ABSTRACT
Chinese auteur Wong Kar-wai (born in 1958) is a beneficiary of what Tomoki Wakatsuki (2020) describes as the “Haruki Phenomenon”—an overwhelming adulation and eventual reception of Haruki Murakami by his younger cultural contemporaries across East Asia. This paper explores the resonance of the “Murakami mood,” as termed by Hillenbrand (2009), within the cinematic oeuvre of Wong—and maps the shift in the idea of East-Asian Masculinity from the traditional Wen-Wu model (toughness, dominance, cultural refinement, and civil success) in vogue till the 1970s, to some more evolved ‘alternative’ models (sensitivity, passivity, detachment, and a keen interest towards domestic activities hitherto associated with women), within the late-twentieth century urban milieu of Japan and Greater China. This article, thus, concludes that the reception of the ‘Murakami Mood’ in the cinematic creations of Wong Kar-wai uncovers how the alignment of political movements, social transformations, economic negotiations, and ideological stances among the postmodern urban youth across East Asia has led to the emergence of congruent cultural consciousness across these two neighbouring regions.
KEYWORDS
Murakami Mood, Haruki Phenomenon, Postmodern, Affectivity, East-Asian Masculinities
Haruki Murakami (born in 1949 in Kyoto, Japan) is one of the most influential and widely translated contemporary Japanese authors. Since his literary debut with Hear the Wind Sing in 1979, Murakami has developed a distinctive narrative style often weaving elements of magical realism, existential detachment, and pop culture into surreal yet emotionally resonant stories. His early works, published before 1983, are considered to be “Murakami Lite” (Hillenbrand 2009, 723, before his turn to a more serious mood of storytelling following the personal influence on him of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, and the Tokyo subway gas attacks in the same year. His work before this period, mainly in the 1980s, was considered more socially detached, with a certain ennui, and many of the thematic and stylistic hallmarks that would come to define what scholars and readers now refer to as the “Murakami Mood” (Hillenbrand 2009, 715). This dissemination and expression of this ‘mood’ has been an integral element of what Tomoki Wakatsuki describes as the “Haruki Phenomenon” (Wakatsuki 2020, 5). The “Haruki Phenomenon” is seen in the reception and adoption of Murakami’s themes, aesthetics, and narrative techniques by his younger cultural contemporaries across Greater China and South Korea—whom we refer to as ‘Murakami’s Children’—as a result of the congruence of consciousnesses forged by aligning political movements, social transformations, economic negotiations, and ideological stances among the postmodern urban youth across the other countries of East Asia. Hong Kong-based Auteur Wong Kar-wai (born in Shanghai in 1958) has been a noteworthy name among them.
In her essay, Margaret Hillenbrand explores the influence of Haruki Murakami’s work on the cultural producers of Greater China. She refers to Fujii Shozo’s concept of “Murakami’s children,” describing them as “the motley band of cultural producers for whom this writer’s works have proved a powerfully nurturing influence” (Hillenbrand 2009, 718). She asserts that Wong is one of these children, especially in reference to his work, Chungking Express (1994). She argues that “Wong reads Murakami not as a corpus of texts that can be plundered at will for in-the-know allusions, but rather as a mood that can be bent and shaped to fit other artistic impulses altogether” (Hillenbrand, 727). This argument of Hillenbrand’s strengthens the claim of connection between Haruki Murakami and Wong Kar-wai through the mood. One of the primary areas of thematic alignment can be identified in Murakami’s active and conscious role in shifting from the traditional concept of East Asian Masculinity, Wen-Wu—which is a balance of Wu 武 that is emblematic of martial valor, toughness, strength, dominance, and Wen 文 which is marked by cultural refinement and scholarly achievement—to a more alternative masculinity based on reactions to urban cosmopolitan spaces and modern detachments. Such congruence in the evolution of the idea of masculinity may be traced to the re-enunciation of a “mood” typical to Murakami’s literary universe, within the cultural expressions of his cross-cultural influences from other East Asian nations.
This “mood,” better known as the “Murakami Mood,” is a “vogue” (Hillenbrand 2009, 715), a trend or demand for the distinct identity of Murakami’s literary aesthetic by the East Asian populace, with narratives in which love, detachment, and lifestyle make up the prevailing atmosphere. According to Thomas Fuchs, “moods may be defined as global, basically evaluating (i.e., pleasant or unpleasant), but non-intentional feeling states which render a person prone to experience themselves and their environment in a certain way, and to behave correspondingly. Moods are thus fundamental states of being-in-the-world that indicate “how things stand” in our life and how we are disposed to react to the present situation” (Fuchs 2013, 617).
In his early writing phase, Murakami developed a style that displayed the mood of being young in a world becoming gradually cosmopolitan and urban. Some characters in his novels get disillusioned by the ideals of “the student movements of the 1960s and early 1970s” (Wakatsuki 2020, 85) at several Japanese universities, a part of the worldwide escalation of protests against social conflicts in the 1960s, characterized by left-wing politics, anti-war sentiment, civil rights issues, and youth counterculture. Murakami’s writings expressed his feelings, along with his and his generation’s moods of ennui and his own situation of detachment. Murakami wrote in his “The Birth of my Kitchen-table Fiction: An Introduction to Two Short Novels,” as a preface to the book, Wind/Pinball: Two Novels, describing the situation of his generation: “Several places near us were owned and run by people of our generation. Kokubunji retained a strong counterculture vibe, and many of those who hung around the area were dropouts from the shrinking student movement. It was an era when, all over the world, one could still find gaps in the system.”
