Title

Haruki Murakami’s Legal Trilogy: A Paradigm of the Postmodern Lawyer

Abstract

My article begins by exploring the negative effects that The Paper Chase’s Hart has had on the legal profession due to the modernist world that Hart inhabits. Next, I analyze the effects of modernism on the legal community though the legal trilogy of postmodern author Murakami. First, I use Murakami’s short stories, The Second Bakery Attack and The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women, to analyze the postmodern condition and compare it with the problems which many lawyers suffer. Secondly, I look at the stifling nature of formalism in the law, and examine Murakami’s combination of the mimetic with the formulaic in the novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle as a potential remedy for formalism and the problems it causes. I conclude with an assessment of the lessons that the legal world can learn from Murakami’s legal trilogy.

Disciplines

Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law

Date of this Version

March 2006