"She's just not there" : A study of psychological symbols in Haruki Murakami’s work

Sammanfattning: In this essay a novel by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, is examined through dreams as a psychoanalytical phenomenon or spectacle. The novel is a complex work but mainly circles around the main character Toru, a middle-aged man in modern Japan whose wife leaves him unexpectedly. The focus in this essay is on the dream symbols in this novel and how they have a narrative function, i.e., how the symbols can be tied to the main character Toru’s real life problems, more specifically, his problems with femininity. The psychoanalytical approaches used in this essay are Sigmund Freud’s and C G Jung’s theories on dreams. Material from another novel by Murakami, Norwegian Wood, which contains the same type of symbolic imagery as The Wind-up Bird, is also included.