The Weird World of Names in Murakami Novels

An in-depth discussion of Haruki Murakami's unconventional naming practices

If you have read more than a few novels by Haruki Murakami, you have probably noticed that his characters usually fall into one of two categories:

1.      They have no name

2.      They have a strange name

There are exceptions, of course, and particularly in the latter half of his career Murakami has begun using somewhat normal names, but even these are typically imbued with meaning and are often the source of anxiety for their owners.

So why does Murakami so often avoid naming people in his books? Why do most of the characters with names get intentionally strange ones? Why did he later switch to using more conventional names? This essay will explore those questions, citing evidence from Murakami’s novels and interviews.

I will state up front that Murakami’s position on the importance of names is often paradoxical, so there is no definitive answer to any of the above. However, it does appear that he underwent a progression in his career, from an apparent belief that names were unimportant and held essentially no meaning to a belief that they might be important enough even to shape the lives of their owners. Thus, I will divide this essay into three parts:

1.      Names may be meaningless.

2.      Names may have some meaning.

3.      Names are (mostly) important.

Names May be Meaningless

Murakami’s first three novels were notable for centring around an unnamed character who uses the first-person male pronoun, boku.[1] For that reason, readers and critics tend to refer to the protagonist as Boku.

It is of course not unheard of for novels to have unnamed protagonists and/or narrators. Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory springs to mind, as does Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Going back a little further, we also have Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Writers have various reasons for doing this, but Murakami takes it a little further than most. In fact, Boku’s lack of a name might be less notable except that few other people in these books have names, either. Those that do are given highly improbable ones, like a bartender called J and a man called “Rat” or “the Rat,”[2] neither of whom remembers their real name. In these books, Murakami mostly used descriptions to avoid naming people: “the girl,” “Spanish instructor,” “my partner,” “the woman,” etc.

He addressed the issue of names in his second book, Pinball, 1973, wherein Boku discusses this with two identical twins:

“So what are your names?” I asked the girls. I was in rough shape—my head was splitting.

“They’re not much, as names go,” said the one sitting on my right.

“That’s a fact,” said the one on my left. “Just about useless. Know what I mean?”

“Sure,” I said.

We sat there at the table, them on one side, me on the other, nibbling our toast and sipping our coffee. Terrific coffee, too.

“Will it be a hassle, us not having names?” one of them asked.

“I don’t know.”

They thought about it for a while.

“If we need names,” the other suggested, “why don’t you choose them for us?”

“Call us what you like.”

First one would speak, then the other. Like a sound check for a stereo broadcast. My headache was getting worse.

“For example?” I asked.

“Right and left,” said one.

“Horizontal and vertical,” said the other.

“Up and down.”

“Front and back.”

“East and west.”

“Entrance and exit,” I managed to interject, not to be outdone. They looked at each other and burst into satisfied laughter.

It is comically absurd, but the message seems clear: names are unimportant. And it is not only this silly exchange; the concept here keeps on recurring through Murakami’s earliest works. It was like an obsession.

In lieu of names, the narrator of Pinball, 1973 differentiates between the twins by the fact that they wear sweaters with numbers on them: 208 and 209. This is imperfect, however, because they can easily change sweaters. Again, it suggests that names are not something permanent or meaningful. A person could merely shed their name and choose a new one, or simply exchange their name with another person.

The choice of numbers also points to Murakami’s main influence for his first two novels: Richard Brautigan. In Trout Fishing in America, there is a cat called 208. Could this simply be a coincidence? Possibly, but Brautigan’s other works feature people without names or with strange or changing names, too. In In Watermelon Sugar, for example, the narrator says “I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.”

(It is worth noting here that the only believable name in Murakami’s first book is that of an American author called Derek Hartfield. One might assume this was a real author and indeed Murakami seeds his novels with seemingly real facts that he has invented as a means of blurring the lines between the real and the imagined. Hartfield is, however, very clearly based upon Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout and is likely used as a reference to another of Murakami’s major literary influences at that point in his career.)

