Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Archive

 

Volume 16 Number 1, April 2015

___________________________________________________________________

The Construction of a Conscious Mind in

Haruki Murakami’s “A Shinagawa Monkey”

 

by

Suzanne LaLonde

University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley 

 

“The water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness, but we draw a total blank of the nature of the conversion” (Colin McGinn)

 

Abstract:

In light of a current reductionist trend of “biologism” to define our understanding of the human condition, this article examines the issue of conscious development by studying Haruki Murakami’s short story “A Shinagawa Monkey” (2006). The first critical argument advanced is that the main character Mizuki experiences conscious development when she encounters versions of herself in the unconscious realm. Highly imaginative experiences with psychotherapy and the animal kingdom in unconscious states promote conscious development. Secondly, another dimension of conscious development involves recognition of a childhood trauma. Murakami’s character gains conscious awareness as she chips away at the encrusted emotions associated with childhood trauma. Finally, the rapport between survival and conscious awareness is analyzed and nuanced in light of trauma theory.

 

Key Words: Consciousness; Haruki Murakami; imaginative experiences with psychotherapy; childhood trauma; trauma theory

** 

 

         Psychiatrist Raymond Tallis seems to think that the reductionist attitude of “biologism” dominates our current understanding of the human condition.[i] Psychologist Michael Gazzaniga shares this opinion, claiming that there is a deterministic view that penetrates all of science. To his mind, it “seems to be urging a more bleak view, the view that no matter how we dress it up, in the end we are machines of some kind, automatically and mindlessly serving as the vehicles for the physically determined forces of the universe…” (2011: 218). Such a narrow perspective seems particularly inadequate when it comes to understand the issue of consciousness. If we are indeed determined by the “forces of the universe,” then how can we control and develop conscious awareness?

         According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, “The construction of a conscious mind is a very complex process, the result of additions and deletions of brain mechanisms over millions of years of biological evolution (2010: 191). What has taken millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning on a large scale, takes a lifetime on an individual scale. Furthermore, we must use the very tool of consciousness to study consciousness, and hence a self-referential problem dominates. This suggests that our understanding of consciousness is open to question, since objectivity is impossible. Related to this caveat, consciousness is not an organ that can be easily studied in the operating theater or in a specimen jar. We cannot put our finger on it.[ii] Despite this inherent and fundamental complexity, our current understanding of consciousness seems to rely heavily on biological and neurological accounts. Tallis confirms this impression: “The notion that our consciousness, the self to which the successive moments of consciousness are attributed, our personality, our character, personhood itself, are identical with activity in our brains is so widely received that it seems downright eccentric to profess otherwise”

(2011: 29).

         This article takes a “downright eccentric” position.[iii] The fundamental argument of this research is that consciousness is more than just a physical process involving neurons, hormones, and ion channels. It involves processes that occur in the intercranial darkness of the mind and thus should be examined by literature and philosophy.[iv] This seemingly straightforward point of view is rooted in the notion that while it is the task of neuroscience to study the brain, it is the task of the humanities to demystify the mind. Instead of relying on empirical data obtained from the lab or from MRI scans, we propose to look at the question of the development of consciousness by studying the short story “A Shinagawa Monkey” (2006) by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami in order to understand how consciousness occurs. The first critical argument advanced is that the main character Mizuki experiences conscious development when she encounters versions of herself in the unconscious realm. Highly imaginative experiences with psychotherapy and the animal kingdom in unconscious states promote conscious development. Secondly, another dimension of conscious development involves recognition of a childhood trauma. Murakami’s character gains conscious awareness as she chips away at the encrusted emotions associated with childhood trauma. Finally, the rapport between survival and conscious awareness is analyzed and nuanced in light of trauma theory.

