Description
In this thesis, I examine two novels that comprise the bookends of what has been referred to as the "commitment" stage in Haruki Murakami's career: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1998), which is the novel that initially launched his advocacy for commitment, and 1Q84 (2011), his most recently translated novel in English. While Murakami's earlier writings seemed to argue that the cohesive self is impossible because of the difficulty in negotiation the multifaceted (and often competing) constraints of the binary structures of East/West, traditional/modern, urban/rural, masculine/feminine, and gay/straight, these two texts mark a shift in the author's oeuvre towards attempting to engage with the world and those in it at all costs. Throughout this thesis, I argue that Murakami's advocacy for commitment is evident in the way that he eschews and subverts the aforementioned dualities, primarily through his use of queer notions of time and space. Because queer frameworks are also heavily invested in disrupting the distinctions of the binaries, my intervention into Murakami's work relies on queer theories of time, space, sexual embodiment, and Asian subjectivity. Ultimately, I discover that as Murakami progresses through the commitment stage of his career, he steers his characters through time and space that is progressively more liminal and queer, and as a result, his characters come closer and closer to achieving cohesive identities and connections to one another.