Murakami’s first two books drew heavily upon Brautigan and Vonnegut, but for his third, A Wild Sheep Chase, he shed those early inspirations and created a more original work that began to introduce the style of writing one might term “Murakamian.” Even so, he continued to avoid naming his characters. At the start of the book, Boku goes to the funeral of a girl he once loved, yet improbably he cannot remember her name. In fact, the protagonist forgets that he even has a name (one we never find out) and we learn that “Names change all the time.” In another author’s book, this might seem ridiculous, but in the magical realist texts of Haruki Murakami, where the real and the imagined are continually blurred, it is actually quite fitting.

In this book, there is a woman called Mrs X, playful avoidance of naming other characters, and even a cat who lacks a name. We learn this about halfway through the book with the following exchange, which might remind the reader of the previously quoted dialogue:

“Nice kitty-kitty,” said the chauffeur, hand not outstretched. “What’s his name?”

“He doesn’t have a name.”

“So what do you call the fella?”

“I don’t call it,” I said. “It’s just there.”

“But he’s not a lump just sitting there.” He moves about by his own will, no? Seems mighty strange that something that moves by its own will doesn’t have a name.”

“Herring swim around of their own will, but nobody gives them names.”

“Well, first of all, there’s no emotional bond between herring and people, and besides, they wouldn’t know their name if they heard it.”

“Which is to say that animals that not only move by their own will and share feelings with people but also possess sight and hearing qualify as deserving of names then?”

“There, you got it.” The chauffeur nodded repeatedly, satisfied. “How about it? What say I go ahead and give the little guy a name?”

This conversation ends with the chauffeur calling the cat “Kipper” and an unnamed woman remarking that “It’s like being witness to the creation of heaven and earth.” In the following pages, there is another conversation discussing why buses and planes are given numbers but boats are given names. This goes on for many pages as they point out contradictions in societal naming conventions. At the beginning of the following chapter, our unnamed protagonist says “I think I just don’t like names. Basically, I can’t see what’s wrong with calling me ‘me’ or you ‘you’ or us ‘us’ or them ‘them.’” The subject of names comes up again and again throughout this novel, even at the end in a confusing chapter that is a hallucinatory rush of images. Here, we have a reference to the cat again and the lines: “No, it’s not Kipper […] The name’s already changed. Names change all the time. I bet you can’t even remember your own name.”

It seems at times as though Murakami is trying to push the idea that names are somehow unnecessary, which could be seen as related to the radical individualism espoused in these books, which pushes back against certain conservative elements in Japanese society. However, the stance is not consistent and perhaps it is better viewed—as so many issues in so many of his novels—as more of a discussion than the author attempting to make a coherent point. In other words, his characters doubt that names have any importance and yet they suspect, at times, that they do. If these comical asides had occurred only once, they could perhaps be written off as an amusing observation by the author about obvious but seldom-acknowledged contradictions; however, the issue persists throughout his oeuvre to the extent that one feels it is in fact a primary theme.

Murakami’s fourth book, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, was the one that cemented his reputation in Japan as a serious novelist. It features a new protagonist but once again he is unnamed. Interestingly, though, there are three iterations of this person and they use three different Japanese first-person male pronouns to refer to themselves: watashi, boku, and ore. For readers of the original Japanese version, this helps them delineate the dual narratives and understand that what initially seem like different characters are in fact versions of one main protagonist (something that becomes more slowly apparent to English-language readers). Other characters are named for their professions or appearances. In one thread, it is primarily “the Professor” and “the chubby girl” whom our narrator describes but in the other it is almost entirely occupations. This is explained early on when one character says, “From now on you are the Dreamreader. You no longer have a name. Just like I am the Gatekeeper.” In this novel, it is not only people that lack names. Many places and objects are described rather than named, extending this trope beyond the realm of the living.

(This novel is being re-released in December with a new translation (and a new name!), so it will be interesting to see how all of these aspects are handled. Learn more here.)

Names May Have Some Meaning

In Pinball, 1973, there had been one exception to the lack of names and that was a girl called Naoko. She died before the events of the novel and although she was significant to the story, she was enigmatic, hidden from the reader. With his fifth novel, Norwegian Wood, Murakami departed from his previous style(s) of writing and suddenly, wholeheartedly embraced naming. Our protagonist has a name (Toru) and the girl at the centre of the story has one (Naoko). In fact, a great many characters in this novel are given names.

