![]() culture in the novel constitute a pastiche that pays homage to the originals even as the author freely copies, quotes, and borrows to create a uniquely postmodern world. The amalgamation of influences from classical and contemporary literary works, ancient Greek and modern European philosophy, jazz, popular music, films, and images from pop. View full-textĪbstract: Haruki Murakami’s postmodern novel Kafka on the Shore contains a dazzling array of obligatory, optional, and accidental intertextualities in the form of quotations, direct references, allusions, and adaptations. Finally I discuss how this enriched state of mindmay have altered Murakami’s ‘vague, Japanese’ fictional ‘I’. The latter is Murakami’s Golden Fleece brought back from the West. Both achieve this however thanks to one crucial element which is lacking in the Japanese myth and represented inthe novel by Reiko: the wondrous power of music/art. Choosing connectedness over alienation like Izanagi, the protagonist of Norwegian Wood -and arguably its dislocated author-leave behind the tempting but disillusioning Western culture. Murakami’s Orpheus-the love-stricken Tōru-tracks across the Greek/Western parameters of the Orphic myth (i.e., the triumph of death and individuality) after his descent into the ‘Underworld’ of Ami Hostel but finally sails back to Japanese home waters, as it were, when he decides to look forward to life and love (Midori). In short, Isee the novel’s identity as a transformative one. Furthermore, I take into account the novel’s love triangles, which connect the two intertexts. A comparative analysis can thus trace the author’s more-or-less unconscious cultural influences from Japan (the myth of Izanagi) and the West (Orpheus). First of all, my purpose is to extend the intertextual reading by bringing into the equation the Japanese version of. I try to find a wayout by looking more thoroughly into the Orphic legacy of the novel than has been doneup to now by Japanese scholars. This article addresses the debate on the ‘Japanese identity’ of Norwegian Wood, which-though popular-is often conducted in an intuitive fashion. ![]()
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