村上春樹文学におけるアジア - 「中国行きのスロウㆍボート」を中心に -

Abstract

Murakami Haruki seeks to give consolations to the pains of the past and the present in Asians. First of all, the hero in the novel who meets the first Chinese is a supervisor of test in his elementary school. To Japanese students, the Chinese looks like a rooster which grow in a farm. The hero becomes sympathetic toward the Chinese students who live in Japan, because they seem to be the mass-products which are massively spent in the post-capitalist era. The second Chinese the hero meets is a female Chinese college student who works as a part-time worker. The student falls in panic because of the monotonous mass-production. Here again the hero feels a pity toward the student, imagining a person: “nowhere man” in Beatles’ song. The third person the hero meets is his highschool classmate who works for an encyclopedia company as a salesman. The hero thinks that his Chinese friend is growing a goods by selling mass-producted encyclopedias only to the Chinese in Japan. As a result, the hero decides to create his own China and to love it. Here the mass-production seems to say that it bred the Second World War which is the starting point of mass-production. Murakami Haruki’s message is that the shadow of the war still remains in modern Japan.