Why did Murakami suddenly set aside his previous approach to naming characters? The obvious answer seems to be that Norwegian Wood was an attempt at doing something entirely different. Several times, he has stated clearly that he wanted to challenge himself with a relatively conventional novel devoid of his usual surrealist tropes. It is likely that he viewed naming in the same way he viewed other elements of his earlier novels: as essentially gaps in reality. Perhaps he simply used names here because naming characters is normal in novels and this was a deliberate attempt at writing a normal novel.

That is not to say that Norwegian Wood is entirely devoid of name-related quirks. Murakami manages to avoid naming various characters by using descriptions and even gives characters playful nicknames.[3] Others have seemingly poignant names, such as a pair of sisters called Midori and Momoko—the Japanese words for green and pink. Here is a quote from my 2023 book Murakamian Magical Realism and Psychological Trauma:

One important character is called Midori, which means “green” in Japanese. Her sister is called Momoko, meaning “peach.” Reflecting on the significance, Midori feels that she looks bad wearing green but her sister looks great in pink, and hence she is cursed and her sister is blessed. Though there is nothing magical about this, and the curse is not literal, it shows Murakami exploring the same concepts in a more realistic way. It also gives us more insight into the characters, for Midori, despite her vivaciousness, is deeply insecure.

This marked the beginning of a new phase for the author, wherein he gave characters slightly strange names that hinted at elements of their life or personality.

After Norwegian Wood, Murakami returned to a nameless protagonist with Dance Dance Dance, a continuation of the story begun in his first three novels, or at least the next stage in the protagonist’s life. Our protagonist remains nameless and to begin with so does an important character who he later learns is called Kiki. This woman has ears that seemingly possess supernatural powers—a fairly standard quirk in the Murakamian world—and her name alludes to that. Although it is not obvious to English readers, “Kiki” relates to the Japanese word for “to listen,” kiku. Thus, we can see now that names have begun to take on some degree of significance even if that significance is unclear.

As this sprawling novel unfolds, unusual names continue to appear and they do so for various purposes. There is a man called Ryoichi Gotanda, who is a famous actor. His name was “not exactly the stuff for making girls swoon, so he’d been given some dashing screen pseudonym.” This is a not-unheard-of real-world practice, but here it is done to highlight the fact that there are two distinct sides to Gotanda (as he is mostly referred to in the book). One might assume it is an obvious comment on fame but in fact it refers to something more sinister. I shall say no more to avoid giving spoilers, except to note that we never learn the name by which the world knows him. We only know his “real” name.

We also have a mother and daughter called Ame and Yuki, or “rain” and “snow” in English. The girl’s father is called “Hiraki Makimura,” an anagram of Haruki Murakami. There is a character called Yumiyoshi, which is likely a play on the character of Yunioshi in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. This infamous example of Hollywood racism has been mocked not only for having a white actor play a Japanese character, but because Yunioshi is not a real (or even believable) Japanese name. There are several prostitutes in the novel, each of whom has chosen her own name, which prompts one of them to explain “These names don’t have real lives. We’re all image. Signs tacked up in empty air. That’s why we respect each other’s illusions.” The protagonist then says that his name is “Winnie the Pooh,” another sign that names may not have any real meaning. Again, we can see that names paradoxically do and do not have significance in Murakami’s world.[4] Even the protagonist, who often seems inflexible, changes his mind from one chapter to the next. Sometimes names seem utterly unimportant to him, but sometimes not having one strikes him as tragic. At one point, he feels devastated not to know a woman’s name, yet this was the same man who believed names had absolutely no importance. Is this character development? Is this a change in Murakami himself? It seems so at a certain point, after a female character dies and the narrator comments: “She was cold, alone, and nameless. That fact weighed more heavily than I could bear.” Much later, a police officer, speaking about the same woman says “her real name was… Aww, what difference does it make what her real name was.”

As in his previous novels, sometimes Murakami playfully avoids giving names or provides characters with names that act as observations of their physical appearance or personal traits. Two of them are referred to as Fisherman and Bookish, for example.

