All You need Is Frog; Murakami’s Views On Society.

            Every day, peoples’ actions go unrecognized and unappreciated. From a simple thing as holding open a door for someone or just asking someone how they’re feeling, we as a society have become dormant to expressing gratitude for all that others do for us to make our lives better. In Haruki Murakami’s literature, this judgement on society is prevalent. When people aren’t appreciated for what they do on a daily basis for years, their loneliness’ pushes the mind to finding a coping mechanism to deal with a gap in their life. If someone feels like they’re all alone for years and years, their minds will split and disassociate to find comfort in their lives.

In “Super Frog Saves Tokyo”, the main character Katagiri is approached by a six foot tall talking frog. A frog that not only speaks but needs him on a secret mission to save Tokyo. At first glance, you might think the guy is crazy and that he may be a schizophrenic of some sorts. But Katagiri is not a man with a history of mental illnesses and hallucinations. He is in fact, a lonely man whose life has been undervalued by his peers and his own family. As the talking frog says to him in their encounter, “For sixteen long years, you have silently accepted the most dangerous, least glamorous assignments—the jobs that others have avoided—and you have carried them off beautifully. I know full well how difficult this has been for you, and I do not believe that either your superiors or your colleagues properly appreciate your accomplishments…After your parents died, you raised your teenage brother and sister single-handedly, put them through college and even arranged for them to marry, all at great sacrifice of your time and income, and at the expense of your own marriage prospects. In spite of this, your brother and sister have never once expressed gratitude for your efforts on their behalf. Far from it. They have shown you no respect and acted with the most callous disregard for your loving kindness.” Katagiri has made sacrifices after sacrifices in his life yet he is all alone with no one to even care about him. He dedicates his life to one of the toughest jobs in japan and did all that he could to set up his siblings’ lives, yet no one has repaid him the favor.

When you look at Katagiri this way, it is no surprise that his mind begins to disassociate from reality so greatly that he begins talking to a giant frog about fighting a giant worm to prevent Tokyo from being wiped out by a giant earthquake. And Murakami does this on purpose to emphasize that the mind can take so much. For instance, in Matthew Strecher’s journal  “Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki”, he finds that Murakami does present dissociative themes in his writing. He writes “ Murakami’s model of the human mind is fairly uniform throughout his literature, his motifs and terminology largely unchanged in the past 20 years. In general, it is presented as a uniformly coded division between the world of the light and that of the dark, the latter corresponding to the unconscious realm. Murakami envisions the inner world of the mind as dark, cold, and lifeless. At times the unconscious is only symbolized, other times it is real.” (Strecher 270) The light in Katagiri’s life is frog, this new friend that needs him and only him or a mission to save all of Tokyo. A person who actually needs and appreciates him. The darkness in his life however, is everything else. All the people that give him troubles, the people who do not appreciate him, the people who he helped that have not shown an ounce of gratitude back. All these people who took him for granted for years and years have led to split to his conscious mind.

Split Consciousness is when the conscious mind is split into two different beings that do not overlap. As people, we think of ourselves as one being in complete control. During Freud’s Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, he treated a woman named Janet, who presented symptoms of similar to split consciousness. He explained one of the woman’s conscious as a “mystical ally” (Freud 17). This perfectly represent Katagiri and his Frog. Frog is not real, but he helps Katagiri feel fulfilled by needing his help to save Tokyo from a catastrophic earthquake that will save millions of lives. For once in his life, he feels that someone is on his side. For instance, when frog says “By tomorrow morning, old Frog will have your problems solved. Relax and have a good night’s sleep.” Katagiri realizes that he can lean on someone for help if need be. And that very next morning, Frog had one of Katagiri’s biggest problems go away, a loan once thought impossible to get the money back on, was done with full cooperation. This moment confirms any doubts of frog’s existence and loyalty. Katagiri’s now knows he has a friend, confidant and problem solver.

In Doris Brother’s Murakami, Connoisseur of Uncertainty: Commentary on Paper by Thomas Rosbrow, they wrote “When we feel endangered by what seems like the imminent repetition of an old trauma, we may feel compelled to eliminate experiences of unbearable uncertainty through our own dissociative reductions of complexity.” This relates to Katagiri once again in that his experiences of being treated like a rag doll are the real feeling he wants to express. The opposite of these feelings of being taking advantage of is to be a superhero who saves the day. That way, everyone will appreciate and admire him. So, with the help of frog, he is able to fulfill this mission. The same way frog needs Katagiri for emotional support to save Tokyo, Katagiri just needs his own emotional support no matter what form its expressed in.

The ending of the story confirms that Katagiri had a split consciousness between reality and a world where frog exists. After he wakes from another vision from his other conscious, he says to himself out loud, “What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real”, confirming that his consciousness coexists, one being day to day reality involving people in his everyday life, the other being his alternate universe with his friend six foot tall talking frog. These two consciousness coexisting does not necessarily mean Katagiri is not a normal function person. It just means that he like anyone else needs to feel some sense of worthiness in society no matter how it plays out.

All in all, the mind can only handle so much social isolation. In Murakami’s writing he can’t stress this point enough. When someone is undervalued as much as Katagiri was and as lonely as Katagiri was, his mind found a way to make it bearable. By disassociating from reality and the splitting of his consciousness Katagiri finally found something that he so deeply desired but lacked in his life, a friend. A friend that only exists in another part of his mind that is not real but at the same time real to him. And that only matters to him because he does not matter to anyone else. No one around him cares enough for him, no matter what he does. But as long as you have just one person or just one frog in your life, life can be bearable.  So next time someone holds open a door for you, or asks you how you feel, take a moment and appreciate their actions and let that be known.

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