Fractured Selves and Gendered Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Feminist Reading of Murakami's Kafka On The Shore and Krino's Out

Abstract

This research examines how trauma and memory shape identity in modern Japanese literature through a comparative study of Haruki Murakami's Kafka On The Shore and Natsuo Kirino's Out. Grounded in psychoanalytic and feminist trauma theories particularly Judith Herman's framework of gendered and relational trauma ,this paper argues that both novels represent the self as fractured and continuously reconstructed through different narrative mechanisms, drawing on Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, Cathy Caruth's trauma theory, and Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection. The analysis demonstrates that trauma is articulated differently across the two novels. In Kafka on the Shore, psychological rupture emerges through repression, dissociation, dreamscapes, and symbolic displacement, revealing a fragmented self that navigates the boundaries between reality and the unconscious; yet in Out, trauma is grounded in lived social experience, where emotional numbness, bodily strain, domestic oppression, and acts of resistance expose the material consequences of gendered trauma response. Through these contrasting representations, the study further highlights that gender determines not only how trauma is lived, but also how it becomes legible as narrative with male suffering often granted philosophical mobility, while female suffering is depicted as endurance within oppressive systems. Ultimately, the dissertation shows that trauma does not simply represent the past; it functions as a structuring force that determines memory's form, narrative style, and the very possibility of selfhood