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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Tatsuo Takahashi
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2018.07.001
Senshu University, Tokyo, Japan
The Last Lawn of the Afternoon is one of Haruki Murakami’s most important early short stories. In this paper, I avoid conventional arguments, focusing my analysis on the encounter between the middle-aged woman and Boku, and the work’s historical backdrop and setting instead. This reveals how Boku’s personal experience speaks to the everyday lives of Japanese citizens at the mercy of circumstances in postwar Japan under American influence and international events. It appears that Murakami attempts to convert the personal minority “memories”, lurking in the everyday order of postwar Japan, into “novels” as open collaborative storiesin his early short stories.
Haruki Murakami, America’s influence, postwar Japan, the student movement, the Vietnam War
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