I came across a speech Murakami gave in 2009 when he accepted the Jerusalem Prize in Israel: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/culture/1.5076881. This was after the world witnessed Israel attacking Gaza, and he addresses it in his speech by indirectly giving his political stance. He says, “Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is “The System.” The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others-coldly, efficiently, systematically…We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must now allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: we made the System”
I found this to be very illuminating to understand his own personal philosophy that influences his work. He says that he is "always on the side of the egg", or the individual, against "The System". It explains his focus on the individual, on which he later says, "I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them." From this perspective, Murakami could have included symbols of "The System" in all his stories.
In particular, I was struck by the sheep's parasitic nature in A Wild Sheep Chase, which Strecher also mentioned. I had previously thought that the sheep might represent the Japanese state or society, but I now think it extends past that: the sheep is "The System", the universal manifestation of the interconnected governance, institutions, norms, beliefs, etc. from society that are imposed on the individual. The sheep dominates the host's mind, eliminating individuality while driving the host to societal success. It is portrayed to inhabit the host in order to maneuver the entire structure of society for its secured control of it, and therefore of the people.
In the short story "Sleep", we see the fight more close-up between the individual and "The System" when the woman rejects her life as the perfect housewife, where "each day [was] pretty much a repetition of the day before[...] a life that had swallowed me up so completely" (81). Murakami repeats the idea that individuality can be consumed by society's desires and expectations, and living becomes meaningless because it is not you truly living it.
The bakery attacks Murakami writes about also could be interpreted through this lens. The protagonist and companions feel an unbearable emptiness within themselves from trying to conform to society, and can only alleviate it by doing something as bizarre as attack a bakery to break out of their routines.
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