It is not only people that have names, of course. The most important location in the book is the Dolphin Hotel. This is a place that had existed in A Wild Sheep Chase and the name has remained the same, but interestingly the business and building have changed almost beyond recognition, an inversion of the previous trope of names changing even when the things they represent stay the same. This is because in the Murakamian universe, the name exists to draw the protagonist back towards the place, something that is explained by the Sheep Man (a supernatural character named for his odd appearance).

With South of the Border, West of the Sun, his seventh novel, Murakami talked less about names but nonetheless made them important. The protagonist is called Hajime. This was only the second time that he named a narrator, and this time the name had significance, for it means “Beginning.” He is in love with a girl from his past called Shimamoto (this is her last name; we never learn her first name), and another important female character is called Izumi, meaning “Mountain Spring.”

The meanings of these names are open to interpretation but it is interesting that right at the start of the book, Hajime explains his name and at the end he talks about the impossibility of going back and beginning his life over with Shimamoto, then tells his wife he wants to begin things over with her again.

Ultimately, this was not one of Murakami’s best novels and the issue of names was of relatively minor importance. This was a transitional work spun off from the next book, which is in my mind his masterpiece.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle mostly follows the adventures of Toru Okada, a typically Murakamian everyman protagonist whose aimless existence is interrupted by the disappearance of his cat and then his wife. Toru and his wife Kumiko have fairly normal names. By now, Murakami had largely abandoned the nameless narrator trope although one cannot help but notice that Toru is very similar to his previous protagonists and has the same given name as the narrator of Norwegian Wood. Jay Rubin, Murakami’s translator for the book, suggests that there is more to these names. He says “Toru” means “to pass through,” which relates to Toru passing through into another realm at the bottom of a well, and Kumiko comes from “kumu,” meaning to get water from a well. Thus, when we dig into these names, they are not quite as ordinary as they seem.

Just 15 pages into this book, however, we have an unusual name: a cat called Noboru Wataya.[5] This is Kumiko’s brother’s name, which we are told is slightly unusual for a person and very unusual for a cat. However, it appears its use for the cat is a subtle hint at an element of the plot that will unfold much later. At one point in the book, Toru decides to rename his cat to Mackerel, showing once again that names can simply be changed when needed. Even Toru partially sheds his name at the prompting of a young girl who tells him it’s “not much of a name.” She asks him about a nickname, and they settle on “Mr. Wind-Up Bird.” Just like the cat and Noboru Wataya, it is something seemingly random but possessing a cryptic clue to the meaning of the book.

We soon meet a woman called Malta Kano, who has chosen her name as a reference to the Mediterranean island, and then we meet her sister, Creta (named for Crete). These names may seem random, but they have meaning. Malta is named for an island where there is special water. Water is a running theme in this book. Later, we meet Cinnamon[6] and Nutmeg. Like Malta and Creta, they have chosen their own names, repeating an old idea that names are something people can and perhaps should choose, and that they can be assigned and re-assigned as needed.

When Toru meets Nutmeg, it brings about yet another discussion of the meaning of names that largely repeats ideas from his previous novels:

“I’d like to know your name,” I said. “I mean, it would be helpful if you had a name or something I could use.”

She said nothing for a few moments, as she crunched on a radish. Then she formed a deep wrinkle between her eyebrows, as if she had just found something bitter in her mouth by mistake. “Why would you have to use my name? You won’t be writing me any letters, I’m sure. Names are, if anything, irrelevant.”

“But what if I have to call you from behind, for example? I’d need your name for that.”

She laid her fork in her plate and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. “I see what you mean,” she said. “That never crossed my mind. You’re right, though. You might very well need my name in a situation like that.”

She sat there thinking for a long time. While she was thinking, I ate my salad.

“Let’s see, now: you need a suitable name you can use for things like calling me from behind, correct?”

“That’s pretty much it.”

“So it doesn’t have to be my real name, correct?”

I nodded.

“A name, a name … what kind of name would be best?”

“Something simple, something easy to call out, I would think. If possible, something concrete, something real, some thing you can really touch and see. That way, it would be easy to remember.”

