Murakami’s experimentation with the sublime in Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world and Kafka on the shore

Abstract

 The dissertation sets out to explore how Haruki Murakami employs the aesthetics of the sublime to depict trauma in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (HBWED) and Kafka on the Shore (KS). It will firstly identify the key historical formulations of the concept, which will be followed by an analysis of the sublime today, namely the postmodern sublime, as well as how it can serve as a theoretical framework to understand trauma and its recovery. Three conceptualizations of the postmodern sublime, which are developed by Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson and Julia Kristeva respectively, will be discussed in detail before an analysis of Murakami’s two novels in light of the concept of the sublime is conducted. I want to argue that instead of trying to illustrate in definite terms the sufferings of trauma, Murakami employs the aesthetics of the sublime to capture his protagonists’ suffering and pain as they experience them. To be specific, the Lyotardian sublime appears to be used in collaboration with Jameson’s notion of the “waning of affect” to capture the machine-like character of inhuman capitalism, whose unpredictable and complicated operations emasculate the hero in HBWED and leave a trauma on his psyche. Kristeva’s formulation of abjection is evoked to shed light on the trauma suffered by the young hero of KS, which is a deep sense of self-abjection caused by his mother abandoning him at the age of four, while the Lyotardian sublime is again leveraged, this time focused on the process of “working through” trauma, to depict the hero’s inner journey to healing.