Japanese “Zenkyoto” University student protest, June 1968. Photo by Mountainlife,
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Kanda_Quartier_latin19680621.jpg/250px-Kanda_Quartier_latin19680621.jpg
Just like the failed student movements, subsequent movements in East Asia in the 1980s and 1990s generated similar feelings of disillusionment among the youth, as those that informed the existence of the urban Japanese youth with their flawed ideals, coupled with the rapid urbanization of the big cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, Busan, and Incheon. In their ennui, they felt trapped by traditional societal norms, and many felt a sense of loneliness, boredom, detachment, and melancholia, in these rapidly urbanizing spaces. Traditional literature lost its demand, with the rise of manga, animation, light novels, and “so-called subcultural works,” as young readers no longer wished for depth of stories (Takumasa 2021, 131). This phenomenon was caused by a change in the mood of the youth, a feeling that finds a poignant expression in the writings of Murakami, shaping the “Murakami mood” for what it is.
Postmodern urban youth across East Asia has generated what Tomoki Wakatsuki describes as the “Haruki Phenomenon” (Wakatsuki 2020, 5)—resulting in Murakami’s younger contemporaries welcoming and applauding his themes, aesthetics, and narrative techniques across Greater China and South Korea. The phenomenon was driven by congruent consciousnesses forged by the alignment of political movements, social transformations, economic negotiations, and ideological stances the region’s youth. This transnational faddism for Murakami is thought by Hillenbrand to be “inextricably tied to the development of cosmopolitanism” (Wakatsuki 2020, 5). She argues that the “cosmopolitan encounters” of “global projects,” enabled by the translators and “gatekeepers” of Murakami works, are what gave birth to the cosmopolitan “trans-border movement” (11). The relationship of Murakami’s work to cosmopolitanism was credited to his “non-national” or “nationality less” mukokuseki style, writing about mundane everyday life with absurd settings, with “socially detached protagonists” (8-18), with both a “departure from traditional values,” and a “cosmopolitan vision—that appealed to readers in Asia,” particularly the “young in Asia,” who “were seeking to break away from conventional family ties, demanding more independence, and individual autonomy.” She adds, “Murakami’s protagonists were hailed by those youth, who longed to replicate the lifestyle and enjoy the sense of freedom that his protagonists represent” (17). That is why it can be said that “the beginning of the Haruki phenomenon in the 1980s” (16) in Greater China was a consequence of great social and cultural changes and subsequent revolutions and movements all over East Asia, with the student movements in the 1960s that Murakami often refers to: “Taiwan’s bloodless reform” in late 1980s, “China’s Tiananmen Square [massacre] in 1989” (85), and the coercive handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997.
Students protest at Tienanmen Square in June 1989. Photo by Jiri Tondl,
https://shorturl.at/SSK85
Owing to the arguable failure of many of the protests and the subsequent disillusionment with the social changes that followed, “young people who had lost hope in their various protests against the established social and political systems in which they had been brought up were in need of what Murakami describes as an alternative narrative to follow” (16). According to a major Murakami scholar, Fujii Shozo, “the fad for Murakami right across Greater China reached an early peak in the aftermath of democratic disappointments of one kind or another” (Hillenbrand 2009, 732). This can be seen in the data showing Murakami’s popularity rising after he won the Gunzo Prize for his debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing, in 1979, but the peak of his popularity came when Norwegian Wood became a record-breaking bestseller in 1987, selling over four million copies (Wakatsuki 2020, 14). Due to his sales in Japan, Murakami soon broke into the markets in Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong, “developing the initial phase of the Haruki phenomenon in East Asia from the late 1980s” (14). In South Korea “all of Murakami’s works since Norwegian Wood—including A Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance, Kafka on the Shore, and After Dark—were published in Korean translation and became bestsellers,” and notably, “Norwegian Wood has remained within the top ten in book sales ever since it was published nearly two decades ago” (Kim 2008, 65). In Korea, the Haruki Phenomenon occurred in 1989, and “resonated with the ‘386 generation,’” a generation that was born in the 1960s, was actively involved in the democracy movement of the 1980s, and “symbolized socioeconomic changes in South Korean society at the time” (Wakatsuki 2020, 14). And in the Chinese language spheres, “Thirty-one of his works are now in print . . . numbering more than 2,800,000 books” (Hillenbrand 2009, 719). With such success, “the Haruki phenomenon spread from Taiwan to Hong Kong, and then to Shanghai, and later Beijing. Similar to the case in Korea, it corresponds to the democratic movements in the region during the late 1980s” (Wakatsuki 2020, 14). Murakami’s works offer to the East Asian youth “a new way of belonging in a world that is becoming increasingly cosmopolitan” (Wakatsuki 2020,30). In other words, the resonance of the “Murakami mood” was found in the expression of disillusionments, detachments, and emptiness, in cosmopolitan urban settings, and in the resultant forms of identities born from them.
Renowned for its visually poetic style and emotionally fragmented narratives, auteur Wong Kar-wai’s literary oeuvre emerged as a living, breathing example of this resonance. Emerging in late-1980s Hong Kong that was on the brink of merging with Greater China, Wong’s work explores the motifs of time, themes of memory and longing, along with displays of urban alienation and cosmopolitan ennui. His films are often marked by nonlinear storytelling, moody lighting, voice-over narration, and expressive use of music. Auteurism is a prominent film theory behind Wong’s filmmaking. His path breaking films Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995) are replete with the typical affective elements that have characterized the early works of Murakami designated as “Murakami lite.” These elements, found in abundance in The Rat Trilogy (1979-82), “The Year of Spaghetti” (1981), and “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” (1981), are encapsulated within the “Murakami Mood” that has been instrumental in marking a shift from the traditional frameworks of masculinity to an alternative notion of masculinity in late-twentieth century urban East Asia. Both Murakami and Wong Kar-wai highlight a subtle but decisive shift from the “salaryman” notion of masculinity, based on a more traditional Wen-Wu model in vogue till the 1970s, to more evolved alternatives, within the late-twentieth century cultural milieu of Japan and China.
