Haruki Murakami: the Music of the Time-River
Haruki Murakami: the Music of the Time-River

Summary/Abstract: This study means to be an argument towards the way in which the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, while boldly seeking to approach new horizons of knowing, manages to surpass the “crisis of the word”, which is acutely felt by contemporaneity, through the postmodern exploration of an alternative language such as music. The dominant jazz rhythm ingrained in his writing renders Haruki Murakami’s prose able to find the unique method of enjoyment in “the musical magic of words” by means of improvisation, and shapes an unmistakable style. We propose as key concepts of this analysis the time-river, an aspect of the unconscious that emphasizes the permanent present, and ma, or the ‘silent beat’, which activates the ultimate significance of the narrative text. This is in order to prove how, through the music that intervenes in the ma moments of plot development, the created fictional universe manages to overcome borders which are invisible to the naked eye, borders between this world and the other, between “practical” reality and “imagined” reality, between the conscious and subconscious, between wakefulness and dream, life and death, to probe the ineffable aspect of the deep self.

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