The Body and Murakami

     by Nobel Chan

    In William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic," the pairing of a technologically-sophisticated future with an Asian setting harkens to the concept of "techno-orientalism," which Yiqin describes in her post as reflecting "Western fears about Eastern imperialism". To be more specific, techno-orientalism not only exposes Western fears of the East, but also acts as an 'othering' tool that dehumanizes Asian bodies. In "Johnny Mnemonic," all the presumably Japanese characters have Westernized names (Johnny, Molly, Ralfi). When Johnny poses as Eddie Bax, Ralfi calls him "Johnny" to indicate that he knows his true identity, suggesting that names are linked to who one really is (3). This link does not hold true for the body: characters are said to "wear" faces, and many major characters have had technological implants that change their physicality (the Lo Teks' teeth, Molly Million's fingernails). The story suggests that the body is artificial where the soul is not; the Westernized names are then the 'true' identity, and the presumably Japanese bodies are the external wrappings, the technological containers. The technological body is a body that can be fixed and replaced, which bears significant consequences for how Asians are perceived in the West. Recent controversies such as Scarlett Johansson's casting in Ghost in the Shell and Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange exemplify how Asian bodies are often dismissed and re-appropriated by White people (see also Ex Machina, where the White android literally dresses herself in her Asian predecessors' skins). The Asian body in SF is usually an empty shell, then, for Western authors to fill in for their own purposes.

    If this description of Asian as container and Western as content sounds familiar, it's because Murakami has proclaimed something similar about his own work, with one crucial difference. Murakami's works flip the script: the Western elements are now the 'container', and the Japanese identity is the central content. Part of why Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is less difficult to read than "Johnny Mnemonic" is because Murakami doesn't pelt the reader with new terms, signifying that Murakami is not trying to portray his world as 'fantastically othered' as Gibson does with his Japan. Rather than race being something 'put on', as in "Johnny Mnemonic" where people can wear faces of a "sharp-faced Caucasoid," Murakami's take on race goes much deeper than skin (Gibson 1). It goes straight down to the bones: "there were human skulls[...] Caucasoid, Negroid, Asiatic, Indians" (Murakami 28). The old man in Hard-Boiled Wonderland studies "the language of bones," imbuing the body with a fundamental, and fundamentally racialized, voice (26). While Murakami writes with Western influences, he is undeniably writing from a Japanese perspective and a Japanese body, and that bleeds into how he (possibly unintentionally) subverts techno-orientalist tropes. 

     One would be remiss to discuss bodies in Murakami's works without turning to the issue of sex. Though the racialized body gains subjectivity in Murakami's world, women oftentimes do not. They tend to be interchangeable, from the dead girlfriend/girlfriend with the ears in A Wild Sheep Chase to Reiko wearing Naoko's clothes in Norwegian Wood. Women's bodies are constantly borrowed/exchanged/confused, undermining their individuality and consciousness. Though there are examples of male bodies being taken over, for instance the Rat in A Wild Sheep Chase, they are mostly allowed to regain subjectivity through their own agency (in the Rat's case, suicide). Importantly, the Rat's suicide does not end his voice, as he communicates with Boku after he dies; Naoko, on the other hand, is effectively silenced by her death, and was silenced well in advance of her suicide by her inability to write letters. In Sleep, the female narrator is the one to confuse the other gender's bodies, noticing that her son and husband have the same expression while sleeping. This similarity disgusts her, which is interesting because the interchangeability of women does not seem to gall either Boku in A Wild Sheep Chase or Toru Watanabe. This discrepancy is suggestive of Murakami's attitude towards women's vs. men's bodies, though any hard conclusions will be hard to come to. Either way, the body in Murakami is a rich playing field for exploring gender and race, and also for other things I haven't touched on here such as sexuality, disability, and age.