These new age masculinities—represented by Murakami as “herbivore men” (sōshokudanshi, gentle, unambitious, more interested in fashion and personal life than work or sex), “cooking men” (ryōridanshi, embracing domestic skills like making lunchboxes), and “metrosexual men” (quiet, sensitive, detached, passive men, often overshadowed by stronger women)—find a strong resonance in Wong’s display of the concepts of urban metrosexual men (urban dwelling men focused on fashion, grooming, and appearance), and “warm men” (nuǎnnán, caring and domestically oriented men).
This paper aims to map the affective resonance of the “Murakami mood” within the cinematic oeuvre of Wong by situating the above works of the two stalwarts within A.O. Aldridge’s theoretical framework of Influence, Analogy and Reception, as well as the theories of Affectivity postulated by Thomas Fuchs. Additionally, with reference to the key concepts of East Asian Masculinity Studies as enunciated by Kam Louie, Romit Dasgupta, Masahiro Morioka, and Tomoko Aoyama, the paper also strives to explore both the cross-cultural resonances within the negotiations of pre-existing traditional masculinities and contemporary alternative masculinities across the postmodern urban spaces of East Asia. Such an exploration of the transnational reception of a Japanese literary stalwart in Greater China professes to create a more comprehensive understanding of the influence of Murakami across East Asia, in turn unpacking how similar social, political and cultural circumstances have shaped congruent literary consciousnesses across mid-twentieth century East Asia. Such an “influence-reception” dynamic would further open up the scope for situating East Asian Literature at the intersection of Masculinity Studies, Cultural Studies, Affect Theory, and Influence Studies with a greater conviction.
1. East Asian Masculinities: A Critical Trajectory
Discussing the role of Murakami’s East Asian readership, Senno Takumasa writes, “This seems to mean that the readership has also begun to change in the field of literature. The mood of young readers in East Asian cities (feeling of loneliness, blockage, emptiness, barrier to society, etc.) may also promote the above reading” (Takumasa 2021, 132). The changing mood is demonstrated in the surveys and interviews conducted by Takumasa in various East Asian cities. To the survey question, “Which parts of Haruki Murakami do you like?” the most common responses from almost all cities “resonate with the loneliness of the characters in the work,” and they “resonate with the sense of emptiness of the work” (132). This shows that the mood among East Asian youth, as well as older readers, in the 1980s and 1990s indirectly caused the rise of the “Haruki Phenomenon” through their desire for an alternative narrative, expression, and identity.
Their desire resonated with the first person ‘I’ narrator (Boku in Japanese) character: “straight but stylishly groomed, urban dwelling and urbane, well read, well traveled, adept in the kitchen, au fait with every latest trend, in touch with his feelings, and utterly at ease with his feminine side,” an ideal of alternative masculinity in East Asia, “a so-called metrosexual male” (Hillenbrand 2009, 723). Murakami’s early fiction frequently presents an emotionally detached or passive male protagonist, “universally known to us as Boku the familiar first person of ‘I’ who mostly stays unnamed” (Strecher 2014, 14). An alternative of the traditional masculinity ideal of East Asia—that can roughly be understood as originated from the Chinese Wen-Wu ideal, literally meaning “literary-martial,” spreading through the historical and cultural influences throughout East Asia, including Japan—encompassed the “dichotomy between cultural and martial accomplishments, mental and physical accomplishments, and so on” (Kam Louie 2003, 4). The ideal of the “salaryman/kigyosenshi” (corporate warrior) figure in many ways embodied the notion of the Japanese male as the archetypal heterosexual husband/father and producer/provider” (Dasgupta 2003, 119). The Japanese adhered to such a Masculinity ideal in the post-Second World War and postmodern decades of rapid economic growth in Japan and East Asia from the 1950s to the 1990s. In contrast to the office going, socially expressive, and financially ambitious men, Murakami displayed detached and laid-back male characters, who perform mundane routines, like cleaning and cooking, and unambitious activities like listening to music and smoking cigarettes. These characteristics shared a sense of solidarity with the existing alternative masculinities featuring similar pursuits like a new-found love for cooking, previously considered a woman’s activity, as recognized by the scholar Tomoko Aoyama in The Cooking Man In Modern Japanese Literature (2005), and the detached passive nature of the “herbivore men” termed by Masahiro Morioka in A Phenomenological Study of “Herbivore Men” (2013). Such alternative frameworks of masculinity felt relevant enough to Wong Kar-wai to address, critique, and explore with a clarity only an auteur can achieve.
Constantine Santas defines an auteur as “a director who is considered the most important figure in the art of filmmaking, a creative person equivalent to the author of a novel and play” (Santas 2002, 18). True to the ideals of being an auteur, Wong Kar-wai follows his own personal style and techniques of filmmaking, however there is a notable lineage of the influence of the “Murakami mood” in his work. This is particularly notable with Wong being young in the 1970s and 1980s era in Hong Kong, a rapidly urbanizing space that fell under the spell of the “Haruki Phenomenon.” Wong’s films showcase the mood of the postmodern and urban human condition. As Ethel Chong states, “His postmodern themes and filming techniques focus mainly on the anxiety within modern urban living” (2003, 01). With his film-making career starting at a time when Hong Kong’s impending handover to China was looming large, this ‘anxiety’ was soon to be aggravated to hopelessness, disillusionment, and eventual emotional detachment on the part of the male youth of Hong Kong. No wonder Wong absorbs the spirit of Murakami by making films that are “about our postmodern human condition” (Chong 2003, 01), with greater focus on the mood of the film than the structure of the story. He does this through his auteurism, bringing to screen the similar themes, motifs, characters, narratives, and lines, as Murakami’s early works.
