Absent Grief, Manic Undoing, and the Transgenerational Transmission of Unclaimed Experience: A Cryptic Reading of Murakami's Tony Takitani

ABSTRACT

Trauma and loss constitute recurring themes in both Murakami's fictional and non‐fictional writing. In the short story Tony Takitani , Murakami portrays a father and son confronting trauma and loss in the aftermath of the Second World War and the nuclear devastation of Japan. The text suggests that the collective trauma of the war functions as an unclaimed and largely unspeakable experience, giving rise to parallel psychic processes in both the first and second generations. These processes are characterized by absent grief and forms of manic undoing, which operate as defensive attempts to seal painful experiences within a psychic crypt, thereby generating transgenerational phantom formations. Within this crypt are encapsulated unprocessed affects associated with loss, including grief over family members, as well as shame and disgust tied to the historical context of the war. Their efforts to reconstruct their lives unfold within a postwar reality marked by an absence of dialog regarding the traumatic experiences they endured. This silence reflects broader social attempts to recover from collective trauma without engaging in mourning or working through painful contents, leaving traumatic material embedded in the personal and social unconscious. Moreover, Murakami's narrative illustrates not only the manifestations of absent grief across two generations, but also the ways in which such unprocessed loss is transmitted intergenerationally, even when experience remains enveloped in silence. The analysis further considers the convergence of fictional, collective, and personal narratives considering Murakami's biographical context.