Unstable Narrative in Murakami's Fiction

Murakami Haruki hardly needs my introduction. I'm interested in teasing out aspects of his fiction that I didn't find obvious when I began reading his works, and aspects that are not widely discussed in English-language discourse.

An illustrative example is the highly complex and unstable narrative structure of his works. Let's dive into concrete examples.

Lederhosen (1985)

On its face, this is a story about a highly cultured woman who has devoted her life to her children despite her husband's infidelity, who goes on a solo trip abroad, discovers herself, and abruptly divorces her husband and takes command of her own life.

However, the narrative isn't this simple. The ostensible main narrator is a man, and the story begins with this man and his wife's friend having an awkward conversation at home while the man's wife has yet to return from shopping. It's a mundane encounter that is highly relatable. The secondary narrator is the wife's friend. She is described in detail by the main narrator — basically she is obsessed with physical activity and sports. Inexplicably, she tells the story of her mother's trip abroad that led to the divorce and eventual reconciliation of mother and daughter. The third and indirect narrator is the mother, who presumably narrated the going-abroad story to her daughter. It is this secondhand narrative that constitutes the "meat" of this work, packaged inside another narrative.

This structure is interesting in itself, but furthermore, Murakami calls attention to the structure in an oblique way. The first narrator asks the second narrator: would she have forgiven her mother for abandoning her if the story had simply been a familiar, conventional tale about a woman with grown children who finds herself abroad? To which she replies: no, the key to her forgiveness is the lederhosen (whereby her mother realized her hatred for her husband — I won't expound on that part of the story here). It seems to me that Murakami is hinting at his choice of this story-within-a-story structure itself.

The Elephant Vanishes (1985)

This story is a prime example of an unstable narrative. I didn't lead with it here because it has been given extensive treatment in Haruki Murakami and His Early Work: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Running Artist by Dr. Masaki Mori (my BA thesis advisor).

Hear the Wind Sing (1979)

On its face, Murakami's debut novella is a story about a young man who spends a few weeks at home during the summer as a college student. However, the narrative is complex in several ways. Most obviously, the central story took place ten years before the unspecified present, so the protagonist is narrating his memory. This type of reminiscence features regularly in Murakami's works, like Lederhosen, and I'd say in literature generally. Less obviously, the narrative is unstable from the outset, because the novel begins with a discussion of the act of writing fiction. It's unclear whether this unnamed narrator is the same unnamed young man telling the story of his college days, or whether the first narrator is Murakami himself, or whether both are true. Certainly, the first narrator describes himself in a way that suggests he is a fictionalized version of the author — a novelist from Kobe who avidly collected English novels as a youth, like Murakami. I say fictionalized because the narrative soon introduces a fictional sci-fi novelist named "Derek Heartfield," through whose writing the fictionalized Murakami learned his craft. Heartfield is a colorful character, but he appears only in the narration of the Murakami alter ego. That is to say, the characters in the "real world" of the novel never mention Heartfield — all literary references therein are to real authors like Dostoyevsky.

Personally I'm a fan of fiction within fiction, like Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (short story by Jorge Luis Borges). I'd venture that Murakami is doing something similar: by inventing Heartfield and attributing his own artistic formation to this phantom figure, he writes himself into the story while keeping just enough distance to preserve the fiction. The Heartfield passages read almost like metafictional scaffolding — they let Murakami reflect on what fiction does and how a writer learns, without fully breaking the novel's frame, because the reflections belong to a narrator who only may be Murakami.

The Second Bakery Attack (1985)

On the surface, this is a comic heist: a newlywed couple wakes at 2 a.m. gripped by inexplicable hunger and, since there is no food in the apartment, decides to rob a McDonald's. What makes the story narratively unstable is everything beneath that surface.

The husband-narrator presents a piece of odd logic: the hunger they feel is not ordinary hunger but a curse, left over from a failed bakery robbery he committed with a friend years earlier. That first attack failed on its own terms — the baker offered them bread in exchange for listening to Wagner, and they accepted, meaning they received something without actually taking it. The narrator presents this as a supernatural debt that still demands settling. The premise is absurd, but the story treats it with complete earnestness.

What interests me is the layered narration. The husband tells his wife about the first bakery attack as they lie awake in the dark, and this retrospective account sits embedded inside the main story. When the wife accepts the logic of the curse without question and insists they go through with the robbery, the reader is left uncertain how much of the supernatural framing to credit. Is the curse real within the story's world? Is the hunger metaphorical — something unresolved in the narrator's past that has followed him into his new marriage? Murakami, characteristically, does not say.

There is also a subtle instability in the narrator's position. He is telling us the story from some point after the events, yet he never reflects on whether the robbery actually broke the curse. The ending — the couple driving home at dawn through an empty city — is peaceful but unresolved. The reader is left holding the same unexplained hunger the narrator described at the outset.