If cultures are considered unifiable through shared stories, it is not inconceivable that they can be connected through distinguishable but ultimately similar shame stories. Whether or not these stories cast cultures as “persecutors” or “victims,” it is more than possible that such societies can attach themselves to others through shared histories and stories of guilt, infamy, and remorse. Such a traumatic story becomes an essential element in Haruki Murakami's 1995 novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which explores Japan's lingering but ignored sense of guilt over wartime atrocities committed before and during World War II. Likewise, the story becomes equally important in Australian writer David Malouf's short story collection, Dream Stuff, which quietly highlights Australia's guilt in participating in or enabling the persecution of Aboriginal peoples. Using a variety of postmodern literary techniques, Murakami and Malouf each seek to unearth the sense of shame buried in their respective societies. This essay will first explore the postmodern and historical credentials of each text before continuing with a joint discussion of the novels as examples of international literature. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Of the two works examined in this essay, Murakami's work is considered the more "classical" postmodern and global text. Although The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is known for its scandalous condemnation of Japan's cover-up of its history, it is equally renowned for its unique literary style and its frequent references to Western (particularly American) culture. The narrative follows a slacker, Toru Okada, who (repeatedly and through various means) manages to slip through time and witness the atrocities committed by the Japanese before and during World War II. The content of Murakami's novel is notable in that it directly contradicts Japan's "famous codes of cultural concealment" (Wood), referring to Japan's deliberately revisionist mentality regarding this historical period. By graphically reimagining the reality of Japanese brutality through fiction, Murakami makes a highly controversial statement about the need for Japan to confront its shameful past. The novel is also characterized by a persistent sense of time distortion, a classic feature of postmodern writing that challenges the narrative's sense of reality and further blurs the lines between dreams, memory, history, and the present time. These parts of the novel occur in both concise and elaborate descriptions, and an example of the former perhaps best illustrates the sense of temporal confusion in the novel: "In bed that night, I kept thinking about Mr. Honda. Both he and Malta Kano had told me about the 'water. Mr. Honda had warned me to be careful. Malta Kano had undergone austerities on the island of Malta in connection with his water research. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but they were both deeply concerned about the water I turned my thoughts to the images of the Nomonhan battlefield: the Soviet tanks and machine gun positions, and the river flowing behind them. In the darkness, I could hear the sound of the river flowing behind them . The unbearable thirst. In the darkness, I could hear the sound of the river. “Toru,” Kumiko said to me in a thin voice, “are you awake?” (54)This moment shows Toru actually slipping into the past, and it's not clear whether or not he's just lying in the dark, staring indeep contemplation, or dreaming while sleeping. We can praise this moment as an exemplary example of postmodern literary technique, the time distortion that occurs in this moment (and throughout the novel) is crucial because it helps illustrate the sense of cultural memory that pervades within these characters. Even though Toru himself has had no experiences in Manchuria and (at this point) has not yet been told any stories about this time, he seems to somehow simply "know" what had happened there. As the memory resurfaces in the character's subconscious, Toru's sense of time begins to falter, and his reality becomes permeated by an unknowable yet strangely familiar sense of the past. In this way, Murakami seeks to illustrate the way history keeps its hand on an individual's shoulder, even if that history has never been experienced firsthand. Another postmodern feature of this novel is that it operates through the use of a metanarrative. While the novel is faithful in illustrating Toru's experiences and development, Murakami is equally (if not more) interested in stories related to Toru through conversations or written material. For example, the first time Toru is brought back in the story is when he asks Lieutenant Mamiya to tell him about his experiences with Mr. Honda as a soldier in 1937 Manchuria. Although the novel continues in this section as a first-person narrative, it is immediately distinguishable because the "I" no longer refers to Toru, but to Mamiya, who for a time effectively takes control of the story (135). The story that the novel seeks to explore ultimately comes through the testimonies created by other characters, and it is only through listening to Toru that we (the audience) are able to witness these moments in the story. The metanarrative structure of the story is significant in that it causes the protagonist to emulate the position of the modern reader, who similarly can only experience the story through experiencing the stories and testimonies of others. Murakami's novel emphasizes the multitude of ways in which history is communicated to an individual, where the temporal distortion created by cultural memory is one way and the need for testimony within a cultural metanarrative is another. What Murakami's style ultimately allows for is a sense of history as an unsettling, relentless entity, as Toru is continually forced to experience these mistakes in his subconscious and is also seemingly incapable of escaping the testimonies and stories of others. Whether or not Toru is satisfied with these slips in the story is debatable; what