村上春樹『1973年のピンボール』論 - シミュラークル化された世界における＜時代＞感覚の弱化 -

Abstract

The sense of time in Murakami’s novel,‘Pinball, 1973’ is blurred. The cause of this confusion is, first of all, due to the twins who entered Boku’s room and lived together. The twins make him have the same sense of time as “that of an organism that reproduced by cellular division.” These twins symbolize an environment surrounded by simulacra; copies without an original. And the transformation (so-called suburbanization) of Nezumi’s hometown and of the land where Naoko (who is Boku’s former girlfriend) lived, is also indicative of this environment filled with simulacra. This paper shows how these simulacra touches not only on copies, but on modernization as a whole. The transformation of Nezumi’s hometown and of the land where Naoko lived, was a process of infiltration of the city into a rural areas, commercializing it in an act of so-called modernization. In this process, the area is in a heterogeneous state where both the former and new economic forms are present at the same time, before becoming a unified state of commercialization. In the modernization process, the sense of time has been activated by a sense of change and rushing toward the future that is brought about by historically heterogeneous things (the state in which the old coexists with the new). However, the changes in the living environment of Nezumi and Naoko show that when everything is commercialized and the areas of difference that are not included in the capitalist order are wiped away, in that spatially homogeneous environment, the sense of period (the concept of time based on difference and change) is going to fade away. The fact that Boku and Nezumi are seized with an “endless déjà vu” is due to the disappearance of outside of capital in the First World (US, Western Europe, Japan), the effect of the extinction of Nature, and the loss of the object that awakens time and period.