2. Murakami’s Influence on Wong: A Dialogue of Affect and Reception
Yet, Wong himself remains somewhat non-committal in his response to questions about Murakami’s influence on his films. He does accept the active presence of Murakami’s literary universe in his life, and the unmistakable resonances in his cultural consciousness. In an interview in the Hong Kong film magazine City Entertainment, in September 1994, he said, “Maybe in the use of number and time, we are similar . . . we are both men with emotion” (Teo 2005, 171). In an interview with Tony Rayns, when asked about his connection to Murakami, Wong responded that he “especially liked his early novel Pinball ’73,” the second novel in the Rat Trilogy. He said that, being of “the same age,” they are both marked by influence of the West, “the music, the cigarettes, the lifestyle.” Gesturing towards having lived in similar situations, both East Asian males, in the 1960s to 1990s era, he said, “What I identified with his books was the sense of being a certain age: of being not far out of your twenties that you’ve forgotten them, but not yet feeling middle-aged” (Rayns 2020). These assertions, in spite of a lack of a direct acknowledgment of influence, highlights time and again the strong connections that the filmmaker feels with conjectural leanings, thematic approaches, and the storytelling techniques of Murakami. Yomota Inuhiko also confirms the influence of Murakami’s first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, on the Wong Kar-wai’s work (Hillenbrand 2009, 727). In his book, Stephen Teo, a leading scholar of Wong’s cinema, asserts that the motifs in Wong’s films, like lost opportunities, possibilities, and impermanence, have been inspired by Murakami (Teo 2005, 50-51). Allan Cameron argues that Wong takes inspiration from Murakami’s display of “pop culture references,” and features of “ordinary folk in situations which are at once mundane and absurd” (2007). These words thus provide a convincing foundation to situate Wong’s auteurism within the gamut of the ‘Haruki Phenomenon’—Murakami’s early career works being identified as particular sources of interest, inspiration, and influence therein.
Murakami, in turn, has taken cognition of the spread of the ‘Haruki Phenomenon’ across East Asia, especially among younger contemporaries like Wong who have responded to resonating moments of social, political, and moral crises through their cultural productions. In his collection of essays, Shokugyō to shite no shōsetsuka (2015), Murakami observes that his books became widely popular around the world in the wake of certain major social changes. According to Tomoki Wakatsuki, young people around the world who had lost hope in their various protests against the established social and political systems under which they were brought up, were in need of what Murakami himself describes as an alternative “narrative” to follow. As Murakami observes, the confusion caused by disruption of an established social system may have led people to lose faith in their own value systems, and under such circumstances, they tried to accept “the uncertainty of reality” by inter-adjusting the actual social system with their own metaphor system. Murakami states that “the reality of the stories my novels offered may have functioned well as a cogwheel for such adjustments” (Wakatsuki 2020, 14).
In the beginning of his career Wong Kar-wai shows similar adjustments in his films specially those he made right before the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. This marked a similar disruption of the established social system and the uncertainty of reality, which Wong represents in his films with his own metaphor system of temporal dissonance and memory. Murakami’s own observations of the connections of his works to major social changes in the lives of his readers, links Murakami’s works to Wong Kar-wai, and his own reaction to social change in his own life.
The theoretical frameworks of Influence, Analogy, and Reception provided by A.O. Aldridge serve as potent tools to establish the connection between Murakami and Wong. In order to analyze “influence,” Aldridge offers the concept of “emitters” and “receivers” to trace direct aesthetic and thematic influence. It can be understood as “direct (acknowledged) influence” largely prompted by the presence of congruent social, cultural, political realities, and/or ideological stance of the influencer or emitter (Murakami), and the receiver (Wong). And in the case of the presence of clearly identifiable thematic, stylistic, and aesthetic congruence between the works of two creative artists, inspite of the absence of any acknowledged influence of one upon another, Aldridge presents the concept of affinity or analogy consisting of resemblances in style, structure, mood, or idea between two works.
The presence of Aldridge’s Emitter-Receiver dynamic of Influence is palpable in this context, as according to Hillenbrand’s argument the influence of Murakami on Wong is not of “in-the-know allusions, but rather a mood that can be bent and shaped to fit other artistic impulses altogether” (Hillenbrand 2009, 727). Hillenbrand is positing that instead of plundering Murakami’s writings for textual fidelity or direct adaptation, Wong filters the “Murakami mood” through his own artistic sensibility. Hillenbrand calls it “an exercise in twisted homage” to the emitter Murakami through which receiver Wong receives, the “Murakami Mood.” The core of the mood are the themes, motifs, lines, major elements, and even music references, “pregnant with romantic possibility, but overlaid with a resigned knowledge that the city is no friend to dreamers” (729), bringing about emptiness and loneliness, resulting in ennui.