“For example?”

“For example, I call my cat Mackerel. In fact, I just named him yesterday.”

“Mackerel,” she said aloud, as if to confirm the sound of the word. Then she stared at the salt and pepper shakers on the table for a while, raised her face to me, and said, “Nutmeg.”

“Nutmeg?”

“It just popped into my head. You can call me that, if you don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t mind at all. So what should I call your son?”

“Cinnamon.”

“Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,” I said, with a hint of melody.

“Nutmeg Akasaka and Cinnamon Akasaka. Not bad, don’t you think?”

Again, this seems to be Murakami telling his reader that names can be random and meaningless, but they are not totally useless and sometimes possess some significance. We sometimes need names for practical purposes, but they needn’t be fixed terms and they need not possess any deep meaning.

However, Murakami’s take on names is often contradictory. As I’ve said, his books discuss issues more than preaching ideas. This is evident when we first meet Ushikawa. This unpleasant character, who will reappear in a later novel, adds a new dimension to the discussion of names in the Murakamian universe:

“Well, now, let me not forget to introduce myself. I am not usually so rude. The name is Ushikawa. That’s ushi for ‘bull’ and kawa for ‘river.’ Easy enough to remember, don’t you think? Everybody calls me Ushi. Funny: the more I hear that, the more I feel like a real bull. I even feel a kind of closeness whenever I happen to see a bull out in a field somewhere. Names are funny things, don’t you think, Mr. Okada? Take Okada, for example. Now, there’s a nice, clean name: ‘hill-field.’ I sometimes wish I had a normal name like that, but unfortunately, a surname is not something you’re free to pick. Once you’re born into this world as Ushikawa, you’re Ushikawa for life, like it or not. They’ve been calling me Ushi since the day I started kindergarten. There’s no way around it. You get a guy named Ushikawa, and people are bound to call him Ushi, right? They say a name expresses the thing it stands for, but I wonder if it isn’t the other way around—the thing gets more and more like its name. Anyhow, just think of me as Ushikawa, and if you feel like it, call me Ushi. I don’t mind.”

Here, we have the opposite idea from what Murakami and his characters had previously expressed. Now, a name shapes the thing to which it refers instead of the opposite way around. A person called “bull” grows to become a bull of a man (something clear from Ushikawa’s physical description) and he even identifies with this creature.

Sputnik Sweetheart is another minor novel—a short work that is often overlooked by readers. It begins by quickly informing us that the main female character is called Sumire, which means “violet.” She hates her name, which was given as a tribute to a Mozart song. There’s another female character called Miu, but that this is not her real name. The protagonist of this book is once again unnamed and so too is the primary location—an island somewhere in Greece. Back in Japan, Murakami’s books tend to be quite specific about locations whether those are real places or imagined ones. Towards the end of this book, we learn about a troubled young boy called Shin’ichi Nimura, but he is usually called “Carrot.”

Altogether, this was a fairly weak book and even in its use of names it is not noteworthy. It seems to me that The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was a massive turning point in Murakami’s career and that Sputnik Sweetheart was a throwaway follow-up book that showed his uncertainty about how to continue as a writer. It says nothing new and adds nothing of real value, so let’s move on…

Names Are (Mostly) Important

If we view The Wind-up Bird Chronicle as the central point in Murakami’s career and Sputnik Sweetheart as a minor follow-up work, then we can look at Kafka on the Shore as the real beginning of the second half of his writing life. Indeed, it is another excellent book and it pushes his bizarre imagination further, taking his narrative in different directions. Until this point, all his narrators were basically the same—aimless everymen bumbling through life. Now we have a young boy called Kafka. This is of course not his real name, but rather one he has chosen because—in his own words—“taking on a different name is child’s play” and “all names are changed easily enough.” There is a mysterious presence that seems to be a part of his mind, and this is called Boy Named Crow. We are also told that “Kafka” is Czech for “crow,” further hinting at this.