 

A Materialist’s View of Consciousness

Before we proceed to parse the question of consciousness from within the world of fiction, it seems useful to understand it from a materialist viewpoint. After all, this perspective might provide us with a sense of direction about how to attack this complicated issue. While there is little consensus of opinion among scientists about what constitutes consciousness, there does seem to be an agreement that it is complicated, and it is perhaps this complicated nature that drives scientists to nuance their questions.[v]  The question among some scientists is not so much, “What is consciousness?” but rather, “Where is it located in the brain?” The “seat of consciousness” is not easily found, not only because the human brain is enclosed in a cranium, but also since consciousness involves many parts of the brain, and of course the mind. Neuroscientist Wilder Penfield maintains that consciousness is a “manifestation of activity of the upper brainstem” (qtd. in Penrose, 1989: 382). Nonetheless, since there also needs to be something about which one is conscious, the cerebral cortex is also involved, especially in order to communicate with the upper brainstem. Other scientists approach the issue from another angle. Mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose asks: “What is the evolutionary advantage of consciousness?” (“Why does consciousness exist?”). For Penrose, conscious thinking is algorithmic. It sifts through the “morass of data” of sense impressions and past related experiences to reach out-of-the-box judgments. In short, conscious states allow us to understand reality in creative and novel ways that algorithmic thinking fails to do; this guarantees our survival. Although Penrose does not draw this conclusion, his writing inspires the following metaphor: consciousness produces mutated (novel and creative) ideas and encourages, if not determines, survival, just as mutating genes help to guarantee survival in the ever-changing natural environment. Just as DNA mutates and replicates, “ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas” (Sperry qtd. in Hofstadter, 1979: 710). What Penrose’s and Penfield’s positions intimate is that while the “hard ware” of consciousness may be understood, it is the “soft ware” (the creative processes associated with consciousness) that defy scientific explanation.

         It appears, in fact, that scientists move toward translations (metaphorical language) to describe consciousness, almost because they have run out of scientific jargon to describe it. A succinct example of this trend is found in the writings of Antonio Damasio who writes: “Consciousness–the phenomenal ability that consists of having a mind equipped with an owner, a protagonist for one’s existence, a self inspecting the world inside and around, and agent seemingly ready for action” (2010: 3). He proposes that consciousness is built in stages, and its intensity ranges from acute to dull, with various levels in between. He summarizes these stages as follows. At a fundamental level, is the “proto-self”. This stage consists of “primordial feelings” associated mostly with the body. The second stage, the “core self,” occurs when the “proto-self” interacts with outside objects and the images of the object and the proto-self (“organism”) are modified. In this stage, the relation between organism and object is represented in narratives images, which are often emotions. Finally in the third stage, “the autobiographical self” develops when objects in one’s biography (images) interact in the mind with the “proto-self” and produces “an abundance of core-self pulses” (Damasio, 2010: 192). In other words, the “autobiographical self” builds “core-self” consciousness through the workings of the mind. “Core-self” consciousness, on the other hand, is constructed through actual physical interactions. Narrative not merely captures aspects of the self and promotes consciousness as in the second stage. It also constructs the self and promotes consciousness in the third stage. In summary, if we follow the line of thinking of Penrose and Damasio, we can draw the conclusion that consciousness guarantees our survival and relies heavily on language and narratives for that survival.

 

A “Close” Reading of “A Shinagawa Monkey”

Given this context of a scientific perspective of consciousness and of Damasio’s concepts of the “narrative sequence of images” and the autobiographical self, we turn now to Murakami’s fiction to elucidate the construction of consciousness from a literary perspective. Following the materialist example, we do not ask so much what consciousness is. Instead, we ask: Where does it seem to occur? Most pertinent for Murakami’s short story: How does consciousness occur? Following Penrose’s suit, we also pose the question: Why does consciousness occur? Before answering these questions, we first present the story from a “close reading” perspective, not in order to offer a simple survey of the plot, but rather to understand the outer layers that prevent conscious states from developing. More succinctly put, as outmoded as a “close reading” might appear, this research peels away layers of the story, as one would peel away layers of tissue, to locate the place of consciousness and the processes of conscious development.[vi]

         There is a powerful force that defines Mizuki Ando, the main character from Murakami’s short story. She is an orphan and has suffered emotionally from being separated from her parents, especially from her mother. This separation and ensuing trauma has everything to do with consciousness, not only because of the associated suffering, but also because consciousness is about survival and the development of a “core self,” as Penrose and Damasio have argued.

