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A Study on Haruki Murakami’s “Underground”

  • 日本硏究
  • 2012, (32), pp.417-434
  • Publisher : The Center for Japanese Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Japanese Language and Literature
  • Published : February 20, 2012

Cho Joo-Hee 1

1서경대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Despite the great stir it caused when it was first published, Haruki Murakami’s “Underground” is one of the least studied works of Murakami’s. The reception for the work has been mainly negative, being criticized for its creative motivation, writing style, and romanticization and insufficient verification of facts. Despite such controversies surrounding it, “Underground” did become a turning point for Murakami’s literary career and had a great impact on his later works, including his most recent work “1Q84”. Murakami himself once articulated that the creative motivations behind writing “Underground” had been 1) to relay the voice of individuals and 2) to investigate where the Japanese society was at. This study focused on verifying the integrity of the former, and concluded that his research was the most extensive and factual, compared to other existing works done on the victims of the attack. As for the controversy over the adequacy of “Underground” as a non-fiction, this study found that Murakami’s argument that “Underground” should be considered as a literary work rather than non-fiction does have a strong merit, and the work should be understood as the author’s creative reconstruction of the stories from the victims. 　The work “Underground” needs to be evaluated with the focus on how it is consumed, rather than which literary category it belongs to. In addition, this work deserves to be considered with a broader perspective of what impact it had on and how it was developed and expressed in his later works.

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