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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
When my marriage ends I am in the middle of reading Norwegian Wood. Traumatized by the news that Naoko, the enigmatic and troubled woman he loves, has committed suicide, Murakami's narrator, Watanabe Toru, packs his rucksack, empties his bank account and takes the first express train out of Tokyo. For months he wanders through Japan from town to town. He sleeps in doss houses and car parks, stations, and on beaches, eats anything or not all. Movement is meant to be the antidote to Watanabe's trauma and sorrow, and what Watanabe does inspires me. Shocked and grieving, I travel. I go back to Japan planning to leave my sorrow behind me, dump it in the exhaust of Pratt and Whitney jet engines, meditate it away at a Zen temple, return to the safety of a land that was once my home, forget the loss in work and weeks of wandering throughout southwestern Honshū. But once I go, what I find in Japan is more sorrow than I have ever known, more loss than it seems possible for any community to sustain. In my quest to escape my own sorrow I find many other sorrows layered across time and space in a Japan deeply etched by the traumas of catastrophe, traumatic memory and history. Once I am there in Japan, it is all so sad or so enduring in the sadness, that my own grief at losing the person I love more than any other is simultaneously exacerbated and absorbed by it.
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11 Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “Research Notes on Japanese Poison Gas Warfare in China” p. 6. chinajapan.org/articles/05.1/05.1wakabayashi4-10.pdf Accessed May 12, 2011
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17 Shin Hae Bong, “Compensation for Victims of Wartime Atrocities: Recent Developments in Japan's Case Law.” Journal of International Criminal Justice 3 (2005), 187-206.
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27 Murakami Haruki. “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer” The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 29 No 7, July 18, 2011. Accessed July 25, 2011.
28 Quoted in 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake, Patrick Sherriff, editor (London: Enhanced Editions, 2011). Location 826 in the Kindle for iPad edition.
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