THE EVOLUTION OF THE PROTAGONIST IN THE TRILOGY OF THE RAT BY HARUKI MURAKAMI

This article examines the evolution of the protagonist in Haruki Murakamis Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase. Murakami is one of the most widely read writers of our time. His books have been translated into many languages ​​of the world and are published in millions of copies. He is called the most non-Japanese of Japanese writers. Murakamis heroes are outsiders of the era of advanced capitalism, consumer society and globalization, who sit in their Japanese kitchens and try to understand the meaning of their existence. It is easy for us to put ourselves in their place, because they are the same as we, who at least once in their life faced the problem of choice. Therefore, in this article we also wanted to reveal the characters nature, analyze their actions and deeds.


ISSN: 2320-5407
Int. J. Adv. Res. 8(10), 647-655 648 quench their existential thirst, and share drunken revelations (the tirades of the wealthy Rat are directed against wealth, despite the fact that his father made an unjust capital during the Second World War, the occupation and war with Korea).
As restrictions on free speech increase, the Rat also goes through an evolution -from a complete absence of any literary interests to immersion in increasingly heavy Western classics, and then he himself begins to write. The postscript says that in the period since the end of the book, the narrator turned twenty-nine, he got married and lives in Tokyo, and the Rat, now thirty, writes novels, is not published, but sends his works to a friend as gifts for Christmas and birthday.
.In The Rat, we find a controversial self-portrait of an aspiring writer: 1. --Where did you get this nickname? 2. I forgot. I have it for a long time. At first I really hated it. And now I don't even think about it. You get used to everything.‖ [8, P.20] (Hereinafter quotes translated by the author of the article).
The nickname was received so long ago and has so grown into the -cultural layer‖ of the soul (-mukashi‖), which has been accumulating since time immemorial, that the hero has already -forgotten‖ where it came from.
This self-absorbed youth is identified with a gloomy, frightening creature lurking in dark, secret holes. Perhaps Murakami did not -understand‖ everything in his first book, but he realized that he was digging up the past of his soul, rummaging among half-forgotten memories and misunderstood images that suddenly emerge from the depths of the -other world‖. Lack of a rational explanation, oblivion, free associations, this is how deep mines and dark tunnels open, leading to another, timeless world that exists parallel to ours -a world that Murakami will explore with more and more confidence. Even The Jay's Bar gives you access to the world of the soul: -In The Jay's Bar, there was an engraving over the counter, yellowed with tobacco smoke, and when time was unbearably slowing down, we stared at it for hours. The image somehow reminded me of the Rorschach test: the vague outlines in which I could distinguish two green monkeys tossing two half-deflated tennis balls ... 1. What do you think they symbolize? I asked [Jay]. 2. The monkey on the left is you, and on the right is me. I throw you a bottle of beer, and you give me money for it." [8, P.15] The writer makes fun of the symbolism attached to the images of animals, and symbolization in general. He stubbornly denies the presence of "symbols" in his books. However, Rorschach's monkeys are a typical example of paintings that sweep before Murakami's readers: generalized images of animals, water elements, plants or terrain, which the author does not agree to define either in interviews or in texts; like Rorschach spots, they can independently influence the minds of readers.
If the Rat is a writer obsessed with the intimate, subjective world of symbols, then the narrator is the only one of the authors of -these pages‖ who is a little more inclined towards objectivity. He reacts to -or simply contemplatesevents and people that come into his field of vision and are of greater interest than himself. In adolescence, the main problem for him was communication with the outside world. He was so quiet that his parents took him to a psychologist. At the age of fourteen, the young man unexpectedly began to talk as if a dam had burst; it lasted three months, and then he became an "ordinary" person, not too taciturn, but not overly talkative either.
Finishing school, the narrator deliberately adopted a calm, detached view of things, vowing to say more than half of what was on his mind. Now, having become a writer, he considers his habitual restraint a disadvantage. She certainly makes it difficult for him to communicate with the Rat, who does not see the opportunity to turn to a friend for advice. Jay puts it this way: -You are a nice guy, but you have a kind of detachment in you.‖ [8, P.108]. The narrator promises Jay to have a heart-to-heart talk with the Rat, but they never succeed. The two sides of a writer's personality will never agree.
