Murakami Haruki’s Sho-Jo Kasahara Mei

In Murakami Haruki's Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), the brilliantly insightful sixteen-year-old shojo, Kasahara Mei, is the most important and complex companion to the protagonist, Okada Torn, in his orphean search for his wife. As pointed out by Murakami himself (Murakami 1995b: 274), Mei plays multiple roles in Tom's journey, and I will argue here that she challenges the novel's conventional genderization of the psychic journey, whereby the unconscious, irrational, bodily, corrupt, cyclical "other" is female to the rational, cerebral, clean, linear time-oriented consciousness of the male.