This book is interesting partly because it saw Murakami move away from the first-person narrative that he had used almost exclusively before now. In this book, he used the third person to tell the story of Satoru Nakata, a man who had lost part of himself as a child. Nakata can talk to cats. One cat tells Nakata that names are not important:

“I forget my name,” the cat said. “I had one, I know I did, but somewhere along the line I didn’t need it anymore. So it’s slipped my mind. […] Cats can get by without names. We go by smell, shape, things of this nature. As long as we know these things, there’re no worries for us.”

Nakata, however, counters that “people don’t work that way. We need dates and names to remember all kinds of things,” and he gives the cat a name so that they can communicate more easily.

The human characters in this novel mostly go by realistic names but there are non-human characters that have stranger ones. Two mysterious beings, for example, are called “Colonel Sanders” and “Johnnie Walker,” as they take the form of those corporate symbols. When Kafka crosses over into another realm, he is told “We don’t have names here.” Thus, we can see that in the everyday human world, names are needed even if they are strange, but in nature and also in other realms, they are largely unnecessary. Ultimately, though, the message is that “You are you and nobody else.” This is something that Murakami has hinted at in almost all his novels and which seems to underpin his shifting ideas on names. They may sometimes be necessary, and they may influence who we become, but for the most part a person is who they are, not what their name says. This is a message that would become increasingly apparent in Murakami’s later books.

In Murakami’s next novel, After Dark, he continued with narrative change, switching from first and third to some sort of detached semi-omniscient narrative being that speaks as “we.” The book largely focuses on a female protagonist but also follows a young man. They are called Mari and Takahashi, although at first we do not learn the man’s name because he avoids giving it:

“I can’t remember your name, though,” Mari says.

“My name?”

“Your name.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t mind if you forgot my name. It’s about as ordinary as a name can be. Even I feel like forgetting it sometimes. It’s not that easy, though, to forget your own name. Other people’s names—even ones I have to remember—I’m always forgetting.”

This is something we’ve heard before. Murakami often emphasises his characters’ ordinariness and that extends to their names and the implausible notion that they can even forget their own names. Takahashi’s name, however, is not as ordinary as it seems… Read in katakana, it means “staying up through the night,” which is what the whole book is about.

Later, we meet a number of people working in a love motel. They have mostly chosen their own names as a means of escaping their pasts, but it is never clear why they chose their new names, which again prompts the reader to question just what a name actually means. Two women are called Komugi (wheat) and Korogi (cricket), and the latter of them says “I got rid of my real name,” hinting at how easy it is to shed a name, and the fact that one doesn’t merely take on a second name but in fact totally loses the first. Another woman is called Kaoru, which she says is incongruous with her appearance: “Yeah, I know, you’re thinking, ‘How did this big hunk of a woman get a pretty little name like that?’ But I’ve been Kaoru ever since I was born.”

This novel appears to be an attack on the faceless modern system that names us and robs us of our individuality, particularly women, whose bodies become objects and even commodities. The book talks about signs and symbols a lot, and has several images that represent the monstrousness of modern urban society, and it could be suggested that changing one’s name is a means of escaping the reaches of the system. However, as always it is never quite so simple.

1Q84 begins by introducing Aomame, whose name means “green pea.” Thus, from the very start we have that Murakamian trope of an unusual name, and unsurprisingly this is discussed at length:

“Aomame” was her real name. Her grandfather on her father’s side came from some little mountain town or village in Fukushima Prefecture, where there were supposedly a number of people who bore the name, written with exactly the same characters as the word for “green peas” and pronounced with the same four syllables, “Ah-oh-mah-meh.” She had never been to the place, however. Her father had cut his ties with his family before her birth, just as her mother had done with her own family, so she had never met any of her grandparents. She didn’t travel much, but on those rare occasions when she stayed in an unfamiliar city or town, she would always open the hotel’s phone book to see if there were any Aomames in the area. She had never found a single one, and whenever she tried and failed, she felt like a lonely castaway on the open sea.

Telling people her name was always a bother. As soon as the name left her lips, the other person looked puzzled or confused.

“Miss Aomame?”

“Yes. Just like ‘green peas.’”

Employers required her to have business cards printed, which only made things worse. People would stare at the card as if she had thrust a letter at them bearing bad news. When she announced her name on the telephone, she would often hear suppressed laughter. In waiting rooms at the doctor’s or at public offices, people would look up at the sound of her name, curious to see what someone called “Green Peas” could look like.

