Childhood, Adulthood, and the Space in Between: J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” and Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood”
Growing up and getting on -- what does it mean?
Hey.
Here is Peter Pan and Norwegian Wood as pdfs.
Here is a song recommendation for these days.
Here is a poem by Longfellow.
Thanks for reading!
Tyler
To me, Literature is an exercise in critical thinking. It’s the practice of visualizing the setting and characters of a story, understanding characters’ motivations, examining symbols and motifs, and coming to both objective and subjective conclusions. By deconstructing a text into its parts, we can assemble larger meanings and uncover truths about what it means to be human.
The texts that I feed through this process that resonate with me usually fit into the same, somewhat coincidental model. They involve a male protagonist whose child-identity is put to the test, and at the story’s denouement they emerge a stronger, more mature and intelligent person than before. They are also (somewhat) better grounded in their society; they depart from boyhood and begin the journey into manhood and responsibility. Common parlance calls these stories “coming-of-age” stories, while more academic spaces may call them Bildungsroman, a term “from the German words Bildung (‘education’, alternatively ‘forming’) and Roman (‘novel’).” They are pretty common and make up a large percentage of our storytelling history.
These stories become more appealing to me in my mid-twenties. They act as colored lens filters do for cameras – they allow an alternate appearance to the real-life challenges of growing up and getting on, and give us a way to measure the hues of our own lives against a two-dimensional fictional world. They also help to provide some comfort to the uncomfortable idea that, despite our best efforts: time hurries on.
I want to write briefly about two of these stories: J.M. Barrie’s novel Peter Pan and Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. Both feature a young male protagonist at their center but say very different things about maturation into the adult world.
Part One: Peter Pan
I read J.M. Barrie’s novel Peter Pan in 2020 during an unplanned hiatus from college. It was the best decision I could make at a time when Covid-19 was still a relatively unknown disease whose mortality rate and effect on the world was yet to be determined.
Staying at home all day and being bombarded with increasingly morbid headlines did its best to remind me how far away I was from my childhood and how much further away I would continue to be. It induced something of a crisis. Seeing as how Disney’s Peter Pan (1953) was one of my favorite movies growing up, I thought revisiting Peter Pan as originally written by J.M. Barrie would provide some insight into dealing with the difficulties of an extended transition into adulthood (while teasing out the nostalgia of rewinding a VHS tape.)
Peter Pan is, ironically, more the story of Wendy Darling, the oldest child in the Darling family. She, with her two younger brothers, are magically carried away to Neverland, an imaginary, far-away island whose inhabitants are separated into factions. There’s the Lost Boys, a brotherhood of rebellious boys led by Peter Pan; the Redskins, a warrior tribe of natives; and the pirates led by Captain Hook, whose crew is often described as thick-headed. The interactions between these tribes are often mischievous and violent, but almost always, Peter Pan emerges the hero.
In the introduction to the Barnes & Noble edition of Peter Pan, Amy Billone writes of the novel’s famous first line, “All children, except one, grow up” –
“While the legend tempts us with achingly desirable unions, it is about the difficulty (if not the impossibility) of fusing disparate worlds: life and death, dreams and reality, masculinity and femininity, childhood and adulthood. Through lively comedy, Peter Pan brilliantly masks the underlying sadness that threatens to pull the story apart” (xxiii).
Plainly said, Peter Pan takes place in a world of opposites. It’s best demonstrated in the novel’s colorful cast of characters: Mr. and Mrs. Darling are opposites as husband and wife (George is brash, childish and dismissive while Mary is charming, compassionate and sensible.) They are opposite to their children, and the children opposite themselves (Wendy is nurturing and orderly, John is reserved and cautious, Michael – the youngest – is adventurous and playful.) All are opposite to Peter, who is cunning, fearless, sometimes chaotic, and most importantly, remains forever young. Peter’s opposite is his nemesis Captain Hook, whose motivations are uniquely fueled by evil.
Hidden between these opposites exist some interesting (though perhaps unintended) social commentaries. While the novel’s cast is predominantly male (most are young boys), each communicates something unique about the experience of manhood and masculinity. On one extreme end, Mr. Darling and Captain Hook are menacing antagonists whose strength comes from intimidating their families (or their crew.) Oppositely, Peter and the Lost Boys’ commitment to their own laissez-faire lifestyle without parents makes them the guardians of innocence and boyhood. In Barrie’s world, these two expressions of masculinity are ideological rivals: one stands for control and malevolence and the other, for radical independence and curiosity.
To emphasize the conceptual juxtaposition of Mr. Darling and Captain Hook, Jen Campell (in her brilliant video) analyzes the novel against the stage production, and says:
“So, Peter is there to fight – and who is Peter fighting? He is fighting Captain Hook – and who is Captain Hook? J.M. Barrie said in the stage directions [of the play] that whoever plays Captain Hook also has to play Mr. Darling, so Wendy is fighting her father because she doesn’t want to grow up, therefore Peter – a manifestation of her alter-self – is fighting Captain Hook, a manifestation of her father’s alter-self, in this space called Neverland, because, in fairy tales and in fights of the psyche, you have to go to a separate space to battle out something that is a representation of a battle that is going on in your conscious life.”
The battle in Peter Pan is a collision of childhood and fate; where the children meet the hard realities of time and adulthood and come to understand what they’ll be leaving behind. Most of us, I think, arrive at this realization when we hit double-digits, sometime just before or during middle school when the world suddenly expands and the realities of responsibility and consequence unite. Wendy’s age (who again, is one of two main protagonists in the novel) is never specified, though it is implied she is at or approaching her teenage years.
While the Darling children have no stated objective in Neverland, Wendy’s objective as a child is to discover the responsibility of adulthood and flinch not toward it; it’s to survive the transition and realize there is more to lose in resisting growing up than accepting it. Eventually, we come to understand Peter’s permanent state as a child to be an adverse trait and not a beneficial one (despite how often as adults we sometimes long for the days of our youth.) In chapter eight, while Peter stands on a rock being slowly submerged underwater, it reads:
“A tremor ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him. It was saying, ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’” (87).
This scene brings to mind a School of Life episode that describes French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s attitude toward the anxiety we often experience when faced with the overwhelming complexity of life:
“[Derrida] wanted to cure us of our love of crude simplicity and to make us more comfortable with a permanently oscillating nature of wisdom ... