heroes. Influenced by the American pop culture, Ryū Murakami also
became interested in rock music and he formed a band for which he composed songs.
His passion for rock and for the lives of the stars was later (1980) expressed in the
novel Coin Locker Babies (コインロッカー・ベイビーズ, Koinrokkābeibīzu). One of
the protagonists of the book, Hashi, became a rock star, fascinated by music’s power
to dominate and seduce the crowds through his voice, following the model of the
American rock stars. Moreover, the subject of sexual violence, of orgies and of the
desire to surpass all of the body’s limitations or even the borders of sexuality, a main
theme of his debut novel Almost Transparent Blue, can be found in his later novel,
Coin Locker Babies, but in a manner that was more sophisticated than the transparent
style by which the subject had been approached in his first novel.
From Almost Transparent Blue, to Old Terrorist (Ōrudo Terorisuto オールド
テロリスト), from 2015, Ryū Murakami’s novels aimed to represent the new – and
uncosmeticized – expression of a Japan that was deeply influenced by the American
pop culture. His characters, although they lack heroism, at least maintain the illusion
that, at the end of an adventure reduced to a series of acts of violence going past the
limits of endurance, they would find something absolute and pure, a world with no
past or memory, a fluid world. In a universe where good and evil are difficult to
distinguish, since excess has become the norm, and the laws of consumption dictate
upon emotions and create sentiments that disappear just as quickly after the fulfilment
of the desire for possession on which they had been based, Ryū Murakami’s novels do
not shy away from directly approaching all of the taboos represented by themes such
as drugs, alcoholism, prostitution, sadomasochism and sexual perversions. The
author’s nonconformism and his desire to attack all of the traditional Japanese social
values are also expressed in his non-fictional texts, which bear titles that, by contrast,
offer an inversed, ironic view on Japan and, implicitly, on the world: SEX is better
than Suicide: Ryū Murakami’s theory of love and woman (Jisatsuyoriwa SEX
Murakami Ryū no Renai Jōseiron 自殺よりはSEX 村上龍の恋愛・女性論, 2003) or
Unexpectedly, I’m a shopping lover (Angai, kaimono suki 案外、買い物好き, 2007)
METACRITIC JOURNAL FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES AND THEORY 7.1
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and Encouragement of having no hobby (Mushumi no susume 無趣味のすすめ,
2009).
When the subject of violence exhausts its resources, Ryū Murakami explores
the subject of possible or alternative universes, an idea borrowed from science fiction;
however, unlike his contemporary, Haruki Murakami, in whose novels possible worlds
play a central role in counteracting the platitude of reality (Frențiu 135-50), Ryū
Murakami has a more provocative perspective on the subject. By skillfully juggling
with certain elements of the science fiction imagination, Ryū Murakami adapted the
theme of possible worlds to his subject of interest, and not vice versa. Thus, while the
plot of Coin Locker Babies progresses towards an apocalyptic ending, seen as a
consequence of the existence of an alternative world, seemingly subdued by the more
realistic nature of representation, the theme of parallel worlds or of counterfactual
history has been gaining primacy. An example is the novel From the Fatherland, with
Love (Hantō o Deyo半島を出よ) (2015), which constructs a dystopian world in which
North Korea invades and occupies Japan.
Brian McHale explains the role played by science fiction in galvanizing
postmodern literature. He describes the migration of certain themes from the science
fiction imagination as a double-edged process, showing that novels borrowed themes
that had previously been postmodernized by science fiction, absorbing them only after
they had been contaminated by pop culture: “(…) we find postmodernist texts
absorbing materials from SF texts that have already been ‘postmodernized’ to some
degree through contact with mainstream postmodernist poetics” (McHale 228-9).
Thus, themes typically assigned to science fiction (such as counterfactual history,
parallel universes or possible worlds) became current in the works of authors such as
Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, or Christine Brooke-Rose, in Verbivore and
in Xorandor, as well as Umberto Eco, in Foucault's Pendulum. In the case of the
Japanese writers Ryū Murakami and Haruki Murakami, their contact with pop culture
and with postmodern fiction took place almost simultaneously. This is why their
approaches to parallel universes and possible worlds rely especially on the ontological
dimension of the world-creating text, which diminishes their subversive or political
effects. Without undermining or questioning the text’s ability to create new worlds,
such themes provide Ryū Murakami’s writing with an ethical dimension, but one
devoid of the certainty of a moral; in Haruki Murakami’s case, they produce an
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ontological dimension, but one often located in the vicinity of the miraculous, like in
the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Sekai no owari to
Hādo-boirudo Wandārando 世界の終りとハードボイルド ワンダーランド),
published in 1985.
