Not Being Kumiko : The Displaced Feminine Subject in Murakami Haruki's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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There is little doubt that Murakami Haruki's novels offer rich pickings for those intent on developing `feminist' critiques of contemporary Japanese fiction. Many of the women of his narratives have variously figured as prostitutes, simpletons, clairvoyants, Lolitas, clerical assistants or housewives. Their subjectivities have frequently been rendered in terms of absence, negation, anonymity - and sexual relations with the protagonist have often been represented in highly simulacral or phantasmal ways: telephone sex, wet dreams, the virtual intimacy of computer mediated dialogue. Most recently, this has appeared in the form of the Oedipal taboo - as the adolescent hero's intercourse with a maternal apparition. Notwithstanding the obvious efficacy of feminist and psychoanalytic readings in attempting to account for Murakami's popularity, it is important that such analyses be qualified by recognition of Murakami's own project of critique - the dismantling of the narrative subjectivities made available through the paradigms of Japanese literary modernity. Indeed, it can be argued that his treatment of female subjectivities is linked to a broader subversion of modalities of the subject - and that this is apparent through his repeated use of the tropes of abjection and the sublime. This paper proposes just such a `double reading' of the central motif of Murakami's longest fictional work The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Nejimakidori kuronikuru). It situates the figure of Kumiko in terms of an incessantly `displaced' feminine subjectivity which is, nevertheless, universalized at a broader discursive level as the site of undecidability, the liminal and the ontological threshold of the sublime.

Not Being Kumiko : The Displaced Feminine Subject in Murakami Haruki's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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