A subaltern civil war: Precariat in-fighting in Murakami Ryu’s Popular Hits of the Showa Era

Published just a few years after the beginning of Japan’s Lost Decade, Murakami Ryu’s 1994 novel Popular Hits of the Showa Era posited that this new economic reality inflicted deep psychological wounds on individuals who were already deeply fractured. Within this text the invisible violence of post-Bubble Japan’s social order is made explicit through a low-stakes, yet hyperviolent, guerilla war undertaken by a set of ludicrous and narcissistic characters whose increasingly deadly attacks are met with public indifference. Within the consumer-capitalist social order, personal satisfaction is the paramount goal (McGowan 2004, 11–12). However, this system fosters the belief that it is necessary to be hostile and mistrustful of others (McGowan 2004, 177–179). These aspects of consumer-capitalism have warped the psyches of the characters in this novel so deeply that even extreme violence is met with apathy. The deaths of others are viewed as a threat to their ego, rather than a tragedy. Rather than coalescing into a new social order in response to lives made hollow by consumer-capitalism, individuals in this novel are instead pulled apart. Blind to the violence that is perpetrated against them by consumer capitalism, Murakami’s characters believe that their irrationality is rational (Kalekin-Fishman 2008, 537).