is undeniable, however, is the fact that Murakami is deliberately creating a character who is (at least in part) defined by an inability to avoid the past. This phenomenon mimics how emotions such as guilt and shame are able to target those individuals who have acted badly in the past, where memories of shameful or deplorable actions are made to stay with the offender very time after such actions have actually been committed. In this way, we can see how Toru exemplifies the cultural memories that pervade the Japanese conscious and subconscious even today. Indeed, parts of Toru's journey illustrate the disturbing extent of the immorality displayed by the Japanese during the war, including the massacre of zoo animals (400) and the brutal, baseball-inspired murder of a Chinese prisoner of war ( 521). Murakami depicts atrocities so extravagant in their brutality that they are truly unforgettable for both Toru and the reader. This in itself reflects the fact that although Japanese cultural codes may promote a cover-up ofcruelty within one's history, there is no escape from this history for the individual. A few years after the publication of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, David Malouf would cover similar ground of shameful history within a collection of short stories entitled Dream Stuff, set entirely in Australia. In an interview conducted by Colm T?ib?n for Bomb Magazine, Malouf makes the following statement: "If you come to Australia from outside you notice certain things, you notice how open and open it is, there are friendly people, lots of sunshine, lots of open space, so much freedom, but there is also a darkness in the midst of all this, a continuous darkness that surrounds the Aboriginal population. Many people feel a kind of shame and almost everyone feels disturbed and uncomfortable about what they contact us caused them." In the above quote, Malouf makes it explicitly clear that he believes his country is haunted by historical and cultural guilt, a feeling that is directly related to the specific content of Dream Stuff. What distinguishes Malouf's illustration of the story from Murakami's is that while Japanese atrocities are physically confined to the past, Australia's shameful history continues to physically haunt the landscape through the surviving Aboriginal peoples who continue to live in the continent. In other words, there is no way that Australian society could exist capable of imposing a "cultural code of concealment" similar to that of Japan, as shameful history is a physical entity within this society. Ultimately, Malouf's work explores similar themes of guilt and shame within a very different national context than Murakami's, ultimately showing how different he is. societies are connected through shared histories of historical and cultural regrets. The story “Blacksoil Country” is notable for this topic because it operates through a highly postmodern mode of storytelling in which a fictionalized narrative of reality is created. In this case, Malouf creates an “origin story” to explain how violence against Aboriginal people began, thus offering a fictionalized interpretation of Australian historical reality. Blacksoil Country” follows the story of a failed farmer and father who casually kills an Aboriginal man and ultimately finds his son's head smashed in as an act of retaliation, thus triggering decades of violence. In describing the father after finding his son, it is said that: “The whole country is his, to rage to and fro with the roll call of his sorrow. . . speak in a low voice. . . so that the earth will finally be cleansed of the shadow of blood. . . and because he believes so completely in what he must do, is so full of the ferocity of it, others are convinced of it too” (129). Malouf includes this illustration of a fictionalized Australian story because he is trying to show how the persecution of an entire group of people requires a deeply rooted passion for hatred, as the father clearly possesses. While we may find sympathy for the father, Malouf includes this description because it demonstrates the psychological mindset of those who spark violent, even genocidal, conflict. Ultimately, the father's pain cannot justify the violence and it is said that “Black people in every direction are hunted down and grounded. They too have lost their protection, what little they had of it” (130). What is significant about this quote is that it is decidedly non-fictional; in other words, the factual and historical truthful nature of this quote juxtaposes the story of the father and son, which is a fictional reality. In this way, “Blacksoil Country” descends from fictional reality to actual reality, while blurring the lines between reality and fiction. In the end, the reader is able to grasp thesense of how shameful is the unjust and brutal scale of violence that plagues Australian history. In another story, "Lone Pine", two elderly Australians are victims of a random act of violence in which they are robbed and killed by a young man and his family. While this story exemplifies the postmodern cliché of unpredictable and inexplicable realities, it also echoes the random and brutal acts of violence committed against Aboriginal people. This notion of “remembered earth” is evident when Harry says of the stars: “If you looked hard enough, every event that was unfolding on this side of the earth, even the smallest, would be reflected there. This too, he thought” (112). Later, after the murders, the murderer looks at the stars and is told that "their living but dead light fell and fell faintly upon him" (115). Like “Blacksoil Country,” “Lone Pine” highlights the belief that the Australian landscape has a memory of its own and that all acts of violence committed on this land will be spiritually preserved by it. The deaths of Harry and May, in this context, are part of a long history of randomly committed acts of violence that have occurred throughout history. In this way, the land becomes a symbolic container of Australia's guilt and shame. Dream Stuff's final, darkly humorous