The German Memory of Murakami (Just a Love Story)

Abstract

This thesis considers the German translations of Murakami, specifically the texts Naokos Lächeln and Kafka am Strand, and how the poetics of the translations contribute to a memory of Japanese aggression during World War Two in the imitation of a Nazi German past. The memory that arises in the German translations of Murakami is triggered by the German language itself and is reminiscent of the memories that manifest at a delay and without direct experience of the past, particularly where the postgeneration is concerned and the generation that belongs to the side of the perpetrator. Literature and scholarship on the generation after tends to favour the voice of the victim and not so much the perpetrator, for the space of poetics may reveal an opportunity upon which aggression can be justified, denied, and made unknown. The perpetrator belongs in the courts but such a space does not necessarily exist for those born in the aftermath of defeat. The question that resonates throughout this thesis is how to imagine what we do not know, how to imagine an aggression we have not ourselves enacted or created. The act of imagination is particularly potent in the German translations, particularly in the verb nachdenken, which signals an opportunity to reflect, ponder, consider, and contemplate. The memory that arises out of the verb nachdenken in the German translations of Murakami appears to be consistent with a legacy of aggression that continually seeks to unknow itself, an aggression that was successful in taking on the appearance of softening facades so as to defer guilt. In the German translations of Murakami, legacies of past aggression are in continuance in the very language itself, which can be understood as a ‘clue’ or ‘fragment’ that has survived from the past into present. For language itself concerns those living and alive in Murakami, regardless of whether they were direct observers or participants of aggression – or simply those born after. The German language and its poetics reveal a trauma arising from failed aggression.