3. Enigma of Ennui: Mapping Psychological Resonances
The foremost among the literary works that highlights the ennui inherent within the ‘Murakami Mood’ is The Rat Trilogy—a series consisting of three novels, Hear the Wind Sing (1979), Pinball, 1973 (1980), and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)—exploring the paths of two men in the 1970s after the failure of the Japanese student movement of the 1960s. The series primarily focuses on two male characters, the “I” narrator (Boku) who is more detached, passive, and focused on consumerist comforts, and the Rat, who is brash, embittered, and becomes increasingly isolated by the end of the series. The first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, introduces the “I” narrator and the Rat, who ruminate in their conversations about their youth, social disappointments, and their experiences in the seaside town of Kobe, with the narrator reflecting on lost loves and a mysterious woman with four fingers on the left hand. The second novel, Pinball, 1973—where the narrator obsessively searches for a specific pinball machine from his youth in Tokyo, while the Rat becomes further isolated and decides to leave the city—further explores themes of urban alienation, memory, consumerism, isolation, and loss. In the final novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, the narrator, under the pressure of political and economic powers, embarks on a quest to find a mysterious sheep. He ends up finding out about the death of the Rat, who has killed himself to defeat the ambitious, conquering and corruptive nature of the mysterious magical sheep. This novel brings an end to the story of two different types of male identities and masculinities, and how they negotiate their feelings in a changing world. These negotiations are further explored in two Murakami stories, “The Year of Spaghetti,” which showcases the “I” narrator habitually cooking in order to indirectly escape his urban loneliness, imagining guests who never come, and “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning,” where the protagonist imagines a love story and a conversation with a girl passing by on Harajuku Street in Tokyo, but never initiates it and accepts the melancholy of his detachment and ennui.
The two films of Wong Kar-wai showcasing such ennui are both set in Hong Kong in the 1990s before the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, and explore themes of loneliness, urban alienation, cosmopolitanism, love, and fleeting connections in the urban spaces of the city. The film Chungking Express tells two parallel stories about two heartbroken policemen, Cop 223 and Cop 663, both dealing with unrequited love. Both cops are the opposite of the Wen-Wu model. Cop 663 is a typical Chinese Metrosexual male, always turned out in a clean uniform with a sharp dress sense, well maintained hair, and attractive facial features. But he also has a detached personality and struggles internally after his girlfriend leaves him suddenly. While Cop 223 brashly and desperately tries to find love, exhibiting the features of a typical “Warm Man,” caring and loving to an extreme extent, he ultimately faces loneliness in the uncaring urban spaces of the city. The film strikes a whimsical, romantic tone with its focus on the ennui and mundane everyday urban life.
Wong’s characters are very much alone in the large city environment. They are alienated from one another even though they are involved in one another’s lives. The characters want to love and be loved, and yet are so dysfunctional that they cannot. The urban environment forces them to blend in, so that individuality is forfeited. Each character has to play by the city’s rules, in order to survive. The meaning of love hence becomes distorted and lost (Chong 2003, 1).
Romantic ennui is showcased in the movie, Fallen Angel, that, similar to the aforementioned film, follows two storylines: one about a detached assassin and his partner, and another about a mute young man who breaks into businesses at night. The Hitman would have qualified as a representative of the Wu masculinity because of his profession, but fails due to his dependence on his partner who plans out all his work. The characters all grapple with loneliness and a sense of alienation in the city. The film’s visual style is more noir-influenced, with a darker, grittier aesthetic than Chungking Express. Fallen Angels can be seen as a darker reflection of the themes explored in Chungking Express, suggesting that love and connection can be elusive, and even destructive.
Wong’s Chungking Express is considered a tribute to Murakami by critics like Hillenbrand who call this film a “valentine to Murakami” (2009, 727), as well as by Yomota Inuhiko and Allan Cameron, both of whom credit Murakami’s earlier works as inspiration for Wong. And also by the critic Stephen Teo, who “identifies the short story ‘On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning’ as the emotional wellspring of the film with its poignant but pithily detached take on the ‘what might have been’ moments that can light up the drab screen of city life” (727). These elements of longing, along with detachment in the hyper-urban setting of Harajuku Street in central Tokyo, are resonant in the similarity of the thematic recurring lines of Chungking Express, “Every day we brush past so many other people. People we may never meet . . . or people who may become close friends . . . This was the closest we ever got. Just 0.01 of a centimeter between us. But 57 hours later . . . I fell in love with this woman” (Chungking Express 00:02:37). Cop 223 repeats a humorously melancholic line in the film, expressing his dreams of love developing from chance encounters that are never fulfilled. This parallels with a line in the Murakami story, “One Beautiful April Morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harajuku neighborhood, I walk past the 100% perfect girl.” The narrator imagines initiating a conversation with her, but only manages to imagine a mundane question about a daily task, asking if she would know “if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?” He imagines having a love story with her, in which he sees the futility of his own imagination. “Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever.” And just like Cop 223, he ruminates on the distance between them, as them passed each other in an urban space: “Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards” (Murakami 1981). Here we see the disturbed or vanished “elementary existential feelings,” as termed by Constantine Fuchs, who explains it as “feeling unreal, like in a dream (derealization)” (Fuchs 2013, 615), in which characters, unable to live in the reality of their urban settings, choose to dream, of a life unlived.
These characters are male, East Asian, and between the ages of eighteen to thirty. They reflect and represent the experiences of the youth of Murakami and Wong through their mood. These characters become an ideal of a type of alternative East Asian Masculinity, which can be termed as a detached passive masculinity, which shares comparable similarities to the concept of the “herbivore men,” as “young men who have who seem to have lost their ‘manliness’ or become ‘feminized’” (Morioka 2013, 1). At the same time these men seem to have developed a certain sensitivity to feelings that makes them fit the description of “warm men.” Such detached, passive male characters are the main narrators, or protagonists of Murakami and Wong, such as the “I narrator” of The Rat Trilogy of Murakami, Cop 223 and Cop 663 in Chungking Express, and the Hitman in Fallen Angels.