The serenity of the narrator, the imaginary author of the book, is also conveyed to the language of the book. The most compelling feature of this small first novel is, without a doubt, its style -how intricately Murakami handles words. -In your style, I like the sense of the joy of playing with language,‖ one interviewer confessed to the writer 649 after several more of his novels were released. -Unlike the writers of the past, I feel the distance between the person and his words,‖ Murakami replied. --Well, in my case, the reason for this is a strong desire to speak when there is nothing to say. I didn't want to write about too many things, therefore, deleting them, I saw that there was nothing else left‖. Here Murakami laughed, but continued: -So I turned to the realities of 1970 and started putting words together. It looks like I decided: what the hell -something will work out, I must try. Returning to this now, I think that then I reasoned like this: it doesn't matter how words are connected -since I am doing this, then my consciousness, one way or another, should be reflected in them‖ [5].
In his lecture at Berkeley, Murakami talked about his struggles with style, referring to foreign literature that inspired him: -I suspect many of you are surprised that in all this time I have never mentioned a single Japanese writer who has influenced me. Yes, indeed, I only mentioned American or British names. Many Japanese critics suck me for this feature of my work. Many students and teachers of Japanese literature in this country do the same. However, the fact remains that before I started writing myself, I loved reading writers like Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, and among Hispanics, Manuel Puig and Gabriel García Márquez. And when the books by John Irving, Raymond Carver and Tim O'Brien appeared, I liked them too. I was attracted by the style of each of these writers, there was something magical in their works. To be honest, I did not feel this kind of charm in the modern Japanese prose I was reading at the time. The question arose: why is it impossible to create such magic, the same charm in the Japanese language? And so I started to create my own style." [2] Murakami achieves soothing detachment in a variety of ways. The narrator describes the events that happened to him when he was a little over twenty, from the position of a wiser, but only slightly more adult "self", in which there is not even a hint of adult complacency. It is important that Murakami always denotes "I" with the word "boku". Although the tradition of the first-person novel has long been rooted in serious Japanese prose, it is commonly used to refer to the narrator as "watakushi" or "watashi." Murakami preferred to designate the pronoun "I" with the word "boku" -a more everyday, simpler, until then mainly used by young people in an informal setting. (Women never use "boku" when speaking of themselves. In cases where the story is from a woman's perspective, the neutral "watashi" is used.) All of this does not in any way imply that Murakami was the first Japanese novelist to use boku for "I" when referring to an unnamed male storyteller. But the personality designated by the writer as Boku is truly unique. First, it reminds him of himself, endowed with a generous supply of curiosity and inclined to calmly, detached and even absentmindedly perceive the immanent oddities of life.
The writer decided to name his fictional character "Boku", feeling: the Japanese word for ego is closest to the neutral English "I"; only in the smallest degree related to the Japanese social hierarchy, it is more democratic and, of course, does not serve to designate any important person.
Twenty-nine-year-old Murakami also made Boku his own age, describing the events of almost ten years ago. In essence, the narrator finds himself in the position of a benevolent big brother -someone who can advise (without any adult complacency) how to survive the tumultuous decade from twenty to thirty and achieve a certain degree of self-knowledge. Boku saw death and experienced disappointment in life, but he is above all an ordinary guy who loves beer, and not at all a subtle artist or an outstanding mind. He is polite and knows how to behave, loves baseball, rock and jazz, is interested in girls -although he does not spend all his time and energy on them, he treats his partners with attention. In fact, he is something like a role model from a more or less didactic book on how to overcome the difficulties of young years and not give up before life.
The narrator in the novel "Hear the Wind Sing" immediately disarms the reader, abandoning all claims to create high art, but in his book, one can probably "here and there" find "one or two instructions." Beginning with the title, this light and playful novel is clearly didactic -in keeping with modern Japanese tradition of offering readers life models. However, the author conveys his message without resorting to the participation of authoritative voices of his parents, which arouses sympathy among young readers and hostility among critics of the older generation.