Some people would get the name of the plant wrong and call her “Edamame” or “Soramame,” whereupon she would gently correct them: “No, I’m not soybeans or fava beans, just green peas. Pretty close, though. Aomame.” How many times in her thirty years had she heard the same remarks, the same feeble jokes about her name? My life might have been totally different if I hadn’t been born with this name. If I had had an ordinary name like Sato or Tanaka or Suzuki, I could have lived a slightly more relaxed life or looked at people with somewhat more forgiving eyes. Perhaps.

It is interesting that even though Aomame is no longer connected to her parents and grandparents, she bears not only their genes but the name they had given her. This is Murakami saying once again—yet in a quite new way—that names are absurd. They are something we do not choose and for most people something they do not change even when they are unfortunate ones. Murakami also raises the question here that a name is tied to a person’s destiny, which is something we have seen discussed in other books, namely by Ushikawa, who reappears in 1Q84.  

Elsewhere, we have Fuka-Eri, which is the pen name of a young female writer, which we are told is an unusual name. She is connected to another character called “The Professor,” which reminds us of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Later, we learn he is called Ebisuno, which again we are told is unusual. One shadowy character is simply called Bat, another is Leader, and two henchmen are called Buzzcut and Ponytail. There is even an unusually named train station—Futamatao.

There is a character called Tamaru but we never learn whether this is his first name or what the character is, the latter being more of an issue for Japanese readers, of course. In fact, even the character himself does not know, and this is important for whilst names are frequently deemed unimportant, not having one is an identity issue. The character is of Korean descent and does not know his own history, which we can see as tragic. Elsewhere in the text, we learn that “Even cats and dogs need names.” We’ve heard this before a few times in Murakami’s books.

It's also worth mentioning here that one character who disappears under strange circumstances is called Kyoko Yasuda. Her surname is the same as “Yasuda Hall,” a central location in the Japanese student uprising of the late sixties, an event that deeply marked Murakami and which is mentioned many, many times in his books.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is perhaps more obviously about names than any of Murakami’s other work. Not only is the protagonist’s name in the title, but it is the focus of the novel’s plot. Tsukuru is a very lonely man whose life was destroyed after his friends left him many years before the novel begins. They all had names that included colours, but Tsukuru did not. Whilst that seems silly, one day they all abandoned him and never spoke to him again, causing him to become suicidal. Of course, it turns out there was more to their decision than coloured names but Tsukuru spends much of his life ruminating on names nonetheless. Later, he meets a man with “grey” in his name and they become friends, suggesting perhaps that this man is somewhere between the coloured and colourless worlds. He also meets Midorikawa, meaning “green river.”

Tsukuru’s name means “make or build.” As with previous characters, this was a name given by his father and it has become something of a millstone for him. It is like a prophesy or even a curse. Just like Ushikawa, Tsukuru wonders to what extent his name dictated the circumstances of his life and shaped his personality, for he ultimately became an engineer, building things for a living. The narrator (this is not one of Murakami’s first-person books) tells us: “First he was given a name. Then consciousness and memory developed, and, finally, ego. But everything began with his name.”

There are other aspects to consider, and much of this would make more sense to a Japanese speaker, for it concerns the hiragana and kanji forms of his name and the various possible pronunciations and interpretations.

Killing Commendatore is the most recent Murakami novel in English (as of September 2024). In it, Murakami returns to the unnamed narrator device he so often used. He repeats many old tropes, including unusual names. Early on, we learn that his wife is called Yuzu, which was a name used in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.[7] Yuzu is a Japanese fruit, and the narrator sometimes plays with his wife by calling her Sudachi (another type of fruit).