4. Notions of Masculinity: Conjuctures
Aside from the feeling of “derealization” these characters also get “elementary existential feelings”: a “feeling detached from the world, experiencing a loss of all meaning or ‘nothingness’” (Fuchs 2013, 615), as they are “incapable of adapting to ideal images of masculinity and develop a deep inferiority complex which leaves them incapable of accepting their own bodies and desires, leading them to repress their sexuality and turn towards alternate means of manifestation” (Morioka 2013, 13). But this mainly happens as an affect of the motif of the “leaving woman.” A motif and character type in the works of both cultural artists, the leaving woman may leave mysteriously, without any reason, or due to the affect of detachment and passivity of the detached male protagonist. In Chungking Express, Cop 663 is suddenly left by his Airhostess girlfriend, without any feasible explanation, except writing a makeshift letter from a used boarding pass, “Your Plane Cancelled . . .” The departure has affinity with Murakami’s ‘I’ narrator, being suddenly left by his girlfriend in Hokkaido in A Wild Sheep Chase. Similarly, Cop 223 is dumped by his girlfriend, May, on the 1st of April, without any cause, and he cannot understand whether it is real or a joke.
Therein lies the cause of the dream scenes in Chungking Express and the magical realism of A Wild Sheep Chase. As first, the character tries to escape the mood of melancholy by “attunement,” which according to Fuchs, is “said to ‘tune’ body, self, and environment to a common chord” (Fuchs 2013, 619). In consonance, Cop 223 often runs in the rain, explaining, “The body loses water when you jog . . . so you have none left for tears” (Chungking Express 00:05:17), and Cop 663 goes stoically back to work, seemingly fine after being left. Similarly, in A Wild Sheep Chase the ‘I’ narrator goes for a walk, having no work to do after his girlfriend leaves him. “I decided instead to go for a walk. It was spectacular weather. The sky was feathered with a few white brushstroke clouds, the air filled with the songs of birds” (Murakami 1982). The “attunement” is also seen in the tendency of these men to change their “environment” in their rooms, apartments, and houses. Like Cop 663, specially, who cleans his room and talks to a bar of soap in the movie, shares affinity with Murakami’s ‘I’ narrator who cleans the house in Hokkaido. After the process of “attunement” comes the failure to do so. “In such states, the background of taken-for-granted familiarity vanishes and is replaced by a sense of alienation from oneself and the world” (Fuchs 2013, 615). The “I” narrator of A Wild Sheep Chase loses touch with reality and talks to his dead friend, and meets a sheep man. In these works, there is often a contrast of masculinities. The detached, passive masculinity is contrasted with the corporate “salaryman” masculinity, defined by a money minded and ambitious character, which represents a cultural evolution of the character’s Confucian Wen masculinity, who had found his ambition stagnate because of the “economic leveling-off,” a period of slack economic growth especially in the 1990s (Hillenbrand 2009, 725).
There are many parallels of the contrast displayed between the two masculinities in the representations by Murakami and Wong. In A Wild Sheep Chase, the Business Partner is a representation of the “salaryman,” who is an ideal man with a family and responsibilities in contrast to the detached protagonist, who is divorced and passively unbothered by it. The contrast is shown in their lifestyle choices, as the Business Partner wears “a deep-blue shirt with a black tie, hair neatly combed,” while the protagonist would be “in a T-shirt with Snoopy carrying a surf board, old Levi's that had been washed colorless, and dirty tennis shoes” (Murakami 1982). But the seemingly traditional, ideal salaryman-life of the Business Partner has contradictory elements of alcohol abuse, which is reflected in the widespread alcoholism of salarymen in Japan, who willingly or unwillingly become alcoholics due to social pressures of the corporate work culture (Sengupta 2003). These men seem content, as seen in the comment of the Business Partner, “I got a new car, bought a condo, sent two kids to an expensive private school. Not bad for thirty years old, I suppose,” but they are haunted by nostalgia of the old free lifestyle as the Business Partner follows his remark with, “I know, I know. That’s what we’ve got to do and that’s what we’re doing. But it was more fun in the old days . . . At the very least, in the old days we did work we believed in, and we took pride in it. There’s none of that now. We’re just tossing out fluff” (Murakami 1982). These comments express the disillusionment from the traditional lifestyle, and a sense of nostalgia for the old days, away from the corporate life. They attempt to regain sight of what they had lost, but it sends them “wandering in an even thicker alcoholic fog. The protagonist in his detached manner says, “at least for the time being, he was a regular guy until the sun went down” (Murakami 1982), commenting on the temporariness of the identity and masculinity of these salarymen, and their dependency on alcohol abuse to maintain their status.
Wong also presents a humorous contrast of these masculinities in his film, Fallen Angels, where the detached, passive masculinity of the Hitman, sometimes called Ming, meets the hyperactive and loud ‘salaryman’ masculinity of Hoi, his junior high classmate, on a night bus. Hoi presents an almost parodic image of the typical salaryman, in a suit and a tie, reading a business magazine on a dimly lit bus, at night. Hoi explains that he is travelling in the bus because his ‘merc’ (Mercedes) broke down, possibly a lie to present a false image of financial success, as we see him later desperately trying to sell insurance to the Hitman. We see the contrast in their masculinities, in their conversation, as Hoi enthusiastically asks, “What do you do for living” . . . “Are you married?” (Fallen Angels 00:10: 42). Hitman internally identifies these as some of the common questions that he is asked whenever he bumps “into old pals” (00:10: 39). Hoi asks Ming for a business card to arrange a business meeting, and asks about his family. Ming shows a fake business card and a fake family photo with a black woman and child. To which Hoi responds by calling him “liberal.” Hoi is friendly but hilariously gives Ming his business card saying “he is an insurance pro” (00:11: 37), adding, “TIME are doing an interview with me in the next few days” (00:11: 45) And after all that, Hoi tries to sell insurance to Ming, saying, “Remember the big bosom? The one we both fancied? We’re getting married next week. Here’s an invitation card. Just fill in your name, okay? . . . Please come, and I’ll have your insurance ready for you” (00:12:14). Through the whole interaction, Wong presents a humorous and downright parodical display of the shallow pomp and vanity of this type of masculinity, stuck between the pursuit of financial success and social respect, but not quite able to achieve either.