Briefly summarizing the events of 1969-1973 (student riots in Tokyo and beyond), in -Pinball, 1973‖ (1980) Murakami refers to the few months of 1973 (September to November), when Boku is twenty-four and the Rat is 650 twenty-five.
Boku lives in Tokyo and continues languidly as a commercial translator, working with a friend and attractive office assistant. Boku feels that the middle of the third decade of his life passes in some mediocre, impenetrable gloom, but when he shares with his assistant his own formula for how to cope with a meaningless routine ("want nothing more"), the formula doesn't seem convincing neither to the girl nor to himself.
Meanwhile, the Rat, leaving the university, hangs out in the "Jay's Bar" in Kobe (700 kilometers from Tokyo), trying to break up with the woman with whom he had a relationship, and intending to leave the city forever. The only hint that the Rat did not abandon literary ambitions is the circumstances of the meeting with this woman: they met through an advertisement for the sale of a typewriter.
Boku and the Rat never meet in the novel; Boku's first-person chapters alternate (somewhat erratically) with a thirdperson story of the Rat. This gives us the first reason to believe that the Rat is an "artificial", fictional character, while Boku is close to the author himself. The element of admonition arises in this book as well, but most clearly it does not come from Boku, who does not use here the image of his matured self, but rather from the wise "old" (forty-five-year-old) Chinese bartender Jay, who was rarely mentioned in the first novel. Appearing before us in his current state and not in retrospect, 24-year-old Boku is much more open to the Rat than he was in "Hear the Wind Sing". The Rat's pain is almost as burning as in the early novel, but here Boku also reveals to us the secret of his past suffering. We understand that his calmness is hardly sufficient protection against the bitterness of loss.
As a result, the general tone of the second book turns out to be much darker than the tone of the first, but instead of returning Boku to the most painful chapter of his past -the death of his beloved Naoko, Murakami forces the hero in embarrassment to go in search of Pinball. The same Pinball, which Boku spent many mindlessly happy hours with, as before with a similar car in the Jay's Bar.
The book's climactic scene takes place in the harsh, blinding light and chilling cold of a freezer warehouse drenched in the scent of dead chickens -an unusually inelegant, fetid image of death as Boku encounters the silent and timeless "other" world of memory. This world then appears as a legendary "elephant graveyard"; then "a graveyard of dreams, so old that they lie beyond memory"; that "dark fairy forest", where Boku himself for a moment feels the threat of transformation into a motionless chimera; then a repository of faded teenage dreams; and, finally, outer space, where a pinball -an automatic machine -"Spaceship" -awaits him in complete peace. This kaleidoscope includes almost all of the "other" worlds offered by mainstream literature and cinema.
The presence of death in the "other world" by Murakami is quite tangible, but this does not mean at all that the "other world" is simply death.
When we meet Boku, the Rat, and the Chinese bartender Jay in -A Wild Sheep Chase‖, it's already July 1978, although the opening section is titled "November 25, 1970." Boku, now twenty-nine, has managed to marry and divorce an attractive office assistant during this time. He turned his translation office into a relatively successful advertising agency. However, Boku lost all connection with the Rat: the old friend simply disappeared, as it was supposed in the finale of "Pinball, 1973", and no longer sends novels in December (this feature of his was discussed in the postscript to "Hear the Wind Sing").
The 1969 student demonstrations marked a farewell to Boku's youthful idealism. After that, in the third decade of his life, there was nothing but a stupefying work routine, because of which, as it seemed to the hero, his "ego" fell into two halves. Boku is nostalgic for the days before this chasm opened up.
In -A Wild Sheep Chase‖, boredom and life are for the most part diametrically opposed phenomena, and the possibility of escaping boredom into life promises an adventure. Literally the title of the novel translates as "Adventure around the sheep".