Thus, by experimenting with the ontological capacity of the text to create worlds
while eschewing science fiction’s founding convention (that of future worlds), the two
Japanese authors rely on ontological innovation. Stimulating the ability of the text to
produce worlds, they avoid any metaphysical and/or moral charge. The
“aesthetization” of the shock produced by the post-industrial society resulted, in Ryū
Murakami’s case, in a form of fiction which demystifies the conventions behind the
creation of a possible world. This significant ambiguity of constructing and
deconstructing meaning also motivates the author’s interest in the theme of parallel
universes and its variations.
Coin Locker Babies is not an avant-la-lettre science fiction novel, since the
main plot takes place in today’s Tokyo, where two areas can be outlined – the real one,
represented by the Shinjuku district, with the thirteen skyscrapers, and the imaginary
one, Toxitown, which seems to have sprung from the post-atomic imaginary. The plot
adapts the common science fiction convention of the world under attack to a rather
traditional narrative formula. Ostensibly constructed as a Bildungsroman, Ryū
Murakami’s story follows the lives of two children who have survived the trauma of
having been abandoned a few hours after birth in coin-operated-lockers in the train
station. Despite the story having been borrowed from a real-life news report, the plot
gradually and almost imperceptibly abandons the traditional realist structure;
however, the transition to the alternative universe is not as visibly marked as in Haruki
Murakami’s novels. The novel is inspired by mediatic accounts of children abandoned
in the coin lockers. According to statistics, 191 cases of children who had died
suffocated in coin lockers were reported between 1980-1990 (Kouno, Johnson 25-31).
Given the authenticity of the novel’s inspiration and the two abandoned
children at the center of the story, Murakami Ryū could have opted for classical pattern
of the Bildungsroman. He only does so in part, and solely in order to gradually blur
the realist dimension. Through the subtlety by which he conceives the alternative of a
possible universe, dominated by the madness of the two main characters, he manages
to convince the reader of the necessity of destroying a world which steals the people’s
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freedom, limiting any possibility of movement. In the eyes of others, Hashi and Kiku
are insane, but, in their own view, the entire world is insane, dominated by a madness
that is ignored and, as such, must be challenged. Both Hashi, through his songs, and
Kiku, through the destruction he was planning, also play the roles of agitators, of
challengers of an immobile world that lacks a soul and, implicitly, that lacks history
and memory.
The two main characters, Hashi and Kiku, are both animated by the spirit of
negation, as a form of the absolute freedom of an individual that refuses to accept any
type of order, be it ethical or transcendental. However, their behaviours differ, since
each have their own relationship with the traumatizing memory of being abandoned
by the mothers who had given them life.
After being found in the coin lockers, the two children are placed in the care of
nuns in the Cherryfield Orphanagem who raise them until, one year before starting
school, they are adopted by a family living on an isolated island west of the Kyūshū
province. When Hashi runs away from home, Kiku and Kazuyo, their adoptive mother,
leave for Tokyo in search for him. After Kazuyo’s strange death, Kiku decides to stay
in Tokyo in order to reach Toxitown, where Hashi lived. He accidentally meets
Anemone, whom he tells about a chance of obtaining a scathing gas that would destroy
the city. From this point on, the twins’ existences are separated, despite the fact that
they both pursue the same final goal: the destruction of the world, albeit through
different means. Thus, while Hashi desires the destruction of the world and of the
traumatizing memory of birth and the annihilation of time – symbolically represented
by murdering the foetus in the mother’s womb, Kiku desires destruction through
violence inflicted on the spatial world order – an order symbolically represented by
the city Centre and by the thirteen skyscrapers. The world order, conceived
mechanistically, as an enormous structure of coin lockers, must be destroyed, so that
the ones trapped inside the lockers could be liberated and could thus live freely.
The metaphor of the world as an enormous coin locker is built gradually, as the
two children grow older and, after leaving the small island where they had been
adopted, they come to understand that the tragedy of being abandoned at birth is part
of the human condition. However, Ryū Murakami avoids this direction and does not
build an existentialist tragedy, which would actually have no effect in a post-industrial
society fuelled by consumption and pleasure, where the message of Christian
metaphysics is almost non-existent. This aspect is, in fact, also suggested by the author
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through the fact that, despite having been raised in the Cherryfield Orphanage, the two
children had not been touched by the Christian message. Stephen Snyder does not base
his reading of the novel on the religious connotation of the idea of good/evil either.
