| Summary: | The focus of this thesis is Murakami's consistent textual evocations of a parallel
world-within-a-world motif. By examining works in which these narrative
constructs are most prominent, the analysis will delineate and clarify the
structures and thematic significance of such constructs within his fictions and
their function in the creation and,even, interpretation of Murakami's other
realms.
This thesis will also explore the possibilities of links, whether conscious or
unconscious, between Murakami's fictions and a modern Japanese literary
paradigm for which the term, Mukogawa ('the other-side') fiction, has been
coined. It is hoped that the structural and thematic analyses outlined above
might aid in the tracing of connections to a Japanese literary tradition with
which, according to most critics, Murakami's fictions have nothing in common.
By examining similar topoi and textual manifestations of difference, I hope that
certain aspects of his fictions will better stand out. At the same time, recognizing
the need to keep one eye open to recent critical studies, I will incorporate aspects
of theoretical approaches to Magic Realism, a literary phenomenon not unlike
mukogawa fiction, that might better enable my analysis of the recurring fantasylike
parallel worlds of Murakami and shed more light on his relation to a literary
tradition that developed out of the perceived sense of 'loss' (identity, culture,
roots) that occurred during the rapid modernization of Japan from the Meiji
period onwards. === Arts, Faculty of === Asian Studies, Department of === Graduate
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