-A Wild Sheep Chase‖ characters seem familiar, but they live and act in a completely new way.
The story, extracted by Murakami from the depths of his consciousness, is distinguished by spontaneity, 651 unpredictability, and develops as follows ... As soon as the sinister man in black is going to explain to the hero why he was so interested in exactly the sheep that appeared in the advertisement made by the Boku agency, into the narrative invades flashback, flash memory. It turns out that last December (1977) a package with a letter from the Rat and a novel came from the far north. Another letter "from completely different places" was received in May; attached to the letter was a photo, a landscape with sheep, and a request to publish this picture. The Rat also asked Boku to visit Jay and the woman Rat left in -Pinball, 1973‖ and say goodbye to both of them. (To the great advantage of the plot, the postmark on the second package was destroyed when Boku opened the letter.) Fulfilling his duty to a friend, the hero inserted the photo into an advertisement produced by his company and made a sentimental journey to his hometown.
Returning to the present moment, we learn that the sinister man in black found Boku, as he was interested in a sheep photograph for unknown reasons. This man -the secretary of the conservative leader Sensei, who is dying of a huge tumor in his brain -makes the hero go in search of one particular sheep from the photograph -the one on whose back there is a faint spot in the shape of a star. Now Boku needs to find the Rat, who sent him the picture. The hero takes his new girlfriend with him.
It is the Boku's girlfriend who, for no apparent reason, predicts an important call to him in connection with the sheep. It is she who insists that they go to Hokkaido to look for the sheep, and she, as if by chance, fishes out the coordinates of a "metaphysical" hotel called "Dolphin" from the phone book.
Miraculously, the building of the hotel turns out to be the former "Union of Hokkaido Sheep Breeders", where "Professor Sheep" lives -a man who in 1935 was possessed by a sheep, now wanted by heroes. The professor turns out to be the only person in the world who can tell the hero where the photo was taken (as it turns out, the same photo adorns the hotel lobby), and he also tells Boku how to find the Rat -in fact, Boku could have guessed about it himself, if he had not "forgotten" that the Rat's family owned a summer house in Hokkaido.
When Boku receives the last clue, his girlfriend fades into the background, and then disappears altogether while Boku goes through the purification. To the advantage of the plot, the hero does not notice Sensei's clear connection with this part of Hokkaido until he manages to find his way to the Rat's summer refuge. There, almost by accident, Boku comes across one wartime book. This publication, glorifying Japan's advance to the mainland, contains the names and addresses of ardent expansionist activists, to which Sensei belongs.
The already weak plot connections get a final shake-up in the finale, when the secretary dressed in a black suit informs Boku: he himself knew about the Rat's whereabouts, and the "sheep hunt" was needed only in order to send a person to the Rat whom he trusts. After all, the Rat should not have suspected anything about the secretary's insidious intention to extract a sheep with supernatural powers in order to use these abilities for his own purposes.
In search of the Rat -Boku hopes that he will lead him to the mysterious sheep -the hero finds himself in Hokkaido, where his office assistant in "Pinball, 1973" offered to go on a tour.
While Boku is waiting for a friend in a secluded mountain hut where the Rat apparently lived recently, the only human being with whom the hero communicates is a weird local character named "Sheep Man" ("hitsuzhi-otoko"). In fact, this small (no more than one and a half meters tall) creature is not quite human. Here is how he appears before the bewildered hero: -He was wearing a whole sheep skin, slipped over his head. The lamb's legs, apparently made by himself and simply attached to the skin, dangled, but overall the suit sat on his stocky figure like a glove. On both sides of the helmet protruded two flat ears, apparently shaped by a wire. The costume was complemented by a mask that hid the upper part of the face, gloves and stockings made of black leather. In front, along the entire length of the body -from the neck to the crotch -a zipper was sewn in ... From the back the suit ended with a tiny protruding tail" [9, P.148].
In this form, the Sheep-Man hides in the forests, hiding from world wars and from the military presence in general, and proclaiming himself the sacrificial lamb of the world. We do not know if he has a dwelling, and if he exists in reality in addition to those scenes when he talks with Boku: he just comes out of the forest and goes back -a sort of fabulous creature.