Instead, he interprets it through a postmodernist lens, following Jean Baudrillard, as
“a vital principle of disjunction.” According to Snyder, Ryū Murakami pushed the
manifestation of Evil to its final consequences, and the effect of this acceleration leads
to destabilizing the stable (Snyder 211) in contemporary society. In other words,
precisely the goal pursued by the two characters, Kiku and Hashi. Both in the case of
Kiku and in that of Hashi, Evil represents the ultimate violence, namely attempted
homicide and murder.
By remoulding the science fiction convention of possible universes in
accordance with contemporary taste, in Ryū Murakami’s novel, Kiku’s act of
destroying the city of Tokyo loses its heroic meaning. The goal of seeking the center on
which every heroic adventure is based is converted into the obsession for destroying
the center and, implicitly, destroying the order it represents, not by virtue of
rebuilding, but from the desire to replace it with its opposite – with the lack of order,
with chaos. The final scene of the novel, in which Hashi crosses the deserted city center
that had been devastated by the toxic gas released by Kiku is thus quite revealing.
However, in a universe sentenced to destruction, in the science fiction
literature, heroes always emerge, namely heroes in the service of man, who attempt to
save the world; in the universe conceived by Ryū Murakami, for the two protagonists
– the children who had been abandoned by their mothers in coin lockers – the only
possible adventure remains the desire to kill the only memory of the mother, namely
the sound of her heartbeat, heard as foetuses and kept on the level of the subconscious.
Thus, Hashi desperately seeks this sound through music and, when this fails, he tries,
in an extreme attempt to exorcise Evil, to murder his own child, by attacking his
pregnant wife. After this attack, Hashi is admitted to a psychiatric clinic. Kiku, after a
series of adventures, manages to obtain the mysterious Datura gas, which was known
to cause massive destruction in the city. What is interesting in his case is that, after
murdering the biological mother and after his sentencing to prison, his desire for
destruction seems to have decreased in intensity. However, his insanity is transferred
to Anemone, who receives the role of an agent of remembrance. She reminds Kiku that,
in a universe dominated by the laws of consumption, the idea that life’s sacred values
remain intact is an illusion, and that individual salvation is impossible, since true
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salvation can take place only when the world order is destroyed, in favour of a new
order. It is unclear whether the order envisioned by Anemone is the one from the
Kingdom of Crocodiles, and what exactly that would imply.
Hashi and Kiku’s reaction against the world, beyond the psychological
explanation offering it as a normal reaction for children abandoned at birth in coin
lockers, is also a response to terrible social aggression; it represents the impulse to
oppose a world that reduces the individual to the state of an object, nameless and
standardized in the form of a coin locker, by replacing it with a universe uninhabited
by people, upon which nature rules, as in the former mining town on the island.
In the final scene of the novel, Hashi is once again dominated, because of the
desire to save himself, by an evil force that orders him to kill the unborn child of a
pregnant woman encountered on the deserted streets of the devastated city. Starting
this image and from the concept defined by Julia Kristeva as “ultimate abjection,”
Stephen Snyder considers that the attempted murder of the pregnant woman
represents “the violation of the most inviolable of images, the pregnant female body”
(Snyder 212). In Snyder’s interpretation, the ending, despite the devastation of the
city, is almost optimistic. The effect of the violence inflicted upon the pregnant woman
is that of a true act of exorcism, since, by attacking her, Hashi regains access to his
biological memory and, realizing this, he understands that the sounds he so
desperately sought through music were actually his mother’s heartbeats, which he had
heard as a fetus. By reliving and consciously remembering the aggression of his own
birth – any birth implies an act of violence by expelling the fetus out of the protective
space of the womb – and, by exorcising his own violence, thus freeing himself from
under the rule of evil, Hashi tries to surpass the vision of the coin locker that had
compelled him to lead a life dominated by violent autistic episodes.
By coming to terms with the memory of the woman who had given him life and
then abandoned him, Hashi also gained his free will, becoming able to fight the desire
to murder the pregnant woman encountered on the deserted streets of the
contaminated city. The desire to compose a new song helps him liberate himself from
the oppressive forces of his inner life and to reconnect with the outside world through
the music that had always helped him break away from his memories, through an
almost cathartic or even confabulatory process: “Hashi himself was surprised how
easily he was able to manipulate the self inside his head, even down to his memories,
to make it resemble the confident person he projected on TV” (Murakami 224-5).
