村上春樹作品に見られる近代科学と自我の喪失 -『世界の終りとハードボイルド․ワンダーランド』における音楽-

Abstract

In this article, we specify the type of music which is influential in Haruki Murakami’s literary work “Hard‐boiled wonderland and the end of the world” and analyze its effects on the world depicted in the work as well as the characters of the work. The unconscious world created inside the imagination of the main character ‘I’(私), or “the end of the world,” is a perfect, idealized world. On the other hand, it is also viewed as the world where the main character dissociates himself from his unconscious subject, “shadow”(影), to maintain the world and the character is not allowed to possess the mind. Another ‘I’(僕), an internal entity of ‘I’(私), is portrayed as a mind‐equipped incomplete entity until the dissociated “shadow” dies. The background of this world reflects elderly people who do not hesitate to conduct experiments on human bodies to satisfy their desire of success in science and the personality of ‘I’(私) who possesses an artificial brain for the study on elderly people. In short, we explore which aspects of the Japanese society of the time Haruki Murakami wants to convey through the depiction of the brainwashed society and what the discovery of music means in the world where music does not exist.