村上龍『海の向こうで戦争が始まる』における日本とアジア : 距離・コミュニティ・暴力

Murakami Ryu’s second novel, War Begins Beyond the Sea, has not drawn the same attention as many of his other novels, despite being published in 1977, one year after his Akutagawa prize winning debut novel, Almost Transparent Blue, and three years before Coin Locker Babies, another highly celebrated novel. However, despite being mostly ignored in the literary field, this novel makes possible a new reading of Japanese national identity in the late 1970s, and contains traces of the author’s thoughts on post-war Japan, which make this work indispensable when attempting to understand Murakami’s other works. This paper explores both Japanese national identity as represented in War Begins Beyond the Sea, and Japan’s postwar relations with other Asian nations. The first half of this paper will address how Murakami’s writing style hints at a conflict or confusion within Japanese national identity. The second half of the paper will explain how this confusion is related to Japan’s distance from other Asian countries and its withdrawal from a conceptual Asian community.言語