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Confabulation is a technical term that describes the situation of the patients “who have
problems with their memory or their self awareness” (Bryson 334).
The world envisioned by Ryū Murakami, constructed as an enormous coin
locker, excludes individual freedom. As such, the individual, reduced to a mere object
abandoned in these lockers, seems to transform from a human being with normal
reactions into one with reflex responses to the violence inflicted upon him by the world
that sees him as an object. The violence of language, the violence of actions, the
violence elevated to an absolute level of value, in the author’ view, represent the only
means of restoring some of the world’s meaning, which had been lost through the
levelling, trivialising process promoted by the consumer society. The scenes of violence
accelerate towards the end, leading Hashi to an insane asylum and Kiku to the release
of the gas upon the city of Tokyo; the scenes follow one another with such speed and
with such a blatant disregard for any moral censorship, that, through the effects of
exaggeration and overemphasis, they tend to encroach upon the entire tableau.
Violence is the only thing that can still move world exclusively dominated by the power
of money and of promoting false images, a world where reality has been replaced by
the simulacrum, as shown by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Considering the
evolution of postmodern society, Jean Baudrillard outlines, from a sociological
perspective, a new view on confronting the individual with reality and with the order
affected by the lack of a temporal dimension, rooted in the present. Within this
“desert” of reality, the theory of the simulacra and simulations gains consistency. In
Jean Baudrillard’s view, we are traversing a world of simulacra, for which reality, more
and more determined by the intensification of models, changed its initial meaning,
disappearing under a network of miniature units and databanks (Baudrillard 167) that
forever multiply, in order to bring forth the images that would form the hyper-real. It
is “the age of simulation,” which begins with “a liquidation of all referentials”
(Baudrillard 167). The transition from the real to the hyper-real occurs when
representation is replaced by simulation. This loss of reality in favour of an increase in
simulacrum is due to the increasingly more complex control held by the means of
information and communication within the consumer society. According to
Baudrillard, it is more “a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself”
(167), which leads to a new way of understanding the world, an understanding that is
no longer direct, referential, but mediated and conditioned by the signs of the real,
and not by the real itself. Jean Baudrillard notes that the simulacrum of the real
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occurred in successive phases, as the strategies of the media technologies perfected
their abilities to erode reality, in four successive phases of erecting the edifice of
representation. Thus, in the first phase, reality is reflected by the sign (“It is the
reflection of a basic reality”), in the second phase the sign “masks and perverts a basic
reality,” and in the third phase “it masks the absence of a basic reality,” so that in the
final phase, the sign no longer has anything to do with reality (“It bears no relation to
any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum”) (Baudrillard 170).
To the same extent, the individual is no longer confronted by reality directly,
but with its perfect simulacrum, which replaced it – the hyper-real. A dive into the
hyper-real can take place concomitantly with the “liquidation” of all systems of
reference, and the level of significance that separates the real form the imaginary is
thus destroyed as a result of this process: “A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the
imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room
only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference”
(Baudrillard 170).
Postmodern theory and practice suggest that knowledge has always been
mediated by representations. Thus, the re-invention of the real in the form of fiction
is more than just an option for literature, it is a condition. The order of the imaginary
is reversed – the unreal ca no longer be built from the data provided by the real, but,
with the already existing models of the simulation, the real should be rebuilt. In the
case of Ryū Murakami’s text, such a model is represented by the post-apocalyptic
image of the world, an image borrowed from classical science fiction literature,
readdressed and re-signified in a postmodern manner. Postapocalyptic imagery
becomes integrated and reinterpreted by postmodernism; however, in Coin Locker
Babies, it also plays the role of a simulacrum in the sense defined by Baudrillard, since
fiction and real events overlap, abolishing the distance between the imaginary and the
real. It comes therefore as no surprise that Coin Locker Babies came to be seen as
foreshadowing the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and Ryū Murakami was often
regarded as a visionary writer.
The post-apocalyptic ending, dominated by Hashi’s song, suggesting that
salvation may come through an art form, reveals the second level of the text which,
without disbanding the primary level of the plot, foregrounds its hallucinatory nature.
