“The wakefulness was always beside me”: Sleeplessness, Embodiment, and Female Agency in Haruki Murakami's ‘Sleep’

Abstract

This article will draw on contemporary clinical scholarship on sleeplessness, cognition, emotional empathy, and memory, and attempt to map it a reading of Haruki Murakami’s short story ‘Sleep’ from his 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes. Such study will situate sleeplessness as a cognitive/embodied and agentic/extended condition, whereby the female subject feels alternately alienated and empowered through complex forms of memory and embodiment. The article will also examine how the hyperactive and hyper-productive orders of embodiment exemplified by the sleepless subject do not conform to the capitalist masculinist notions of endless productivity but increasingly undercut the same through the caricatured representation the subject’s medical/ entrepreneurial husband. This article aims to examine the interface of cognitive studies, cultural studies, and literary studies drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to connect to the broader research in cognitive and clinical psychology on sleeplessness.