Speaking of references to previous novels, one can hardly fail to note that the character of Menshiki has a name meaning “avoiding colours,” which suggests a connection to the previous book. Murakami calls this name a “strange combination.” (Murakami said in an interview that he had not realised when writing that there was any connection, but he always says things like this. The magician does not give away his secrets…)

Apart from that, however, the use of names in this novel is surprisingly normal. One character goes by a shortened version of her real name but that’s about all. Has Murakami given up on the use of strange names? Has he finally exhausted this avenue of discussion? I suppose we may find out when the next one is released…

In Novelist as Vocation, he finally addressed this, albeit in a typically circumspect fashion. He said:

For a long time I couldn’t give names to my characters. Nicknames like “Rat” or “J” were fine, because I just couldn’t give them actual names. Why not? I don’t know the answer. All I can say is that I felt embarrassed about assigning people names.

However, he did admit that names are “an important element in [his] novels.” That makes me feel a little better about writing 7,000 words on the subject.

A Conclusion… Of Sorts

It is hard to say anything conclusive about Murakami’s novels. They are deliberately confusing and Murakami himself is incredibly evasive. Any time he admits something, he later says something contradictory, so one never quite knows what to believe.

On the subject of names, I think he is fascinated by them and what they mean, and he has played with naming conventions throughout his novels, having characters discuss them or live without them or with strange names, largely as a means of figuring it out. Like I’ve said a few times now, it is a discussion; not a lecture. He is not saying “Names don’t matter.” He is not saying “Names are terribly important.” He is saying both and neither. He is working through problems and concepts in his fiction, trying to work it out for himself and trying to help his reader.

Early in his career, he largely avoided naming people or used silly nicknames and descriptions. This helped people identify more with his characters. However, later he said something that directly contradicted this:

I wanted to write a novel encompassing this contemporary social system in its entirety. That’s why I gave names to almost every person in the novel and fleshed out their characters in detail, so that it couldn’t be unnatural for any of us to be one of them.

It sort of makes sense. Characters lacking names are easy to identify with… we can step into their skin and understand their world more easily. But then characters with realistic names are similarly easy to identify with because they are more real. This is one of many, many paradoxes in the Murakamian universe.

One consistent thing about Murakami’s writing and his interview responses (which are minimal at best) is that he often says things and then very clearly does the opposite. He deliberately challenges readers and critics in a playful way, and I think that his frequent assertion that names are not important is counterbalanced by a demonstration that they are. In his world, names are easily shed, but they would not be shed if they did not need to be shed, which shows their importance. They also tend to dictate people’s lives to some degree. A person is given a name and that predicts what they will become unless they are able to forget it or abandon it somehow, whether they choose to become nameless or adopt a new name. Those who allow themselves to be trapped by a name typically suffer for it.

Like almost all writers, Murakami was influenced by his favourite authors and those happened to be ones who avoided names (at least for some of their books). He copied Brautigan, Dostoevsky, and Kafka. It was a literary device and an interesting one, but it is something he has expanded in various ways over more than forty years.

I could have delved into Murakami’s short fiction and even his non-fiction here, but this essay is already more than 7,000 words… I recommend readers check out Matthew Carl Strecher’s book, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami, which relates to identity. In it, he points to “A Shinagawa Monkey” as a particularly important short story that sheds even more light on Murakami’s use of names.

---

[1] This literally means “I” but in Japanese there are various pronouns meaning “I” that cannot easily be translated into English. These relate to issues of register and gender. “Boku” is used by young males and is rather informal.

[2] The word Murakami uses is “nezumi,” which literally means “rat.” Some translators use “the Rat” but others drop the definite article.

[3] One character is referred to as “uniform” and another is called “Kamikaze” in the Alfred Birnbaum translation and “Storm Trooper” in the Jay Rubin one.

[4] Without going into spoilers, this appears to be a key theme throughout the novel. Certain characters both are and are not dead. Things can be and not be at the same time. This sort of uncertainty was something Murakami explored at length in the first half of his career.

[5] This comes from a running joke in which Murakami used his friend’s name in his fiction. His friend was illustrator Noboru Watanabe. For this novel, Murakami gave the surname to the main character and changed Watanabe to Wataya.

[6] It is of interest that “Cinnamon” is a name Murakami has used himself (for his mailbox and e-mail address) and this character is a writer whose literary efforts seem very much like Murakami’s.

[7] Murakami almost always inserts little connections between his novels, which is why I recommend reading them chronologically.