In this sense, the attack on the world order is doubled, on a fictional level, by an
impairment on the norms of fiction, through a technique that is rather characteristic
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to the visual arts, which can overlap distinctive spaces through ingenious optical
effects. In an apparently simple composition, with the plot following two primary
levels in relation with the evolution of the lives of the two children, the novel abandons
conventions. Through the multiplication of scences of violence, to the brink of the
unbearable, a strange effect is obtained, namely that of a well-tempered surrealism
produced by the excess of certain violent scenes that dominate the background, in
relation with the foreground. Therefore, a second, unreal, distant level of the plot is
created. The technique of oversizing the effect of violence on the secondary level plays
the role of concomitantly annihilating and accentuating the distance between the
reality of the text and the super-reality thus built. One scene associated with this
technique is the one from the end of the novel, in which Hashi attacks the pregnant
woman, while Kiku releases the baneful gas upon the city. Thus, at the end of the novel,
the more distant level – oversizing the power of the two protagonists – imposes itself
with so much force, that it comes to annihilate the fictional ontology, so that Kiku and
Hashi, by gaining superhero powers, rise against the world order, making it collapse
and thus restoring chaos.
Values such as love, music, humanism do not stand a chance in the universe
created by Murakami Ryū. The only means of salvation seems to be action, but
definitely a destructive action at that. What Hashi tries through music, Kiku seems to
manage through action.
The world of consumption does not eliminate art; quite the contrary, it
identifies it with the objects of immediate pleasure and offers it the power of quick
reproduction, thus stripping it of its uniqueness and power of fascination. Hashi’s
music could definitely be a profession of faith in favour of art and to the benefit of the
supporters of its transcendence, but the way in which rock music is used for financial
gains – the expression of these manipulations of meaning is Mister D. – and especially,
in this context, the degradation of the concept of an artist, turned into the rock star,
hungry for orgies with sex, alcohol and drugs, erases any trace of art’s sacredness as
its transcendent nature is pulverized into worthless fragments. The power of art is
ephemeral and it does not last longer than the moment of its consumption – this seems
to be the message transmitted by the author, through Hashi. Thus, in Hashi’s case,
music proves to be nothing more than a search for the sounds he had heard in his pre-
natal condition and which, during his childhood, he is under the impression that he
re-hears in his sleep, at the psychiatric clinic where he had been taken together with
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his brother Kibu, so that they could be treated for autism. At the clinic, through certain
sounds that reproduced heartbeats, he was given the feeling of safety and of the
absence of consciousness, which he must have experienced as a fetus in his mother’s
womb. By singing, Hashi seeks to recover that state through music. The liberation from
the body and from consciousness, through art – through rock music, in Hashi’s case –
is illusory, nothing more than a mask that hides a more subtle form of violence – a
violence that acts through pleasure and seduction. In Kiku’s case, violence receives the
mark of the heroic, but an upside-down heroic. His adventure is not an adventure of
knowledge, but one of destruction. Kiku, as opposed to Hashi, understood, from the
very beginning, that violence must be directed not at the one who survived in a hostile
world, but at a world that proved to be nothing more than an even larger coin locker,
a world of objects that do not remain mere objects, since they induce a certain idea of
a metaphysical presence. Bill Brown notes the dual perspective on imagining objects
and explains that the magical (totemic, fetishizing) value of things is given by what is
excessive in objects: “You could imagine things, second, as what is excessive in objects,
as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as
objects-their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by
which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems” (Brown 5). The need to
destroy the world can thus also be translated through the two characters’ desire to
liquidate a society in which the objects excessively produce a false metaphysical
presence (simulacrum) and simulations. In the novel, there are countless examples of
objects that had been converted by the postmodern society into fetish objects or idols;
in this sense, the mass-media played an immense role in the production of certain such
objects, dematerialised of their own matter and reconverted into images. For instance,
Hashi is attached to his rock star image, created by the mass-media, and the television
becomes his mirror: “Television became his mirror” (Murakami 224). Later, however,
he develops a true aversion to the objects that reflect his image: “Hashi had developed
a strong aversion to anything that could reflect an image. Mirrors horrified him, as did
windows at night, polished black marble, shiny chrome bumpers, or a still body of
water” (Murakami 378). Another outstanding scene is that of the recording of Kiku’s
meeting with the mother who had abandoned him in the coin locker, a meeting that
was staged and transmitted live. The feeling he experiences when he sees the woman
who had given birth to him was that she was not human, but rather a chunk of metal:
“She was hardly human, more like some… blob…of metal” (Murakami 270). The
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mother’s image of an idol is thus destroyed by reducing it to a metal object, an object
that can be annihilated by the explosion of a gunshot. The scene ends with the mother’s
murder. The death of the mother sends him to the youth detention centre where the
thoughts of destroying the world gradually take shape. However, this episode stands
out, since, for Murakami, violence has a dual valence. However, this episode also
stands out from the viewpoint of the mother-son relationship, since, in Murakami’s
work, violence is not merely a way of shocking the reader, but also an ambiguous, dual
presence. Thus, if the image of the mother is undoubtedly sacralised, then could it be
that what the author attacks here is the fetishization of an image that loses its original
meaning, transforming a sign into its representation? By abandoning her own child in
the coin locker, the woman who had given birth to it loses, in the traditional view, the
symbolic function and, implicitly, she herself transforms into her own anti-symbol.