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Gradually, as Boku begins to feel the "presence" of the Rat in this strange creature, autumn comes into its own -the snow falls, and the cold that penetrates us in the scene with the chickens stored in the freezer from "Pinball" becomes more and more ferocious. Boku senses that something is about to happen.
And yet we have not answered the question: why sheep? what do they symbolize (if they symbolize anything at all)? Murakami tried to explain it this way: "When I started -A Wild Sheep Chase‖, I did not plan any plan. The only thing I did was to use "sheep" as a kind of key word and arrange a meeting between the primary character -"I" ("boku") -and the secondary -the Rat -at the end of the novel. That is the whole structure of the book ... And I believe: the novel is a success precisely because I myself do not know what the sheep has to do with it." [2].
This sheep moved into Sensei's brain in 1936, and once it may have inspired the bloody Genghis Khan.
When Sensei dies, the mysterious sheep leaves him and chooses the soul of not someone else, but the Rat as a new abode; from a detailed explanation of the reasons that prompted the sheep to go over from a conservative thug to a disaffected radical student, the writer wisely avoids.
For the last time experiencing the flowering of idealism in the spirit of the 60s, the Rat decides: the only way for him to benefit society is to commit suicide while the spirit of a powerful sheep slumbers inside him. Boku assists him by launching a clockwork bomb to kill a malevolent secretary who is obsessed with inheriting the power of a sheep.
Another novel, which is considered a continuation of the Trilogy of the Rat -"Dance, Dance, Dance". -Dance, Dance, Dance‖ is considered a sequel to -A Wild Sheep Chase‖, as it tells the story of Boku's life from the moment he blew up the sinister man in black and returned from Hokkaido to Tokyo.
The struggle to gain innocence and immediacy, which makes it possible to clear the mind, drive out logical thinking, lure the "inner story" to the surface, becomes the main theme of "Dance, Dane, Dance" -both in the plot and in the style aspects.
It all starts with Boku, now thirty-four, returns to Hokkaido, the hotel -Dolphin‖, which served as his home when he hunted sheep five years earlier. It's 1983. At the hotel, Boku hopes to find at least some information about his old girlfriend with magical ears, in this novel named "Kiki" ("The Listener"). A shabby old hotel has been transformed into a modern high-tech marvel, but in some indefinable dimension, it also "includes" the frozen world of the Sheep Man, who talks about the importance of connecting with others.
But as the action progresses, Boku encounters a wide variety of characters. Among them, of course, it is worth noting a pretty young hotel employee named Yumiyoshi, with whom the hero falls in love (although from the outside it looks rather unconvincing). With the exception of this rather artificial love affair, all of Boku's relationships with other people that come his way are clouded by financial interests. Ultimately, thanks to a clairvoyant, the hero learns that Kiki was killed by his classmate named Gotanda, who became a movie star and sacrificed his personal life for the sake of a professional image. True, it is not entirely clear why Boku needed the help of supernatural forces -the cause of Kiki's death was obvious from the very beginning.
If -A Wild Sheep Chase‖ was a fantastic attack on right-wing extremists and adventurers with conquering ambitions, then "Dance, Dance, Dance" is rather a detailed analysis of that, what it means to acquire a profession and try to survive in a society dominated by the mass media. As before, while remaining faithful to the most important existential issues of life, death and memory, in this novel, Murakami pays more attention to social ulcers.
In "Dance, Dance, Dance" a new level of seriousness is reached, indicating that the writer has acquired a sense of responsibility towards society.