         It is not until the very end of the story that we realize that Mizuki is an orphan. From the very beginning of the story, it is apparent that she suffers from a curious problem. She has forgotten her name. She remembers everything else, including names of friends and clients, her address, phone number, birthday, and even passport number. Yet, when she is unprepared or in a hurry, it is “as if a circuit has been broken” (Murakami, 2006: 150). Like a dog, she relies on a worn-bracelet with her engraved name, and like a lost dog, she searches for her owner. The narrator indicates that she feels like a cat or a dog and was careful to wear her name bracelet whenever she left home (2006: 151). The lost “owner” could be Mizuki herself or her mother to whom she once “belonged” or never belonged, as she was never truly beholden.

         Against this curious and complicated backdrop, Mizuki appears normal. She is twenty-six years old and works as a receptionist at a Honda dealership in Shinagawa. Although she does not find her job the most “thrilling”, she is competent, having learned technical information, such as the mileage ratings for all the cars in the showroom. Furthermore, she is a good conversationalist and has “a winning smile that always put customers at ease” (2006: 151). As for her marriage, she was not “Dissatisfied… aside from her husband’s sometimes excessive rationality, she had no complaints about him at all” (2006: 151).

         Despite Mizuki’s “winning smile,” the syntax belies her sense of wellbeing. In other words, the narrator’s comments need to be taken with a grain of salt. Recall that she is not “dissatisfied” with her marriage (2006: 151). She does not sing the praises of her husband. Instead, she has no complaints about him (2006: 151). This vocabulary fails to convey a sense that Mizuki is thriving in her marriage. As for her work, she might be adept at customer service, but she is never allowed to cut the deal. According to the narrator, it does not matter much to her that the boundaries of her job are “unbreachable” (2006: 152). Apparently, she is not ambitious. She is more interested in punching the clock at nine and five, taking vacations and “enjoying her time off” (2006: 152).

         Should we trust the narrator’s reading of Mizuki? After all, the terms “enjoying her time off” are striking, since she does not seem to enjoy much in life, as indicated by her relationship with her husband and by the complete absence of information about friends, family, or hobbies.[vii] It is also easy to doubt the narrator’s reading of the protagonist, since Mizuki actually devotes herself to her job, which seems to suggest that she might feel ambitious. If the narrator is unreliable, then how do we as readers make sense of Mizuki’s story?

         Another way of looking at her apparent lack of ambition is to suggest that she must stifle her feelings and her whole personality when she is on the job. Why might that be? She has another job to do. Like a Russian doll, she has a job within a job. She has a job to do in her mind. Her real job is to figure out why she has forgotten her name. To add to the name-confusion problem, at work she is Mizuki Osawa, her maiden name. Everywhere else she is Mizuki Ando, her married name. (She had never bothered to change her maiden name because it was too much “trouble” (2006: 152).) Indeed, her forgetting her name is obviously not innocuous. It involves her core identity and appears to occur in an unconscious realm, since  “a life without a name, she felt, was like a dream you never wake up from” (2006: 151).

         Her curious dementia drives her eventually to seek professional help. At first she sees a medical doctor who considers this isolated case of only forgetting her name as a psychiatric issue. Mizuki imagines that the doctor thinks to himself, “We’ve got our hands full with people who are much more seriously ill than you” (2006: 152). In spite of this attempt to belittle her own problem, she then arranges to speak to a ward-counselor, who is offering sessions at a “greatly reduced rate” (2006: 152). According to the narrator, the counselor, Mrs. Sakaki, seems “less like a counselor than a friendly neighborhood housewife” (2006: 152). There is nothing sophisticated about the office. The counselor “sits behind a plain metal office desk” (2006: 152). Since the ward-counselor appears less than professional and the sessions are offered at a cheap rate, it is easy to entertain doubts that Mizuki will find elucidation about, not to mention therapeutic relief from, the problem that plagues her, because the narrator and Mizuki entertain such strong doubts.[viii] However, the homely counselor and cheap rates are a clever narrative device. There is little to suggest that we are going to discover what lies buried in the depths of Mizuki’s mind. However, it is easy to feel startled, if not pleasantly surprised, to discover that thanks to her new counselor, Mizuki discovers the source of her problem from a talking monkey from Shinagawa.

