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Haruki Murakami's Pinball, 1973 -Focusing on the world view in this novel-

  • 日本硏究
  • 2015, (38), pp.383-403
  • Publisher : The Center for Japanese Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Japanese Language and Literature
  • Published : February 20, 2015

Kim, Chung-Gyoon 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article studies the world view shown in the novel Pinball, 1973, one of Haruki Murakami's early major works. Analysis of this novel gave me an insight into the following. ‘I’, the protagonist and narrator of Pinball, 1973, confronted the world view in the 1960s with that in the 1970s. In this novel, the world view in the 1960s represents a perspective focusing on ‘political power’and ‘love’. In the meantime, the world view in the 1970s is characterized by ‘loneliness’, that is, a perspective that everyone in this world is fundamentally lonely. In Pinball, 1973, the 1970s is an era set under a new condition of life distinguished from the 1960s. According to the novel, people in the 1970s lived as if they became a part of a machine, losing their personality in a highly-industrialized society. However, ‘I’, the narrator, had a hope to lead a personalized life without losing himself to the system of highly-industrialized society. ‘I’ is a character who overcame allteglichkeit and reflected on his own life. Through such self-reflection, ‘I’ reached a conclusion that it was the order of universe and the life of people that things began from nothing and returned to nothing. And with this in mind, ‘I’ overcame the sadness of losing his girl friend Naoko. Pinball, 1973 shows this mental journey attaining a view of the universe and the world that people's life is in the universal order of coming from nothing and returning to nothing.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.