Another thing is also important: Boku from "Dance, Dance, Dance" has another world that belongs exclusively to himself. This world is a kind of chain, and as the Sheep Man explains, Boku is a link in this chain. And it is connected with all that exists. It is his chain that connects him with everything that he has lost and that has not yet had time to lose. 654 to communicate with "those who have lost" -to which both this and all further stories of the parallel worlds of Murakami are dedicated. [3, P.60] In search of "meaning" Boku turns to Kant's -Critique of Pure Reason‖, which he often reads during the action of -Pinball, 1973‖. Here the hero is forced to play the role of a priest at the "funeral". In this dark scene, everyone is soaked to the skin in the October rain, but the ritual is carried out with great solemnity. And no matter what is so beautiful, even touchingly, it is not Naoko that is buried, but the electronic control panel, "dead" and no longer needed. An absurd ritual around a meaningless subject, this funeral dispels the "illusion" that there is more meaning in human life than in the life of a control panel. What is a sense of life? What is the meaning of things, as well as people who first enter our life and then inevitably leave it? All of them are just images that live in our consciousness, which means that there is no more meaning in them -and no less -than we ourselves put into them. Boku is reminded of the control panel again when he tries to dissuade his office assistant that her life will inevitably come to a standstill. The hero believes that the only response to the hardships of life is detachment: "It's better to just want nothing more."[10, P.105] In -A Wild Sheep Chase‖, the theme of death and irreparable loss sounds surprisingly clear. First, Boku learns about the accident that resulted in the death of his ex-girlfriend; then the hero recalls the ritual self-gutting of Yukio Mishima; later it is revealed that the Rat also committed suicide; and finally, after meeting Boku and the ghost of the Rat, a sinister man in black dies. At least four more deaths are reported along the way, including the death of Conservative leader Sensei and the "death" of the port area in his hometown of Boku, with its modern tombstonelike buildings. The disappearance of the hero's girlfriend at the end of the novel is another loss, which was preceded by the departure of Boku's wife and the end of his business partnership.
Calm Boku tries not to take it all too seriously. According to his observations, losses are of three types: "Some things are forgotten, others disappear, and still others die. There is hardly anything tragic in this."[9, P.196] Sitting in a house in Hokkaido, Boku feels that something is about to happen: -The more I thought about it, the more difficult it seemed to me to get rid of the feeling that the actions of the Sheep Man are performed at the will of the Rat. The Sheep Man drove my girlfriend off the mountain and left me alone. His appearance here undoubtedly portends something. Something is growing around me. The space is tidy and cleaned. Soon something is going to happen."[9, P.166] "Foreshadowing" future events, Murakami uses the archaic expression "atari-ga hakikiyomerareru": literally "everything around is swept and cleaned" -this is how they say about the altar of a Shinto shrine, where a ritual of purification is performed before the appearance of the god. -Don't forget that this place is not easy,‖ the Sheep Man advises Boku. And now the hero undergoes physical cleansing: he begins to monitor his diet (in Shintoism, the cult of food plays an important role), refuses sex and cigarettes and makes daily runs in clean, cold air. Boku also intends to purify himself mentally.
During one of the runs, the hero suddenly becomes very cold, and he returns to the house halfway through. The entire neighborhood is immersed in winter silence, and Boku turns the player on to autorepeat to -as a cleansing mantra -listen to Bint Crosby's "White Christmas" twenty-six times in a row. The hero feels that "everything flows" completely without his participation, and, as if becoming a part of this stream, he continues to perform the purification ritual described by the author almost poetically.
The ritual is physically demanding, but Boku's purified lungs are well prepared for this. He vacuums, washes and mops the floors. he scrapes off the dirt in the bathroom and toilet, polishes furniture, flushes windows and shutters, and in the end (and this is the most important task) cleans the mirror -the main subject of the Shinto rite.
The mirror in this house is large, full-length, antique, and Boku manages to wash it so that the reflection in it seems no less, if not more, real than the world on this side of the mirror. However, when Sheep Man appears, attracted by the sound of music (Boku is playing the Rat's guitar), the mirror does not reflect him and Boku breaks out in cold sweat. For all the dissimilarity of the tall Rat and the undersized Sheep Man, Boku guesses: his old friend somehow possessed the Sheep Man. With a theatrical gesture, breaking the guitar, the hero demands that the Rat come to him in the evening, and the Sheep Man goes back to his forest.