BURIED IN TIME: THE
FORGOTTEN EXISTENCE OF LIEUTENANT MAMIYA IN HARUKI MURAKAMI’S THE WIND-UP
BIRD CHRONICLE
Subhashini. G
PhD Research Scholar (Full Time),
Department of English,
Government Arts College (Autonomous),
Salem-7.
&
Dr. T. Alagarasan
Associate Professor,
Department of English,
Government Arts College (Autonomous),
Salem-7.
Abstract:
This paper examines the desolation of Lieutenant Mamiya
in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, set against the backdrop of
World War II. The novel pictures Toru Okada, and his innate ability to
reidentify the individuals who unravel the concealed identities of characters
such as Lieutenant Mamiya, Creta Kano, Malta Kano, Noboru Wataya, and Kumiko.
Initially introduced as the keeper of Corporal Honda’s will and a retired
Social Science teacher from Hiroshima Prefecture, Lieutenant Mamiya appears to
be unremarkable. However, his true identity remains obscure, his past is
gradually forgotten. When Toru Okada is prepared to listen, fragments of
Mamiya’s concealed history surfaces. As a former member of the Kwantung Army
involved in conflicts against the Soviet Union over Manchukuo, Mamiya embodies
the existential dislocation experienced by war veterans. This paper explores
his profound ontological transformation, marked by emptiness, loss, and
alienation. Mamiya ultimately reduced to a “hollow man,” exists in isolation,
his past is erased from collective memory. His existence mirrors that of a
fossil buried in time—unseen and unvalued unless it is excavated. In this way,
Mamiya’s identity, firmly rooted in the past, becomes devoid of significance in
the present.
Keywords: Ontological transformation, Emptiness, Alienation,
Erasure of identity
In this article, Buried in Time, the researcher examines
the metamorphosis of Lieutenant Mamiya, exploring how the identity of Mamiya
was intermittently eclipsed and subsequently reidentified. There is a profound
existential transformation explored through Catherine Malabou's concept of the
metamorphosis of identity. The researcher examines how the frame narrative
serves as a gateway to rekindling the partially concealed identities of the
characters.
Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was
translated into English by Jay Rubin, and this research focuses solely on the
translated version. Rubin, a Japanese literature professor at Harvard
University in 1993, later moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he
specialized in contemporary Japanese writings, particularly the works of
SosekiNatsume, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Haruki Murakami. The original Japanese
version, NejimakidoriKuronikuru, was serialized between 1992 and 1993 in
Shincho magazine. Rubin began translating the novel while it was still
in progress, and his work took more than three years to complete. Knopf
initially released Volume 1, The Thieving Magpie, and Volume 2, Bird
as Prophet, separately in 1994, followed by Volume 3, The Bird Catcher,
in 1995. Later, Knopf decided to publish the novel as a single volume, and
Rubin, as editor, faced challenges in adapting it for American readers. By this
time, Murakami had already gained recognition in the U.S. through short
narratives like “The Zoo Attack” (1995) and “Another Way to Die” (1997),
published in The New Yorker. The publication of The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle marked the rise of the "Haruki Phenomenon."
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a Chinese box-structured novel, in which layers of
narrative gradually reveal and reshape the identities of several characters.
Kumiko, initially introduced as the wife of the protagonist, Toru Okada, later
emerges as a bridge leading him to the metaphysical realm. Malta Kano, whom
Kumiko introduces to Toru to help in finding their lost cat, is a clairvoyant
who becomes a guiding figure in his metaphorical search for the Holy Grail.
Creta Kano, first described as a “prostitute of the mind,” is later revealed to
have lost her ability to feel after attempting suicide, following the physical
violation inflicted by Noboru Wataya. Lastly, Noboru Wataya, the novel’s
primary antagonist, is an intellectual tyrant and political manipulator,
responsible for the suffering of multiple characters, including Kumiko, her
sister, and Creta Kano.
Murakami’s critics have studied the narrative,
Psychological, and Mythological aspects of the novel to decipher
Murakami’s fiction. Still, the historiography of resistance and its
desolation is something yet to be analysed. Desolation is a term derived from
the French word “desolacion” which means hopelessness, despair and
devastation. It encompasses the idea of a place laid waste, abandoned, or left
in a state of ruin. Whether it’s the aftermath of a battle, or the remnants of
a forgotten city, or the ache of a lonely heart, desolation captures that
haunting emptiness that lingers in their absence.
