무라카미 하루키(村上春樹) 『색채를 갖지 않는 다자키 쓰쿠루와 그의 순례의 』와 『해변의 카프카 』에 나타난 순례에 관하여- 모노이야기(物語)로서의 모노(もの)의 흐름과 매개자의 자리 -
Pilgrimage as Mono-gatari(物語): The Flow of Mono and the Mediator’s Position in Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and Kafka on the Shore
This study investigates the ontological configuration of “pilgrimage” in Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013) and Kafka on the Shore (2002). Although previous scholarship has emphasized symbolic motifs, psychoanalytic interpretations, and mythic frameworks within individual texts, comparatively little attention has been given to movement as a structural mechanism that transforms the subject’s mode of being across these two novels. Drawing on Kawai Hayao’s reading of Kafka on the Shore as a “mono-gatari (物語) novel,” in which the “flow of mono” is rendered visible through characters who occupy the position of mediator rather than that of autonomous agent, this article reconceptualizes pilgrimage not as a literal journey or as a single-stage rite of passage, but as a recurrent, mediatory event in which the subject is traversed by a flow larger than the self.
Both novels begin with protagonists positioned in states of absence or existential void; however, the nature of this absence differs substantially. In Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, Tsukuru’s emptiness emerges from social exclusion and the breakdown of relational identity, and his journey unfolds within empirical reality. By contrast, Kafka on the Shore presents a more radical rupture: Kafka and Nakata traverse mythic boundary spaces—forests and metaphysical “entrance stones”—where temporal continuity, identity, and world order are destabilized.
Through a comparative analysis of (1) the structure of absence, (2) the spatial dynamics of pilgrimage, and (3) the protagonists’ eventual positioning within their respective worlds, this study argues that Murakami’s pilgrimage narratives operate on distinct ontological planes. While Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki rearticulates relational identity within social reality, Kafka on the Shore reconfigures the subject’s relation to the structure of the world itself. Pilgrimage, therefore, functions not as escape but as a process through which absence is confronted and the subject’s place within reality is renegotiated.
동북아시아문화학회 [The Association of North-east Asian Cultures]
설립연도
2000
분야
복합학>학제간연구
소개
동북아시아 문화의 다양성과 정체성을 연구 토론하고, 지역내 문화 교류의 다양한 모습을 연구하고 문화변동의 큰 틀을 집적함으로써 우리 민족 문화 및 상대 민족의 문화적 터전을 이해하여 문화공동체적 특성을 계발하고 상호 관련성의 강화를 유도하는 학술활동을 통해 동북아시아의 문화발전에 이바지함.