Illusion Painting and TV People: On the Generative Principle of the Virtual World of TV People

Haruki Murakami's short story, TV People, reveals the reality that people cannot stand up to the lure of TV media, and are completely dominated by the media in their thinking and actions. Many previous studies argued that the virtual world in the novel is an “imaginary real world” based on the computer network, but such an explanation would make certain plots in the novel unreasonable. Since the novel is full of elements of “illusion painting”, the principle of the illusion painting can be used to reasonably explain the plots in the novel on the one hand. On the other hand, the virtual state generated by the illusion painting principle is more in line with the situation when Murakami Haruki wrote the novel.