Body Parts in Murakami's Work

If there’s one consistent thing throughout many of the Murakami works we’ve read so far, it’s a persistent and confounding obsession with body parts. The most obvious example of this is, of course, the girlfriend’s ears in A Wild Sheep Chase, which are not only described as “the dream image of an ear,” but also in turn beautiful, erotic, and enthralling (34). This woman, however, is not the only one in this novel to have body parts described in excruciating detail. The secretary, too, has a perfect feature: His hands. His hands are described as “truly beautiful […], if somehow unsettling” and his fingers as “tense, compelling, [and] nerve-racking.” (61, 124).

The body part obsession carries into Murakami’s short stories. In Sydney Green Street, the characters chase after the sheep man’s ear, which is decidedly not perfect as it is put on a pizza and covered in hot sauce. In The 1963/1982 Girl From Ipanema, there is another focus on the “metaphysical sole” of the girl’s feet, which are described as perfect, and as neither too hot nor too cold (11). There are also extremely detailed descriptions of non-human body parts, like the whale penis in A Wild Sheep Chase which is described as unrecognizable as a part of a body and is sad and twisted.

I’m not sure what these body parts are intended to represent, if anything specific, or if they are even intended to represent the same thing in each case. Sometimes I feel like the perfect body parts in A Wild Sheep Chase and The 1963/1982 Girl From Ipanema indicate a connection to the other world – after all, the girlfriend clearly has some supernatural powers, the secretary is arguably also implied to have a connection to the world of the sheep himself, and the Ipanema Girl is also clearly somehow connected to the other world where time does not pass and everything is simply metaphysical. These descriptions always feel either implicitly or explicitly erotic, as if there is nothing more attractive than an ear, a hand, or a foot.

On the other hand, the descriptions of body parts and features that are somehow wrong are always a touch unsettling and seem to function as various representations of corruption. In both the case of the whale penis and the sheep man’s ear, there is a separation from the body, a sometimes literal staining of that which is considered erotic or perfect when attached to the body. Maybe that juxtaposition between perfection and twisted ugliness is the point. Maybe the idea is that something so perfect can always be thoroughly destroyed, like a flower crushed thoughtlessly under someone’s foot, or a set of footprints trampled through fresh snow.

-Amanda