Literary Analysis as Dream Interpretation

Murakami disjoints narratives, gives supernatural powers to body parts, and creates mystical worlds just a train ride away from reality. Reading his work often feels like wading through a dreamland, and because of this, I’ve noticed our analysis of Murakami’s literature often looks eerily similar to a dream interpretation. Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams identifies the components of a dream as the manifest content (the images or people that exist in the dream) and the latent content (the hidden desires or meaning in these symbols). He says that integrating these components together creates the dream interpretation. 

In the following section, I am going to model our interpretation of the chapter “She Leaves the Mountain; Hunger Strikes” from A Wild Sheep Chase in the shape of a dream analysis. 

Manifest Content

In this chapter, Boku awakes in the cabin in Hokkaido. He instinctively knows that his girlfriend is gone from the cabin — she has left him alone on his mission to find the sheep. He says the house had a “vacated atmosphere” which he only ever felt after his wife left him. He checks for her all over the cabin, heats up some stew, pours a glass of wine, and enjoys his meal to “Perfidia”. He thinks about what his life would be like if he didn’t have to go on this sheep chase. He would be eating omelettes and drinking whiskey. He continues his day as usual and reads Sherlock Holmes before bed.

Latent Content

In this chapter, there is a wish that things would return to normal. Perhaps he wishes that he had never gone on this wild sheep chase, and as a refusal to recognize the direness of his situation and the loneliness he feels, he continues on as normal. Boku tries to escape in many ways: envisioning himself back at home, listening to cheerful music, reading a detective story. His wife leaving him clearly scarred him, and this wound is reopened by his girlfriend leaving. Ultimately, the distractions of the chapter, to a trained eye, demonstrate the deep hurt of being left by a partner. Even the ordinary cheerful things are imbued with emptiness.

When we’re engaging in literary analysis, especially with works as mystical as some of Murakami’s, viewing things not only at face value but also as symbols of hidden desires and meanings can be helpful. Don’t try to establish meaning from the manifest content, but use it as a tool for a deeper interpretation.

-Ayjia