디스토피아 세계와 삶에 대한 의지 - 무라카미 류(村上龍)의 『5분 후의 세계』를 중심으로 -

Abstract

This paper focuses on Ryu Murakami’s 1994 fictional work, The World in Five Minutes From Now, and examines an alternate history of Japan, as a dystopian society. in the 1990s, Japan underwent an economic recession, also known as the Heisei Recession, during which rifts had begun to form in Japanese society, which believed that it had lost the war but not the economy. Nevertherless, Murakami, in his novel, creates another Japan that has an even more desperate history. At the same time, he presents the character of Odagiri who overcomes the ‘fear’ and moves forward despite everything in his difficult environment. In this context, Murakami presents another ‘possibility’ of history-which is the product of chance-and urges for the self-awakening of man that can discover the will to live despite the poorest of environments. This paper concludes that, with the dystopian society presented in the novel that functions as a metafictional device, Murakami’s work poses a question to the readers, and narrates how an individual-who has realized the circuit to death through the ‘fear’, that they have faced in the given environment-confirms the will to live.