5. Affinity of the Affective Atmosphere
One final aspect of the resonance of Murakami within the works of Wong Kar-wai is that of “affective atmosphere,” which according to Thomas Fuchs “may be regarded as holistic affective qualities of experienced spatial and interpersonal situations, integrating their expressive features into a unitary dynamic. Such atmospheric effects are evoked by physiognomic or expressive qualities of objects as well as by intermodal features of perception such as rhythm, intensity, dynamics, etc” (Fuchs 2013, 616). Affective atmosphere can be created by the expression of mood through seemingly ordinary objects like cigarettes, radios, jukebox machines, etc. These elements resonated via the influence of the “Murakami mood” on Wong Kar-wai through the “the music and the cigarettes,” and the focus on the mundane in urban spaces, as mentioned by Wong himself. They can be traced in how both of them use similar elements and motifs to create an affective atmosphere, in their works.
A recurring motif in the early Murakami is the consumption of cigarettes in moments of intimacy. In Hear the Wind Sing, the narrator talks about the girl with four fingers, with whom he had just spent an abstinent night. “The car was stifling hot, but she smoked one cigarette after another in silence all the way to the harbor, mopping her sweat with a towel as she smoked. She would light one up, take three puffs, examine the lipstick stain on the filter, and then butt it out in the car’s ashtray before firing up another” (Murakami 1979). This passage is a recollection of nostalgic memories of the narrator, who relates in Murakami’s typical detached tone, but remembers her with fondness, and despite his detachment, is curious about her fate in the present, as he had never seen her again after spending a summer with her. Cigarettes appear in Murakami’s works in sombre but sweet moments. They also make their presence felt in moments of melancholia when he hears the news of the death of a girl he used to sleep with in his college years. “And so, when the news of her death reached me, I was smoking my 6,922nd cigarette” (Murakami 1979). The reader is told nothing about his sadness, and the information he gives about the girl is conveyed in a detached, emotionless manner. The only indication of his melancholy is his detailed description of the memory of completing a meaningless, hazardous act of smoking his 6922nd cigarette when he hears the news of her death. In Fallen Angels, cigarettes are consumed in moments of intimacy like when the Hitman and his partner meet for the last time to end their relationship, with the partner asking if they were still a couple.
In the movie, the Hitman and the Partner share a relationship of strange dynamics, as they hardly ever meet, and are both dependent on the other for different things. The Hitman, with a typical detached masculinity, finds it difficult to make decisions for himself, depending on his Partner to plan his jobs. The Partner, however, has one-sided feelings for the Hitman, but is unable to express herself, and contends with cleaning his house whenever he is absent. This strange relationship continues until the Hitman has a near death experience and wants to leave the business. In the strangeness of their relationship, they fail to communicate with each other, culminating in a final scene between them where they meet on-screen for the first time, and say nothing to each other. Just smoking cigarettes in each other’s company, they sit silently for a long time, till the Hitman “terminates” their partnership and leaves, which would later result in his death. Here, cigarettes set the mood for personal and urban alienation, felt by characters in the urban setting of 1990s Hong Kong, stuck in strange and sometimes toxic relationships with people or the city, unable to get out.
Music too, sets an affective atmosphere, carrying an important part of the story with mood behind it. For example, Chungking Express has a recurrent music that is used both as background and an in-story song, “California Dreaming” by The Mamas and The Papas. The song plays throughout the movie, and serves as a tool of affective atmosphere that the character, Faye, uses to mentally escape the urban setting of Hong Kong, by later going to California to fulfill the dream, as the song’s title suggests. The song also symbolizes Faye’s attraction towards Cop 663, as it always plays whenever he appears in front of Faye, which is shown via Wong’s auteur-ship of clever camerawork, in presenting Cop 663’s face through Faye’s visual perspective. Owing to his detached nature, however, Cop 663 is unable to understand either the meaning of the song or Faye’s feelings towards him. Later, the song plays when they meet again at the end of the movie, symbolizing the continuation of the dream. Similarly, in Murakami’s Hear the Wind Sing, a young lady dedicates the song “California Girls” by The Beach Boys, to the “I” narrator in a radio program, in an effort to remind the detached protagonist of her existence and their past spent together, but just like Wong’s Cop 663, the detached “I” narrator of Murakami fails understand her feelings and intentions.
There is also an affinity in the works of Murakami and Wong in their use of musical instruments and sound as a substitute for real physical intimacy. In Fallen Angels, the Hitman breaks up with his Partner by playing a Shirley Kwan song, “Forget Him,” as a signal, on the jukebox and leaving without meeting her or communicating directly. The jukebox, thus, is used as a symbol of a broken dysfunctional relationship. To add to that point, the Partner has an intimate relationship as a surrogate as she spends intimate moments caressing the jukebox while it was playing “Speak my Language” by Laurie Anderson, after which she has an orgasm on the Hitman’s bed, in the empty apartment. This shares a parallel with the intimate relationship of the “I” narrator of Pinball, 1973 with the pinball machine, which he sees and experiences as a woman; who talks to him and cares for him, smiles at him, but when he touches it, it is “as cold as ice” (Murakami 1980). But rather than comprehending its non-humanness, he observes how his fingers leave marks of warmth on its surface. These scenes depict the characters’ detachment from reality in urban spaces, who then find comfort in objects that enable an affective atmosphere.
