Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-Therapy by Jonathan Dil

Author:Jonathan Dil
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350270565
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

This desire to see the “lump of death” is what caused her to cover her boyfriend’s eyes while riding on the back of his motorcycle, killing him and injuring herself. “You’ve got to really push the limits if you’re going to trick it into coming out,” she explains to Tōru. 96 For her, this gooshy something inside people is the only real thing in the world. 97 At one point, she pulls Tōru’s ladder up from the well, abandoning him down there and perhaps leaving him there to die. Someone else rescues Tōru before he has a chance to find out just how far she was willing to go.

This can all be seen as part of Tōru’s preparation. He must slowly strip himself of everything inessential, everything connected with everyday reality. Entering the well, he senses this separation from the world above and the lives of ordinary people: “I am no longer one of them, however. They are up there, on the face of the earth; I am down here, in the bottom of a well.” 98 Or as he puts it a few lines later, “The break between ‘people’ and me is now total.” 99 This is the first step of what Campbell describes as the hero’s journey, “detachment or withdrawal,” the necessary transferring of “emphasis from the external to the internal world.” 100 This is similar territory to what we have already seen in A Wild Sheep Chase, but here the hero’s journey becomes more intentional. Tōru will make a conscious decision to commit to the quest and to follow it through to its end, even if it means death.

The main example Joseph Campbell offers of a hero who goes “forth of [their] own volition” is Theseus, who, when he learns of the half-bull, half-human Minotaur who is consuming human sacrifices in a labyrinth in Crete, immediately volunteers to kill the beast. 101 The Theseus story is one of the sources Murakami is borrowing from in Wind-Up Bird, even if Tōru takes a little longer than Theseus to make his decision. 102 There are numerous references to labyrinths in Wind-Up Bird, and when the character Ushikawa (Bull River) appears later in the story (or simply Bull as he is often called—“the more I hear that, the more I feel like a real bull,” Ushikawa states), we know our hero is getting close to his final battle. 103 Ushikawa is not the Minotaur in the novel, however; he is simply its representative (Ushikawa works for Noboru, who is the real beast that must be confronted). The most important labyrinth in the novel is the hotel where Kumiko (or some part of her) lies. Each time Tōru manages to make his way to room 208, he is interrupted by a knock at the door and warned to leave, but in the end, he will need to stay and face whoever or whatever is waiting for him on the other side.

Before this climactic encounter, though, there is an earlier one where

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