Essay: Murakami and Petrushevskaya

The Unspoken Societal Issues of Russia and Japan

The works of Haruki Murakami in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby transcend time and space to exemplify the mundane, yet beautiful emotions and themes of isolation and loneliness. The following short stories give a voice to the unspoken issues that tear families apart, such as suicide in modern day Japan, and the effect that wars, such as the Cold War and World War II in Russia during the 1930-40’s that continue to thrive today: The New York Mining Disaster, The Ice Man, The Mirror, My Love, The Father, and The New Robinson Crusoes. The stories mentioned above are similar in the way that they share the themes of loneliness and isolation through an allegorical writing style that allows the reader to use his/her/their imagination, but differ due to the cultural context in which these stories exist within.

In reading the works of Murakami and Petrushevskaya the sensation of loneliness and isolation is apparent because it is nearly impossible to connect personally with the characters provided in the stories. In the story The Ice Man by Murakami, the main character marries a man who is defined as cold, distant, and “. . . as isolated and alone as an iceberg floating in the darkness” (212). As the tale continues the mentions of coldness and loneliness increase even more so, and ends with a beautifully depressing line “And I cry some more, icy tears welling up endlessly in our frozen little home in the far-off South Pole” (218). Petrushevskaya is also able to evoke feelings of isolation and loneliness as presented in the story, My Love. This narrative follows the forbidden love that a husband has for his co-worker and his absent feelings for his wife, whom he later realizes he loves dearly, but he was too late to come to this conclusion for she has died. The main character is experiencing a disconnect from his family, causing feelings of loneliness and isolation to occur, for example the narrator describes the loneliness that the main character feels when he must return home after leaving a work trip by saying, “How lonely he felt on those nights when he had to descend from heaven back into his hell. . .” (88). Both authors of the aforementioned tales give insight to common feelings of sadness with an unconventional plot that gives reader a subjective voice in the form of imagination.

The sensations of depression, sadness, isolation, and emptiness are continuously refashioned in Petrushevskaya and Murakami’s collections, but what is even more intriguing and poignant is the causation for stories such as these to have been written in the first place. The stories in both Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby can be read as allegories that relate stories of fantasy and imagination to real-life issues that have silently torn families apart in Japan and the Russia for years.

Imagine how having a father, niece, or uncle take their own life could drastically impact your family and its dynamic. This is something that Japan has silently endured for many years, and it isn’t appearing to slow down anytime soon. Japan has been known for its high suicide rates in men from the ages of 20 to 44 and young school-aged children for many years now, but there has been only a minute drop in these rates over the past decade. The high suicide rates are easily accounted for when we look at Japanese culture and the traditional beliefs held in the meaning of suicide. In the Japanese culture education is a very high standard and many children are pressured by their parents, peers, and teachers to keep their grades up to par, and they are social outcasts when these sky high standards are not met. It has been found that one in four junior high students suffer from severe depression, caused by a lack of social acceptance in Japan, and that the highest rates of suicide in children coincide with the start of the school year (Lu). Working men from the ages of 20 to 44 are also being trapped into a sense of helplessness because of the burden of financial security. In 2014 approximately forty-percent of this demographic in Japan were unable to find job security, and resorted to a state of hikikomori and/or suicide in order to cope with “precarious employment” and financial crisis (Wingfield-Hayes). There is also a traditional belief, that is widely held in Japan, philosophizing that suicide is “purifying”, “a cosmic change”, and “beautiful” (Stack, 136).

Murakami’s short stories can be read as a wake up call to Japanese and other worldly cultures that suicide is something that should no longer be normalized in a modern society. His allegory, The Mirror is a prime example of the suffering that school-aged children are facing in Japan as mentioned previously, and the long-term effects of the pressure that they are put under. In this story, our narrator is discussing a time when he was working as a high school janitor, when he encounters a mirror that shows a reflection of himself, but a different version of himself. A version of himself that is filled with hatred, but the next morning he learns that there was never a mirror there and that he had imagined the entire experience (55-60). In the beginning of the narrative we learn that the narrator didn’t go to college because he was part of a “hippie generation” and instead decided to jump from small job, to small job, while traveling across Japan. This story can easily be interpreted to represent the hatred and disappointment that the narrator has for himself because he didn’t continue his education, and secure a job for financial stability. This type of self-disapproval is exactly what leads many in Japan to take their own lives in order to escape their shame. Another great example of the suicide culture in Japan comes from The New York Mining Disaster:

The first person to straddle the divide between reality and unreality. . .was a friend from college. . .He’d been married for three years, and his wife had gone back to her parents’ house. . .to have their baby.