story, "Great Day", follows a family during the 200th anniversary of the founding of Australia and their discovery that their town's history museum is being burned in some kind of bonfire. The story is postmodern in that it is highly ironic; in celebrating the country's founding, it also celebrates the death and guilt that came with it. This guilt is highlighted when Clem, who exemplifies the Shakespearean character of the “prophetic madman,” thinks: “What we dare not ourselves, he found himself thinking, they do for us, the burglars, the robbers, the smashers, the money-grabbing merchants ”. . When we punish them it is to hide our guilt” (177). In this moment, Clem is experiencing a revelation about the nature of contemporary relations between whites and Aboriginal people. He realizes that the only reason for the high crime rates within Aboriginal communities is because they are forced into a dehumanizing existence of cultural exile and second-class citizenship. Clem's reflection is also a transparent statement about the pervasive sense of shame and guilt Australians feel about the treatment of Aboriginal people. Dream Stuff ultimately works as a question about how Australians should make sense of a truly shameful past. Further complicating the issue is the fact that this legacy of prejudice and violence is something that is inherited by contemporary Australians, and while such violence has declined significantly and ideologies have had time to change, there is a persistent sense of guilt for the actions of the ancestors. . As Australia's demons remain out in the open, Malouf shows how there is an enduring sense of confusion about how to deal with these historical demons, especially when there is no real prospect of rectifying such a traumatic past. While Malouf offers no definitive conclusions to these stories, nor suggests concrete answers to these questions, his novel is noteworthy because it exists as an exploration of how the demons of the past are able to create and maintain a culture's shame. Murakami's postmodernism in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is relatively easy because Murakami uses traditional techniques of postmodern writing, such as metafiction and time distortion. The argument for Malouf's postmodernism is considerably more difficult, considering the fact that his writing typically escapes these defining characteristics of the movement.As I have shown, the more postmodern aspects of his writing are obscured but ultimately evident in the way he illustrates imaginary, unpredictable, and ironic realities. However, the different uses of postmodernism in these two novels ultimately help show how each text actually requires different modes of this literary style to maintain the author's vision in the discussion of the past. For example, the nature of Japanese history is that there is no physical presence of historical atrocities, requiring Murakami to use a style that allows him to move fluidly between past and present, thus explaining his use of time distortion. Furthermore, if Toru is used to keep the reader rooted in a sense of Japanese modernity, the past can only be experienced through narratives told by real witnesses of this history, requiring the use of a metanarrative. Moving forward, Malouf's work requires no such slips in and out of the past because it sets the nine in different time periods and throughout Australian history. Each story is, therefore, the portrait of a contained but complex reality that offers itself to the reader's examination. While there are various senses of postmodernism within these two texts, the way postmodernism operates in each ultimately reflects the needs of the authors and the cultures they intend to examine. In discussing the merits of these two novels as examples of global literature, we may recall the fact that world literature is defined by the way it invites the reader into the world of another culture, while allowing him or her to interpret and imagine the world in a way that makes sense to them (both as individuals and as an individual). as representatives of a different culture). Fundamentally, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Dream Stuff are undeniably local texts, as they exclusively discuss the histories of the specific societies to which their respective authors belong. Indeed, these stories as specific historical experiences are beyond the privilege of translation, as an international audience will never know the experience of having ancestors who perpetrated the Rape of Nanjing or who participated in the seasonal hunting of aborigines. However, it takes a work of world literature to allow the reader the ability to connect with this foreign culture in one way or another. Since there is no prospect of truly translating a specific cultural heritage, it is the essence or core of these stories that must be translatable to foreign audiences. In the case of these works by Murakami and Malouf, what is translated is the shared experience of cultural and historical shame. While it is a generalization to say that all societies carry with them shameful histories, it is not wrong to assume that many (if not most) cultures carry historical incidents that bring a sense of guilt onto their respective citizens. Therefore, it seems natural to me that there is the possibility that international literature is based on shared stories of national and cultural guilt or historical guilt. For example, American readers might feel connected to Murakami's novel because of the shame we should feel for the atrocities committed by our soldiers during armed conflicts in the Middle East. As for Malouf's work, we may find common ground with his narrative when we remember the attempted genocide of Native Americans across the country. While we may not wish to reflect on shared stories of shame and remorse, we are nevertheless called by these works to find a sense of shared humanity in the fact that no story is immaculate and no culture is beyond reproach. In summary, despite the differences between these postmodern texts written by.