The characters also find comfort in an atmosphere conjured by food, and in situations relating to food. In Chungking Express both the male characters, Cop 223 and Cop 663, find solace from their melancholy and loneliness in food. Cop 663’s story of changing relationships is reflected in his relationship with the “cheese sandwich,” a comfort food that his airhostess girlfriend liked, who later leaves him, and the “Midnight Express” food shop, where he meets Faye, and which he later owns, so it becomes symbolic of his connection to the city. Cop 223’s situation of his relationship is also expressed with expiring pineapples which he eats symbolically to accept his breakup with May. But when he meets a new love interest, in the blonde woman with whom he spends a sexless night in a hotel room only a few hours after they first meet, he spends the time with her eating fast food at the hotel, symbolizing the fast nature of his feelings for her. Murakami’s men are equally connected to food, one of the motifs of the Murakami mood being spaghetti, which is often connected to moments of loneliness and ennui. This can be seen in A Wild Sheep Chase when the “I” narrator cooks the Italian staple after his girlfriend leaves. But most emblematic of this element is the story, “The Year of Spaghetti” (1981), where the “I” narrator talks about cooking spaghetti in his mood of loneliness, hoping the activity would alleviate his melancholia. The motif of melancholic men cooking finds resonance in Wong’s Fallen Angels, where the mute He Qiwu’s father is always seen cooking. Wong shows this man as quiet and melancholic, in intimate close-up shots of his side profile in moments of monologue by He Qiwu. In the monologue, He Qiwu says about his father, “After my mum’s death . . . he very rarely talked.” But in the scenes of cooking, he is shown to have a momentary smile on his face. This display of cooking East Asian men, as men with depth and a deep masculinity, sees resonance in the social reality of Japanese men who regularly cook (Aoyama 2003), as well as in Murakami’s use of cooking in his novels, which comes from his own early life working in his jazz bar, “The Peter Cat,” about which he writes in the preface of the book Wind/Pinball—and, as shown, it resonates in Wong’s interpretation of this motif in his films.
To conclude, the period from the 1960s to the 1990s was one of great social movements, coupled with rapid economic growth in East-Asia. These contrasting impulses resonate through affectivity and mood, giving rise to varied senses of identity. Among men, the ideal of traditional masculine identity has been challenged with alternative models. The writers and artists of the era represented these models in their creations. Murakami offers a detached, passive masculinity, popularly termed “the metrosexual male,” and recognized in the trend of “herbivore men.” Through the “Haruki Phenomenon,” his work resonates with artists and writers of East Asia. The “Murakami mood,” likewise, appears in these models of masculinity via the artistic works of East Asian producers, thereby establishing alternative models of East Asian masculinity. Notable among them is Wong Kar-wai who, through influence and resonance, has crafted his own style of representing the mood.
6. Conclusion
There is an identifiable resonance of the “Murakami mood” in the two films of Wong Kar-wai, who expresses the “mood” with his audio and visual artistry. The resonance, well understood in terms of affectivity, demonstrates how their works negotiate pre-existing East Asian masculinities and newly forming alternative East Asian masculinities, in the cosmopolitan, postmodern urban spaces mainly in the 1970s in Japan and the 1990s in Hong Kong. This article on the reception of the Japanese luminary in Greater China and East Asia has, thus, explicated a comprehensive framework tracing the influence of Murakami across East Asia. It underlines how similar social, political, and cultural contexts have forged congruent literary consciousnesses across mid-twentieth century Japan and Greater China. Such an influence-reception dynamic has also highlighted the relevance of approaching East Asian Literature from a more interdisciplinary perspective and locating it at the crossroads of Masculinity Studies, Cultural Studies, Affect Theory, and Influence Studies with a greater conviction.
Aitor Debbarma is a PhD candidate at the Department of English at The ICFAI University, Tripura. He has served as Guest Faculty of English at Holy Cross College, and Kathia Baba Mission College, Agartala, Tripura. For his doctoral research, he is working on the influence of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami on East Asian cultures. His areas of interest are Cultural Studies, Generational Studies, East Asian Studies, Reception Studies, and Translation Studies. He has published a short story called “Fatal Little Things” in the Tripura Times Newspaper in 2019. His future plans are to continue his research in academia on topics relating to unique literary and cultural concepts. In his free time, he enjoys writing, playing football, playing music, and trying new artistic endeavors.
Urmi Sengupta is an Assistant Professor of English at The ICFAI University, Tripura. She is also an Executive Council Member of the Comparative Literature Association of India, and member of the Advisory Committee of the Centre for Canadian Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She was awarded a PhD in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University. For her Doctoral Research she has engaged in a comparative analysis of the works of Alice Munro (Canada) and Nirmal Verma (India). Her research interests include Canadian Literature, Ecocriticism, Gender, Translation Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Memory Studies. Her essays have been published in journals like Sahitya: The Journal of the Comparative Literature Association of India, Littcrit: An Indian Response to Literature, The Calcutta Journal of Global Affairs, and Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry. She has contributed chapters in peer-reviewed volumes on Ecocriticism and Environment: Rethinking Literature and Culture (Primus, 2018), Nation-building, Education and Culture in India and Canada (Springer, 2019), and Memory Studies in the Digital Age: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Routledge, 2025).
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