Murakami’s exploration of history in the background of
his novel is a profound technique of his fiction. Lieutenant Mamiya enters the
narrative as a man distributing Corporal Honda’s Keepsake. Since he is a
retired social science teacher from Hiroshima Prefecture, he doesn’t have a
business card to introduce himself to the protagonist, Toru Okada. It shows the
‘erasure of identity’ as a soldier in the community. And at the same time,
there is a profound ontological detachment from self.
While trapped in the dry well, Lieutenant Mamiya suffered
from intense pain and hunger for three days, feeling as if he were already
dead. At that moment, when a brief flash of light appeared above him, he was
unable to grasp it. He believed that the intense light had taken his shadow
away—an archetypal sign, as the shadow carries a person’s partial identity and
memory. He had “ceased to feel anything (177).” After his return from the Outer
Mongolian region, he remained in Manchuria and was later assigned to Siberia.
When he lost his hand, he felt no pain. This dissociation has ultimately led to
a state of oblivion.
The detachment from the ontological state of mind explores
Mamiya’s existential void and shows the futility of war. Murakami himself has
shared the megaliothymia of war through Sergeant Hamano in The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle as follows.
“I’m a soldier. And I don’t mind dying in
battle for my country, because that’s my job. But this war we’re fighting now,
Lieutenant-well, it’s just not right. It’s not a real war, with a battle line
where you face the enemy and fight to the finish. We advance, and the enemy
runs away without fighting. …We have to steal their food, because the line
moves forward so fast our supplies can’t catch up with us. And we have to kill
our prisoners, because we don’t have anyplace to keep them or any food to feed
them. It’s wrong, Lieutenant…. I’m telling you, Lieutenant, this is one war that
doesn’t have any Righteous Cause. It’s just two sides killing each other. And
the ones who get stepped on are the poor farmers, the ones without politics or
ideology. (WBC 143)
In Murakami’s narrative, Lieutenant Mamiya suffers from
over forty years of post-traumatic stress after witnessing Yamamoto being
skinned alive and Sergeant Hamano being killed and he was thrown into the dry
well, where Mamiya himself was trapped for three days. Unlike the “rupture”
that disrupts and halts creation in Mallarmé’s Art of Poetry, Toru Okada
experiences a rupture that leads to a break from his alienated self, allowing
for transformation rather than stagnation.
Lieutenant Mamiya’s “rupture” leads to a destructive
quality in his life, resulting in a sense of annihilation and existence without
real meaning. Along with Corporal Honda, Sergeant Hamano, and Mufti Yamamoto,
Lieutenant Mamiya was sent on a secret mission to the Outer Mongolian region by
crossing the Kalkha River. He was a wounded individual who underwent metamorphosis,
which is intriguing. As Yamamoto retrieved a document, he was skinned to death
in front of Lieutenant Mamiya. Mamiya was powerless and “did nothing but vomit…
all that remained lying on the ground was Yamamoto’s corpse, a bloody red lump
of meat from which every trace of skin had been removed (160).”
Lieutenant Mamiya was left alone with the Outer Mongolian
patrol unit after skinning Yamamoto and killing Hamano. Abandoned in a barren
land, he was rescued by Corporal Honda after three days. He returned to the
war, where he lost his left hand to a Soviet tank. Though he survived for many
years, he lost his family in the Hiroshima attack. A grave bearing his name
exists in a cemetery, yet he remains alive throughout the narrative.
Lieutenant Mamiya's metamorphosis into an "empty
shell," akin to Corporal Honda's keepsake (an empty box) given to
protagonist Toru Okada, is revealed through storytelling. The narrative plays a
crucial role in unveiling his inner turmoil. His fractured sense of self
transforms into that of a "Hollow Man," a state laid bare to the
readers.
