Reconstructing Shadows of War in "Tony Takitani" & "Abandoning a Cat"

On December 7, 1941, an infamous strike was launched by the Japanese military on the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii, causing the United States to cease its neutrality and enter World War II. Both Murakami's father and the fictional father of Tony Takitani, Shozaburo Takitani, are safely sequestered when this occurs—one was released charitably from military service just before, and the other had never shed any sweat over the war to begin with. These two fathers and their two sons have the war, its atrocities, and the subsequent American occupation of Japan stitched into them, and when reading "Tony Takitani" and "Abandoning a Cat" it seems almost inevitable that the traumas of war are carried in the body and then passed on, though diluted, to those who come after.

In the case of Tony Takitani, with "his curly hair," "his somewhat deeply sculpted face," and the Italian-American origins of his namesake, it could very well be that America is reflected onto him in place of his mother, whose absence the story depends upon. He is named casually by the American major his father plays jazz with, who assigns himself as Tony's godfather. I think this naming of Shozaburo's son by an American military leader could be representative of the effect that militaristic occupation has on a native culture since the matter is unceremoniously handled by the major and Shozaburo, numb from his wife's sudden death, can do nothing but acquiesce: "The American occupation of Japan was probably going to last a while yet, and an American-style name might come in handy for the kid at some point." This thought on Shozaburo's part is especially interesting when you consider that if he and Tony's mother wedded in 1947, Tony is born just a few short years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The next paragraph immediately refutes the slightly disruptive thought that an American name would be (someday) beneficial: "For certain people, coming face-to-face with a child called 'Tony Takitani' was all it took to reopen old wounds." This lends nicely to the beginning of "Abandoning a Cat."

From the first few paragraphs of this nonfiction piece about his father and these cats, American violence sits immovably in the corner of the reader's eye with the mention of ruins of a building "bombed by American planes—one of a few still visible scars of the war." (Again for me, the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan were brought to mind.) Murakami's father was discharged from service only days before Pearl Harbor, and, despite having survived narrowly, felt a sense of guilt over those he had left behind: "having his own life saved while his former comrades lost theirs became a source of great pain and anguish. I understand all the more now why he closed his eyes and devoutly recited the sutras every morning of his life." This event of American entrance into WWII becomes central to his father's life as a moment in which his life split decisively into two paths, one leading to life and one to a nearly certain death, and it is this moment that makes a part of Murakami's father permanently inaccessible to Murakami himself. It is impossibly to extract the effects of war from those who are affected by it, and I understand why Murakami ends "Abandoning a Cat" the way he does: "Still, that solitary raindrop has its own emotions, its own history, its own duty to carry on that history. Even if it loses its individual integrity and is absorbed into a collective something. Or maybe precisely because it's absorbed into a larger, collective entity."

The description of the relationship between Tony and his father are also very similar to the dynamic painted between Murakami and his father. Of Tony and Shozaburo, Murakami writes that "being the kind of people they were, imbued to an equal agree of habitual solitude, neither took the initiative to open his heart to the other." Of him and his own father, he writes, "Both of us were unbending, and when it came to not expressing our thoughts directly, we were two of a kind. For better of for worse." For Murakami, he describes also how his life was free from the worries of war that took up his father's youth, that he could study unmoored and enjoy what his father couldn't. But this expectation from his father carries this latent burden of war from father to son. This sublimation (or absorption to follow Murakami's metaphor) of pain into other emotionally intensive narratives is present in "Tony Takitani" as well. In both stories, it is the disconnect between father and son that paint the seemingly unrelated stories of a wife with a shopping addiction and a cat escaping up a tree with similar thematic undertakings: they convey a tragic inaccessibility to those you love as a result of trauma. The scars of war show up, though transformed and translated. Murakami communicates a dreadful sense that even after surviving war or violence or death, the loved one coming back unscathed returns as only fraction of the person who left: "Going down is much harder than going up." 

(There is so much much more to say here about the connection here to American culture, the ending of "Abandoning a Cat" with the mention of "individual integrity" in relation to the solitary raindrops history, and collective history! But I am very interested to see this effect in Norwegian Wood as well because I do see some of it there also!)

Alana Lopez