Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

This thesis offers a reading of the first eleven novels of popular Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki, as well as a selected number of his short-stories and non-fictional works, as an evolving therapeutic discourse. In short, it is a response to Murakami's own claim to have started writing fiction as a means of self-therapy. Murakami, I will argue, is primarily responding to existential anxieties that have been magnified by conditions of cultural decline in late-capitalist Japan. His resulting therapeutic discourse shares interesting parallels with certain psychoanalytic theories of the twentieth century. Previous psychoanalytic readings of Murakami's work have tended to take either the writings of Carl Jung or Jacques Lacan as their starting point. This thesis will argue, however, that both theoretical frameworks are needed if one is to truly understand where Murakami is coming from. This kind of therapeutic reading might seem to justify those critics who see only the escapist elements in Murakami's fiction and who fault him for failing to engage fully with the important political and social issues of his day. In fact, a therapeutic reading, I will argue, is the best way to see how closely related Murakami's search for self-therapy and his growing search for commitment really are.

This thesis examines animals in the fiction of John Irving and Haruki Murakami, two authors who have much in common, contemporaries whose work is both commercially successful and regarded as literary. Different in that Irving works within a traditional realist framework while Murakami delves into the magical, each includes animals in his fiction. They employ anthropomorphism and zoomorphism in a variety of ways and demonstrate how animals, as Claude Levi-Strauss puts it, are “good to think with”. I draw on the work of Erica Fudge in an overview of thinking with animals and examine the role of anthropomorphism and how it complements animal advocacy and liberationism in Irving’s Setting Free the Bears. I compare and contrast anthropomorphism and zoomorphism in The Hotel New Hampshire. In doing this, I complicate and challenge Wendy Doniger’s assertion that “sexuality makes humans into animals; language makes animals into humans”. This also applies to Murakami’s animals, who have further roles including enabling engagement with a magical dimension. I argue that, as instantiated in both writers’ fiction, animals evoke thought effectively largely because they are, as John Berger puts it, “both like and unlike”, and as Fudge identifies, that the “paradox of like and not like…exists in our fascination with animals”. My argument is that it is this very paradox, that they are simultaneously both “them” and “us”, along with other factors, such as the diversity, versatility and the inherent ambiguity of animals, that renders them fascinating. Furthermore, Murakami’s magically real animals link conceptual realms that are conventionally separate and facilitate criticism and challenging of conventional human hegemonic structures while operating outside national and cultural boundaries. In summary, Irving’s and Murakami’s animals are good to think with for many reasons, not despite their enigmatic furry ambiguity, but largely because of it.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1995. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [265]-271).

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Kandidatuppsatsen analyserar Haruki Murakamis gestaltning av sin skrivprocess i boken Författare till yrket. Syftet är att undersöka hur en individuell skrivprocess kan kopplas till generell teori. Frågeställningen är hur Murakamis skrivprocess kan förstås i förhållande till Flower och Hayes kognitiva processteori för skrivande. Undersökningen genomfördes genom närläsning och kvalitativ tematisk analys. Sekundärmaterialet utgjordes av böcker och artiklar som ytterligare belyste resonemangen i primärmaterialet. Analysen visade att Murakami gestaltar sig själv i tre dimensioner i sin skrivprocess - intellekt, själ och kropp - en medveten konstruktion av identiteten där varje del inte behöver vara helt sann men helheten är sanning i stora drag.  Framställningen av självet och skrivprocessen är en konstnärlig gestaltning med inslag av fantasi såväl som minne och fakta men framstår som ärlig och i stort sett trovärdig. Det gick att associera alla delar av Murakamis gestaltning med den kognitiva processteorin. Uppsatsens slutsats är att det går att koppla en individuell skrivprocess till den kognitiva processteorin för skrivande och det går att replikera ansatsen för analys av fler författares skrivprocesser. / The Bachelor Thesis analyzes Haruki Murakami’s depiction of his writing process his book Novelist as a Vocation (the version translated from Japanese to Swedish by Eiko and Yukiko Duke 2017). The purpose is to investigate how an individual writing process can be linked to general theory and the research question is how Murakami's writing process can be understood in relation to Flower and Hayes' cognitive process theory for writing. The analysis was conducted through close reading and qualitative thematic analysis. The secondary material consisted of books and articles that further elucidated the reasoning in the primary material. The analysis showed that Murakami shapes himself in three dimensions in his writing process - intellect, soul and body - a conscious construction of the identity where each part does not have to be completely true but the whole is truth in general. The presentation of the self and the writing process is an artistic design with elements of imagination as well as memory and facts, but appears to be honest and largely credible. It was possible to associate all parts of Murakami's design with the cognitive process theory. The conclusion is that it is possible to link an individual writing process to the cognitive process theory for writing and it is possible to replicate the approach for analysis of more authors' writing processes.

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This thesis explores the work of three contemporary Japanese artists - Yasumasa Morimura, Mariko Mori and Takashi Murakami - in relation to cross-cultural exchanges and differences between Japan and the West. In carrying out such an investigation, this study illustrates how these artists play with Japanese and Western cultural forms in the context of postmodern challenges to concepts of essence and authenticity, and in a technologically transformed world shaped by unprecedented global flows of information, people, products and capital. In Morimura's art-making, this play is characterized by appropriations and parodies of Western cultural icons. The idea of identity-as-essence is superseded by a vision of identity-as-performance - a conception of identity as a creative act, taking place within an immanent system of global exchanges. Whilst Morimura's work tends to reify difference, for Mori the opposite is true. Melding arcane scientific and religious ideas, Mori creates technological spectacles with which she fantasizes a vanishing of determinate identities and difference within the encompassing field of a culturally amorphous techno-holism. Murakami's 'superflat' art raises the possibility of resolving this tension between the reification and effacing of difference. In his work, 'Japan' and 'the West' are represented as discrete entities that, at the same time, emerge already entangled, as effects in a preexisting system of global exchanges.