         Before Mizuki finds elucidation and therapy from a talking monkey, she herself must talk. Mrs. Sakaki poses question after question, and usually the responses are short-winded. When asked about “things she enjoyed, things she didn’t. Things she was good at, things she wasn’t. Mizuki tried to answer each question as quickly as she could” (2006: 153). The fact that she tries to answer these questions “quickly” suggests that she did not have much to say about herself. She paints a picture of herself to Ms. Sakaki that is absolutely mediocre. She grew up in a “quite ordinary family” (2006: 153). She never remembers struggling financially (2006: 153). Mizuki had “no special problems with her family” (2006: 153). Nevertheless, the narrator tells us that her mother was a “bit of a nag” and her sister (although always at the top of the class), “a little shallow and sneaky” (2006: 153). The terms “bit” and “little” are used to suggest that she is trying to temper her reading of her family; there might be a more visceral emotion buried in the recesses of her mind. On the other hand, “she didn’t have anything bad to say about her marriage” (2006: 153). She does confess that they had made a few mistakes at the beginning, but that “over time they had cobbled together a decent life” (2006: 153). Obviously, the term “cobbled together” fails to convey a thriving relationship.

         Mizuki, too, seems to be surprised to learn about herself, as if she read her life story for the first time. She has not been the author of her personal narrative, just as the narrator, as inaccurate as he/she/it might be, is in charge of making sense of her. She was “struck by what an uninspired life she’d led” (2006: 154).  The word “surprised” is perhaps not the right term as she actually reacts very harshly to the banality of her existence: “If her life were a movie, it would be one of those low-budget nature documentaries guaranteed to put you to sleep. Washed-out landscapes stretching endlessly to the horizon. No changes of scene, no close-ups, nothing ominous, nothing suggestive” (2006: 154).  It goes without saying that terms such as “low-budget,” “put you to sleep,” and “washed-out landscapes,” convey an absence of vibrancy. To add to this, the next line is filled with “no’s” and “nothing’s”, a sure reflection of the vacuum inside Mizuki.

         Is there really nothing more than empty space inside of her? She feels sorry for the counselor, for having to listen to her boring life story. She thinks to herself: “If it were me and I had to listen to endless accounts of stale lives like mine… at some point I’d keel over from sheer boredom” (2006: 154). It is startling to realize that she feels for others when they experience “sheer boredom”, but she does not seem to feel sorry for herself for living a boring life. More succinctly, she feels for others before she feels for herself. She is totally out-of-touch with her own emotions.

         Part of the reason she might be oblivious, at least consciously, to the way she feels is that she has never had a chance to speak. According to the narrator, Mrs. Sakaki listens intently to her client, and Mizuki feels “strangely calmed,” as no one had ever listened to her “so patiently” (2006: 154). By speaking and listening to her own voice, Mizuki is able to break the sound barrier of boredom. She is able to tell stories about herself, as opposed to a repetitive bullet-point list of her past. It is the difference between replaying a low-budget documentary and a high-definition Technicolor drama. Mrs. Sakaki reminds her client that her sessions are not like those “radio call-in shows where the host just tells you to hang in there” (2006: 154). And so, Mizuki takes the time, at last, to tell her story.

         Again, like a Russian doll, Mizuki’s story is a story within a story and has everything to do with her forgotten name and the construction of a conscious mind. Mrs. Sakaki invites her client to talk about any experience in her life that has to do with her name. Mizuki discovers little by little that her life story is not that trivial and boring after all. During both junior and senior high school, she went off to boarding school and would commute on the weekends to her parents’ home. She made “good friends” who were from other places as well, and she generally “enjoyed” herself for six years (2006: 154).  Seeing that she was a healthy and independent, it seemed natural for her to study away from her family. Besides, the train commute was “kind of exciting” (2006:154). Even though the narrator tries to convince us that Mizuki was just an average person, Mizuki informs us that she had been appointed the student representative of her dorm (2006: 154). Again, this suggests that the narrator is not a trust-worthy source of information. We must alter our impression of the main character as the story unfolds, our conscious awareness of Mizuki changes as the narrator’s voice grows silent and she finds her own voice.

