村上春樹文学におけるマイノリティ表象

Abstract

Murakami Haruki's works often features physical minorities. Most literature dealing with disabilities is criticized for the writer's unfairness, that is, separating disability by the standard of normalcy and placing the disabled below the non-disabled, but Haruki's work seems very fair in that respect. Minorities only function as symbols in his work and interest in their existence itself seems shallow in that problems or internal conflicts they experience in real life don’t appear. In other words, a disability is separated from the standard so-called “normal”, and since the order of rank has been established accordingly within the society, the disabled people have been positioned lower than the none-disabled people. It is true that the work of Haruki seemed to be fairly even in this perspective. The same is true of sexual minorities. Haruki's work does not show a discriminatory view of sexual minorities in that they are not depicted in a way of [sexual minority = object of hatred], which is prevalent in modern society. However, there are differences in the treatments for males and female.s In the case of lesbians, the lifestyle has been described as deviant or a symbol of wickedness and has been eradicated to the outside of text, but in contrast, a gay male has been described as an intellectual person, who manages a luxurious life. This clearly shows the discrimination between males and females, and it lacks realism as their ideal lives don’t reflect social discrimination and disapproval experienced by sexual minorities at all.