One unusually warm Sunday afternoon in January, he went to a department store and bought two cans of shaving cream and a German-made knife. . .He went home and ran a bath. . .downed a bottle of Scotch, climbed into the tub, and slit his wrists.(36)

This quote shows just how common and banal suicide is viewed in Japan without even a second thought. Murakami is one of few that believes that this “suicide culture” must change, and that attention to the issue instead of the continued suppression of such feelings of loneliness and isolation must be revolutionized.

Murakami isn’t the only author writing in order to change a culture or bring up uncomfortable topics, Petrushevskaya’s stories in There Once Lived a Woman. . . discuss the toll that war can take on family dynamics. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya wrote the majority of her short stories during the 1950-60’s as a reflection of her childhood and early adult life in Russia during World War II and the Cold War. Between the years of 1941 and 1945 the Soviet Union was sending troops to battle during World War II, and with a life expectancy of only about 24 hours for soldiers they were quite literally being sent to their death. The Soviet Union ended up losing about thirteen-percent of their population due to this war, the majority of the losses being males due to the high rates of death for soldiers (Murray). It is often forgotten that soldiers are more than just soldiers, they have spouses, children, and friends who are now in the absence of their loved one. This left many mothers without money to provide for their children, and left children without a father figure. Although some soldiers did survive the war, many of them had psychological issues such as alcoholism and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of the war. Either way you look at the situation of war in the Soviet Union, one thing is apparent and that is that the entire family dynamic in the Soviet Union was disrupted by the end World War II, but the effects of this isolation and loneliness created by absentee loved ones and the death of loved ones lives on today. Petrushevskaya’s work The Father is about a man who cannot find his children and is sent on a journey in which he finds a cabin in the woods with a young boy in it. The man cares for the child by keeping him warm and feeding him. A woman knocks on the door of the cabin that he is in, and tells him that the boy is her child. The two then care for the child, but as the father attempts to dress him, the boy turns back into a baby(141-8). This story is very open to interpretation, as many of Petrushevskaya’s stories are, but the interpretation of the father in The Father is that he was a “failed” or absentee father figure, perhaps because of alcoholism or PTSD that he would have suffered after fighting in a war zone. Another example of the effects of World War II comes from The New Robinson Crusoes, which follows a family’s journey of refuge, because they are seen as political criminals. A story such as this is surprisingly not far fetched for the time period, in fact Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s family members were forced into a labor camp because they were “Enemies of the People” (Treisman). Many families in the Soviet Union were torn apart by being shipped off to separate labor camps, or having certain members sent away/disappear.

In conclusion, Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby share similarities in the thematic elements of isolation and loneliness and an allegorical style of writing that discusses a multitude of ways in which families can/are torn apart by issues that a society chooses to ignore and keep hidden. While their differences come in the cultural context in which each collection of short stories exists. These collections of stories have very different tones in which I find Petrushevskaya’s stories more warm and fantastical, whereas Murakami’s are more cold and sharp, although I don’t find that their gender differences have anything to do with the tonality or the stories themselves, rather I believe that the individual and the experiences in which they lived and suffered through define their narratives.

Works Cited

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Murakami, Haruki. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Print.

Murray, Marilyn. "Pain of World War II Is Passed On to Children." The Moscow Times. The

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Petrushevskai︠a︡, Li︠u︡dmila, and Anna Summers. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill

Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. Trans. Keith Gessen. New York, NY: Penguin,

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Stack, S. (1996), The Effect of the Media on Suicide: Evidence From Japan, 1955–1985. Suicide

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"Timeline of Soviet Leaders." Timeline - Soviet Leaders 1917 - 1991. RFF Electronics, n.d. Web.

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Treisman, Deborah. "This Week in Fiction: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya on Poverty and Fairy

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Wingfield-Hayes, Rupert. "Why Does Japan Have Such a High Suicide Rate?" BBC News. BBC,

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