         At this point, there is another story about nametags that develops within the story of her less-than-boring life at the boarding school. Each student had a nametag and had to hang it on the board of the dorm. There was a special system associated with the tag. If a student was present at the dorm, she hung the tag one way; if she was going out, she turned it over the other way; if she was leaving for the weekend, she had to take it off the board. And in fact, one of the students–a certain girl named Yuko Matsunaka–left her nametag one weekend with Mizuki. She was rich, beautiful, smart, and popular. “In other words, she stood out” (2006: 155).

         Yuko is the complete antithesis of the protagonist, except that they both shared one important personality trait. Yuko, like Mizuki, did not share her feelings much (2006: 155). This prompts, the main character to confess to her counselor: “I couldn’t always tell what she was thinking. The younger girls may have looked up to her, but I don’t think she had any close friends” (2006: 155). Mizuki draws this conclusion because she had never had a private conversation with Yuko, and yet Yuko came to speak to her about something so very intimate. Namely, she asks Mizuki if she had ever felt jealous (2006: 155). Her response is a “guess” that she had never felt jealous. Another caveat looms on the horizon when she asks Yuko to explain what she meant (2006: 155). “Like you love someone but he loves someone else. Like there’s something you want very badly but someone else just grabs it. Or there’s something you can’t quite do, but someone else is able to do it with no effort… That sort of thing” (2006: 155). Mizuki responds that she does not “think” that she has ever felt that way. In other words, the heavy dose of ambiguity (she “guesses” and “thinks” that she has not felt jealous) suggests that she does indeed feel that way toward something or someone. The feeling just has not registered on a conscious level. In fact, after closer inspection, she confesses: “Actually, there are lots of things I should feel frustrated about, but, for whatever reason, that hasn’t made me feel jealous of other people. I wonder why” (2006: 155). She wonders why she fails to feel jealous of other people, when she understands that she ought to feel jealous.

         Perhaps, Mizuki along the way has forced herself not to feel this emotion, not to feel consciously aware of it, since it is just too painful. Yuko could be reading her mind when she states: “It’s hard to explain what jealousy is to someone who’s never felt it…. One thing I do know is it’s not easy to live with. It’s like carrying around your own small hell, day after day. You should be really thankful you’ve never felt this way” (2006: 155). But, again, has Mizuki never felt this way? Or has she refused to allow herself to feel this way, as she does not want to live in her own “small hell”?

         Before leaving the dorm for the weekend, Yuko gives Mizuki her nametag and announces, “I don’t want a monkey running off with it while I’m gone” (2006: 156). To which, the rational Mizuki responds that she “doubts” that there are any monkeys here. “And then, Yuko left the room, leaving behind the nametag, an untouched cup of tea, and a strange empty space where she had been” (2006: 156). Yuko never went home. She was found in the woods with her wrists slit. That strange space in Mizuki’s room lingered for quite some time.

         When Mrs. Sakaki asks why Mizuki had never mentioned this encounter before, she responds, “…talking about it would have been like lighting a match in a room filled with gas” (2006: 156). Instead, she keeps Yuko’s and her own nametag hidden in a shoebox in her closet and carries the box wherever she roams. Mrs. Sakaki returns to the issue of jealousy, as if she were trying to pick the lock of a treasure box. And, again, Mizuki insists that she thinks that she has never felt jealous of other people, because people are different and hence, it is difficult to make comparisons. (2006: 156). Mrs. Sakaki finds this an “interesting point of view” (2006: 156). It is just that, a point of view. It is not an emotion. In other words, Mizuki is intellectualizing the emotion of jealousy, engaging in a rational process of comparisons, not in a visceral one. We grasp the intensity of her rational mind, when she states: “I think I understand what might cause it. But it’s true that I don’t know what it actually feels like. How overpowering it is, how long it lasts, how much you suffer because of it” (2006: 157). Words such as “overpowering” and “suffer” highlight the emotional side of jealousy, and yet she confesses to be ignorant of those emotions. At this point of the story, Mizuki is just as unreliable of a narrator of her story as the original third-person narrator.

