Literary Onomastics and Identity in Haruki Murakami’s and Easterine Kire’s Selected Novels

Abstract

 This paper attempts to study the significance of naming in the literary context of two selected works of Haruki Murakami and Easterine Kire respectively. Along with this, the study of the process of self-introspection that is revealed through the protagonists will also be undertaken. The blurring of the surreal and the real by Murakami, much like the magical realist novels, play a pivotal role in the formation of the protagonists’ selves. In Kire’s Son of the Thundercloud, the lack that the main protagonist feels is initiated by stories narrated to him during his childhood. This lack is subsequently intensified in the later years, when the protagonist’s family is wiped out when a drought affects their village. Like the Murakamian world, the world that Kire creates in her novel is a concoction of the surreal and the real. In the works of these authors, the fragmentation inherent in the characters is dealt with, often through the exodus of the main protagonists. This ‘reaching out’, more often than not, entails a re- telling of the past both literally and metaphorically. Reconciliation with the past is crucial for the future. In the course of this ordeal, the main protagonists’ search for meaning behind their names and the name of their acquaintances becomes a prerequisite for the formation of identity. This initially entails a process of disintegration of the ‘self’, or broadly, the ‘subject’. The paper will also lay emphasis on the study of how the protagonists try to attain integration from disintegration.