Rachel Lee HMS 101 - 19A 2 March 2018 Professor Muhlstein Super Frog Saves Tokyo In Haruki Murakami’s compelling, almost discombobulating short fiction, Super Frog Saves Tokyo, we are quickly introduced to two characters, Frog and Katagiri. Right away, the line between reality and imagination is blurred. Murakami dabbles in magical realism- where surreal characters or objects appear in everyday life. Murakami illustrates a hypnotic nightmare, juxtaposing the marvelous from the mundane- his ambiguity emphasizes this dream-like state and takes the audience on a strange yet compelling adventure through magical realism and plays with the idea of man against his mind. Murakami uses two recurring themes: the power of imagination and the clash between the conscious and the unconscious thought. From a Freudian perspective, we are following Katagiri’s battle between the ego and the superego. According to Freud, we crave things that we cannot or do not have; dreams are wish-fulfillment based and our subconscious mind desires these so much that they would appear in our sleep or unconscious thoughts. In this case, Katagiri’s mundane lifestyle is so boring and bland that he wants to transform his …show more content…
Murakami introduces Frog as a being that can speak, understand human language, and communicate fluently. Through the relationship between Frog and Katagiri, we can see the psychological battle Katagiri undergoes. Murakami also uses magical realism to lighten the tone on disastrous , catastrophic events. Because of this, he mingles fantasy into traumatic events, like the earthquake, and thus engages the reader and draws them in; the passage of Frog bursting open through boils and maggots could represent the thousands who died in the Earthquake through crumbling towers and cracks. His death at the hospital could also allude to those who knew their time had come and died a death they weren’t supposed