         The impression that Mizuki does not exactly embrace her emotions is driven home symbolically when we learn about her memorabilia box, where she kept Yuko’s and her nametags, diaries, letters, photo albums, and report cards.  She had intended to get rid of those “things”, but she never managed to find the time to “sort through them, so she dragged the box along with her every time she moved” (2006: 147). The term “dragged” suggests that these “things” (along with the memories they contain) were an emotional yoke.

         When Mizuki returns home from Mrs. Sakaki’s office, she looks desperately for the nametags. They are no longer in the envelope in the memorabilia box. No longer burdened physically by them, she still must face the psychological burden that their absence represents. It is truly a burden for her and her alone, for the story of the nametags is her secret, which is found within the envelope of another secret (her forgetting her name), which is found within the envelope of another secret (her consultations with Mrs. Sakaki).

         On the tenth session, Ms. Sakaki pulls out Mizuki’s and Yuko’s nametags and places them on the desk and announces that those nametags had been stolen and hence the reason why she had trouble remembering her name (2006: 158). They had been stolen? And, Ms. Sakaki had recovered them? Will she thus recover her name? Her identity? Her sense of conscious awareness?

         Originally, Mizuki did not want to talk about Yuko, jealousy, or nametags, but now she was ready to light “a match in a room filled with gas” (2006: 156). Or, rather a monkey helps her to light the match, when he confesses that it was he who had stolen the tags. Upon meeting the culprit, Mizuki recalls what Yuko had said shortly before her suicide: “I don’t want a monkey running off with it…” (2006: 158). That is exactly what happens, and Ms. Sakaki’s husband, who works as the section chief of the Public Works Department, had captured the monkey with the stolen property. Asked why he stole the nametags, the thief responds, “I’m a monkey who takes people’s names. It’s a sickness I suffer from. Once I fix on a name, I can’t help myself… I’ll see a name that attracts me and then I have to have it. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t control myself” (2006: 159). The monkey’s obsessive and impulsive behavior propels Mizuki to ask whether he had anything to do with the suicide; he responds emphatically that Yuko had been “overwhelmed by an inner darkness” (2006: 159).

         While a talking monkey with uncontrollable urges to steal nametags seems hard to fathom, it is even harder to understand the “unusual powers” of Ms. Sakaki. After listening to Mizuki for weeks, a “fog was lifted” and she realized the nametags must have been stolen and by “some creature, not a human, living in the sewers” (2006: 159). Such a revelation shrouds mystery in mystery. Why would he steal nametags? By stealing nametags, he is able to “remove some of the negative elements that stick to those names” (2006: 160). He even claims that if he had been able to steal Yuko’s nametag before, “she might very well not have taken her life… Along with her name, I might have been able to take away some of the darkness that was inside her” (2006: 160). Negative elements? Darkness inside her? The logical questions that follow the monkey’s claims are what negative elements are associated with Mizuki’s name and what darkness lies inside her? After much prodding from Mizuki, the monkey asserts:

 

Your mother doesn’t love you. She has never loved you, not even for a minute, since you were born. I don’t know why, but it is true. Your older sister doesn’t like you, either. Your mother sent you to school in Yokohama because she wanted to get rid of you. She wanted to drive you as far away as possible. Your father isn’t a bad person, but he isn’t what you’d call a forceful personality, and he couldn’t stand up for you. For these reasons, ever since you were small you’ve never got enough love. I think you’ve had an inkling of this, but you’ve intentionally turned your eyes away from it. You’ve shut this painful reality up in a small dark place deep in your heart and closed the lid… This defensive stance had become part of who you are. Because of all of this, you yourself have never been able to deeply unconditionally love anybody else (2006: 161).