By substituting the functioning mechanics of the world, seen as an immense
coin locker, mechanics which, dividing the people into prisoners and guards, functions
in only one direction – the latter making sure that nobody escapes, with a universal
law of violence that would awaken all those hopelessly trapped in the coin lockers of
the consumer world, Kiku begins his murderous attack on Tokyo – namely, in the city
centre, represented by the Shinjuku district, with its thirteen skyscrapers, the symbol
of the post-industrial society and of commodification. If the violence through music,
promoted by Hashi, was unsuccessful, the one remaining chance is that of generalizing
violence on the scale of the entire world, the path chosen by Kiku. His activism awards
no value to the power of music, in relation with the power of destroying the society.
The expression of the stability of a world in which the unforeseen is excluded is
represented by the Shinjuku district, the centre of the business world, with its thirteen
skyscrapers. By translating this view, the novel’s central motif becomes the search and
destruction of the centre, an ironic retort to the idea of the centre-periphery relation,
foreign to the traditional Japanese thought, but so deeply rooted in the modern
western thought.
Without directly encroaching on the nature of the centre, the postmodern
poetics proclaimed not the disappearance of the relation between the centre and the
periphery – a relation in which the periphery functions within the line-of-sight of the
centre –, but rather the problematization of this relation and, by assimilating the
principle of relativity from scientific thought, it declared the ubiquity of the centre. In
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Murakami’s view, the destruction of Tokyo’s centre represents the balanced disruption
in the relation of subordination between the periphery and the centre, and the
proclamation of chaos in the form of a new beginning. If the centre symbolically
represents consciousness, then the return to brute force, after the destruction of
reason, which is the expression of the intellect, leads to the establishment of a new
order – the order of a world without history, a world in which history merely just came
into being atop the ruins of the old one. The return to the barbaric state from before
this world, a return that is possible through the destruction inflicted by the Datura gas,
could regenerate the world and could recover the meaning of history and, implicitly,
the meaning of the real. The new order is one without people, without subject and
without memory, replaced by an order of objects without memory which, in the
absence of people, lack the metaphysical presence. The apocalyptic scenery from the
end of the novel is the expression of a world of objects that remained functional, but
in which no human survived. What role would the object then play, within the new
order? No obvious role, seems to be Ryū Murakami’s answer. Basically, the
foreshadow of this ending occurs in the very beginning of the novel, which depicts the
image of the abandoned coalmine on the island on which Hashi and Kiku had been
raised: “The neat gray rows of miners’ quarters seemed normal enough except for the
occasional tuft of weeds pushing through a broken window, but there was an eerie
stillness, almost as if a siren had sounded and everyone had cleared out, leaving the
boys as a human sacrifice” (Murakami 26). Could it be that the image at the end,
depicting an abandoned Tokyo, foreshadowed the posthuman universe?
In this sense, the adventure of the destruction through chaos and violence is
translated, in the case of the two protagonists, into the desire to recover certain
realities from before their birth, namely that state completely devoid of consciousness
and will, a recovery that is only possible by tearing the fundamentals of the world to
the ground.
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Bryson, Joanna J. “The Confabulation of Self.” Memory in the Twenty-First Century.
New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences. Ed.
Sebastian Groes. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016: 334.
Frențiu, Rodica. “Haruki Murakami. Possible Questions – Possible Worlds. The
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Borriello. no. XI, Napoli, Italy, 2011.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. London and
New York: Routledge, 1996.
Kouno, Akihisa, Charles F. Johnson. “Child abuse and neglect in Japan: Coin-
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Murakami, Ryū. Coin locker babies. London: Pushkin Press, 2013. Translated by
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