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In Sorrows Begin Responsibilities
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20096 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1992 |
2,896 Words |
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Ihab Hassan
Ihab Hassan is Vilas Research Professor of English and
comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin in
Milwaukee. He is the author of Selves at Risk: Patterns of
Quest in Contemporary American Letters and Out of Egypt:
Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography. In the sixties and
seventies he developed the theory of postmodernism in essays
collected in The Post-modern Turn: Essays in Post-modern
Theory and Culture. |
HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD
Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum
Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 1991
400 pp., $21.95
They call it "Murakami madness." It is certainly a phenomenon, this sudden rage for Haruki Murakami's bleak fiction. The phenomenon heightens for us the conundrum of contemporary Japanese culture itself. Is there something in that culture oddly new? Has Japan changed drastically since the ear, or is the change merely a mirage of images, a trance of self-induced hype?
The questions concern the nature of postindustrial societies, and concern America as well as Japan. Thus, for instance, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard writes in his antic book, America:
America has no identity problem. In the future, power will belong to those peoples with no origins and no authenticity who know how to exploit that situation to the full. Look at Japan, which to a certain extent has pulled off this trick better than the U.S. itself, managing, in what seems to us an unintelligible paradox, to transform the power of territoriality and feudalism into that of deterritoriality and weightlessness. Japan is already a satellite of the planet Earth. But America was already in its day a satellite of the planet Europe. Whether we like it or not, the future has shifted towards artificial satellites.
Ambiguously Gifted, Urban Writers
Pies or satellites in the sky aside, a different kind of literary work has now found its audience in Japan. The work, as in Murakami's case, often makes the miron serar (million seller) list. It can be fiction at the edge of pop; or it can be serious fiction, postmodern fiction, that hostile critics label pop. Sometimes the work cultivates tedium, inchoateness, transcendent banality; at other times, it surrenders to a frenzy of slapstick and pastiche. Such techniques may serve an emergent social vision with sullen or clownish art.
In fact, following the earlier Japanese modernists like Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki, later than Yukio Mishima and Yasushi Inoue, younger still than Kobo Abe or Kensaburo Oe, a generation of ambiguously gifted urban writers now struggles to render the febrile realities of Japan.
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