 

The monkey then finishes Mizuki off by telling her that she obviously does not love her husband. One bullet after another: Her mother and sister dislike her; her father is indifferent to her; she has been deprived of love; she has walled herself off from others; she cannot love anyone, including her husband and maybe herself. She sinks to the floor, confessing that it is true. She has known this all for a long time, but kept her eyes closed and blocked her ears (2006: 161).  In a sign of gratitude to the monkey, who will be released thanks to Mizuki, she gives the nametags to him. Her problem has been solved. She has her name back and that is all that matters. “I am going to live with what’s out there. That’s my name, and that’s my life,” she declares with resolution (2006: 161).

 

Discussion and Conclusions

This final line leads us back to our original questions regarding consciousness. Namely, why do we have conscious awareness; where does it lie; and how does it develop?  The term “out there” in the previous line refers to reality. Mizuki develops conscious awareness of reality, thanks to a monkey. As painful as that reality might be, she is resolute to accept it and to live it. It would be an oversimplification, however, to suggest that consciousness is an awareness of “out there”.  Further, the process of attaining consciousness is more complicated than just a monkey revealing the truth. Obviously, we cannot advance the general argument that conscious awareness is achieved through conversing with a monkey.

         Although Mizuki never explains explicitly that she has suffered from being abandoned by her mother, there is indirect evidence to suggest so. Yuko’s suicide is actually the most obvious reason to believe that she has suffered. Considering that Yuko and Mizuki share in common emotional suffering, sense of alienation, and lost nametags, it is tempting to view Yuko as the alter ego of Mizuki. In other words, Mizuki knew at a conscious or unconscious level that she was never loved by her family, and hence metaphorically kills herself, and Yuko serves as a symbol of this murder. It is this suffering and the murder of her ideal self that impedes her sense of consciousness.[ix]       The psychiatrist Henry Krystal sheds light on the relationship between suffering from being abandoned by the mother and consciousness: “The question is not nutrition but the necessary affective support of mother. If there is not prompt resumption of adequate mothering—but enough care is available to make survival possible-anhedonia sets in” (Krystal in Caruth, 1995, p. 80). Anhedonia, as the name suggests, refers to a loss of gratification or a diminution in the capacity for pleasure. Krystal also points out that alexithymia (the shutting down of the personality) accompanies, anhedonia.[x] This psychic turning off appears in the form of personality obtuseness and dullness and an inability to act assertively. It appears that if Mrs. Sakaki had not had her special powers, then she might have reverted to these explanations and terms to describe her client.

         There are two explanations for this self-deadening process. First of all, “there is neither the neurological nor the psychological development to localize and identify pain experiences” (Krystal, 1995: 92). Secondly, this dullness must take place in order to guarantee a certain level of survival, because non-verbalized emotions shatter the personality, if they were made known on a conscious level. Krystal has documented this symptom in his patients: “Individuals are hurt, so deeply wounded beyond the possibility of recovering through grieving that they constrict their mental functions and function as if they were partly demented” (Krystal, 1995: 92).[xi] Mizuki constricted her mental functions, so that she did not have to feel the hurt of being abandoned by her family. All the same, it is important to nuance the term mental functions. Yes, she has suffered from dementia, but she has also nearly lost all ability to feel emotion, especially her own. Emotions, intellectual abilities, and consciousness are intimately attached, as Damasio argues (2005: 130). Since Mizuki was not prepared psychologically to assume her troubling past, then she has no other way to survive than to avoid conscious awareness.

         Thus, this analysis of Mizuki’s story in light of Krystal’s research brings us to a conclusion that goes contrary to Penrose’s position regarding the evolutionary reasons for consciousness. If Penrose argues that we develop a sense of consciousness in order to come up with non-algorithmic and out-of-the-box thinking and to insure survival, Mizuki purposely fails to achieve conscious awareness in order to survive. More precisely, she does not live “out there” but in a no-man’s land between the “in there” (the unconscious state) and the “out there” (the conscious state) to insure her survival.