Unlike Freud’s psychoanalysis, which draws from past
desires and seemingly insignificant events that shape a person's psyche,
Catherine Malabou’sThe New Wounded speaks about trauma that has no connection
to past events. Malabou considers trauma as a brain liaison, an external
rupture, that can cause psychological and neurological issues irrelevant to
prior experience. She criticises Freud by stating that
he never presents the formation of the new identity as a
discontinuous process, a leap, a phenomenon that is no less unforeseen or
unexpected than the catastrophe itself. For him, traumas and wounds do not seem
capable of creating ex nihilo a posttraumatic identity. There is always a
certain psychic continuity between what comes before and what comes after the
wound; the subject remains what he is within his very alienation. (152)
This aligns with Stéphane Mallarmé's idea of rupture in Arts
of Poetry, where an external noise can halt creation. Just as sudden noise
disrupts the creative process, trauma desolates the flow of life, leaving the
individual completely displaced from their inner self. As Murakami projects in The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Lieutenant Mamiya turns out to be haunted by events
related to his past, and his identity is broken. This broken identity creates a
rupture, leading to an existential metamorphosis, as Malabou states, “All
suffering is formative of the identity that endures it” (18).
Furthermore, unlike Freud’s approach, which reconstructs
and rejuvenates the mind by tracing past desires and unconscious memories,
Mamiya’s trauma follows a model of plasticity. As Catherine Malabou suggests,
trauma reshapes identity rather than merely breaking it, leading to a
reidentification of the self through the act of narration.
The reidentification of Lieutenant Mamiya occurs on
multiple levels. Existential metamorphosis refers to the way the meaning
and purpose of Mamiya’s life are circumvented, much like the light that is
briefly veiled in the well. When Lieutenant Mamiya was left to die in the well
by the Russian officer Boris the Manskinner, he experienced intense darkness
and lost consciousness. During the day, a brief thirty-second beam of light
would enter the well, but Mamiya could never fully grasp it due to its fleeting
nature. He believed that this light stripped him off something essential—his
profound shadow, life, memory, or even his very identity.
Anagmorphic
(derived from anagnorisis—realization, and morphosis—transformation)
describes how, through reading, the audience comes to understand that Mamiya
has lost his profound sense of purpose due to the intervention of an ostensibly
purposeless war. Murakami takes readers on a turbulent journey where the true
identities of the characters are gradually revealed through the narrative,
encouraging the reader to become an active participant. This anagmorphosis
of Lieutenant Mamiyaoccurs at the reader’s mind through reading.
Finally, Narrative Metamorphosis parallels the
anagmorphic process—or rather, one might say that an anagmorphic transformation
is the result of narrative metamorphosis. Murakami layers the narrative in such
a way that he presents a tabula rasa (clean slate) before us and
gradually fills it in. Alternatively, one could say that every narrative framed
within the novel begins in medias res, leading to a process of narrative
metamorphosis. Murakami is using a unique writing technique of the Chinese box
structure narrative, inwhichacts as a profound path that brings out Lieutenant
Mamiya'scharacter to light.
The Chinese Box
Structure, also known as the Layered Narrative, is a storytelling technique
that reveals a narrative within a narrative, unfolding in multiple layers. In The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the mundane task of the narrator, Toru Okada,
searching for his missing cat, initially gives the novel a detective fiction
kind of narrative. This gradually expands into a paranormal narrative with the
introduction of Malta Kano, a clairvoyant who claims to heal others. Murakami
further layers the narrative with war memoirs, exploring themes of memory,
nostalgia, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
As the story
progresses, political power abuse becomes a central theme, intertwining with
intellectual manipulation and the exploitation of Creta Kano, described as a
"prostitute of the mind," highlighting abuse and gender
discrimination. Toru Okada moves in and out of a metaphysical realm in an
attempt to uncover the truth behind Kumiko’s disappearance. Ultimately,
Murakami concludes the novel with an open ending, leaving readers to ponder the
true nature of loss and the complexities of human connection. This ambiguity
encourages reflection on the characters' journeys, urging us to question our
perceptions of reality and the unseen forces that shape our lives. The fate of
Toru Okada and Kumiko remains uncertain. Thus,
the forgotten existence of Lieutenant Mamiya comes into being on multiple
levels through Murakami’s layered storytelling.
Works Cited
Malabou, Catherine. The New Wounded.
Forms of Living, 2012.
Murakami, Haruki. The Wind-up Bird
Chronicle. London, Vintage Books, 2011.
Wakatsuki, Tomoki. The
Haruki Phenomenon. Springer Nature, 9 Dec. 2020.