         The concept of a mental “no man’s land” must be stressed. It is a safe haven, between the rude reality of truth of conscious states and the masked rude reality of the unconscious state. This is where the monkey steps in. He acts as the spokesperson of the unconscious realm. This is not a far-fetched idea, if one considers the countless animals from fables and fairy tales who have served as ambassadors of the unconscious realm. According to Bruno Bettelheim, “The child must distance himself from the content of his unconscious and see it as something external to him, to gain any sort of mastery over it” (1976: 55). In other word, “inner psychological phenomena are given body in symbolic form” in order for people to feel in control of them (Bettelheim, 1976: 37). Animals are given the difficult task to communicate those complexities. As far as Mizuki is concerned, she develops conscious awareness of her identity when she allows the monkey to communicate the harrowing content of her mind, which is a childhood of abandonment and neglect, the absence of a mother. The monkey serves as an “ersatz mother”, just as teddies do for countless children. It was not by chance that a furry monkey frequents Mizuki’s mind, as opposed to a lizard. “Mammals offer something no reptile ever will,” writes Frans de Waal, “They give affection, they want affection and they respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs” (2013: 5). When the monkey appears in the story, logic is suspended, and we enter into the realm of unfettered emotions. Once she encounters the unconscious state (thanks to the monkey), and the floodgates of emotions are lifted, Mizuki becomes a speaking subject. She attains a certain degree of conscious awareness.

         It is noteworthy that as the story progresses the narrator relinquishes his/her role of transmitter of information. There are many more quoted passages from Mizuki at the end of the story than at the beginning, which seems sensible if she is undergoing psychotherapeutic sessions. Finally, we must not dismiss the fact that her cure occurs during a process of psychotherapy of sorts. Just as Mrs. Sakaki facilitates an encounter with the unconscious–through the monkey–she also endorses a talking cure or “talking to neurons” cure, which occurs at the busy intersection between the unconscious and conscious realms. Such a comment brings to mind the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss:  “I never had, and still do not have the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no “I” no “me”. Each of us is a crossroads where things happen” (Lévi-Strauss, 1978: 3-4). Thus, to return to the beginning of this article and to the issues of where and how consciousness occurs, it becomes apparent that it develops in response to a talking cure with unconscious realms. While it was argued earlier in this final section that Mizuki’s life story actually contradicts Penrose’s position on the relationship between consciousness and survival, we can also conclude in line with Penrose’s argument that Mizuki and Mrs. Sakaki eventually sift through that “morass of data” in order to insure conscious awareness . They draw out-of-the-box judgments thanks to a monkey, and it is thanks to this imaginative process and therapeutic encounter with language that Mizuki out-survives her former self, Yuko.

 

Reference List

Bettelheim, B. (1976) The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. NY: Vintage Books.

 

Boyd, B. 2009) On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

 

Caruth, C. Ed. (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

 

Damasio, A. (2010) Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. NY: Vintage.

________. (2005) Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. NY: Penguin.

 

Davis, P. (2013) Reading and the Reader: The Literary Agenda. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Doidge, N. (2007) The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. NY: Penguin.

 

Fireman, G., et al. (2003) Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Gazzaniga, M. (2011) Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. NY: Harper Collins. 

 

Gopnik, A. (2013) ‘Mindless: The New Neurosceptics’, The New Yorker Magazine. 9 September. pp. 71-76.

 

Hofstadter, D. (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. NY: Basic Books.

 

Krystal, H. (1995) ‘Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Fellow-Up’ In Trauma: Explorations of Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, pp. 76-99. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

 

Kurzweil, R. (2013) How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. NY: The Penguin Group.

 

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1978) Myth and Meaning; Cracking the Code of Culture. NY: University of Toronto Press.

 

Malibou, C. (2012) The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. NY: Fordham University Press.

 

Murakami, H. (2006) ‘A Shinagawa Monkey’, The New Yorker Magazine. 13 & 20 February. pp. 150-161.

 

Penrose, R.  (1989) The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

 

Rose, N. and Abi-Rached, J. (2013) Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

 

Tallis, R. (2011) Aping Mankind : Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham, UK: Acumen.

 

de Waal, F. (2013) The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. NY: W.W. Norton.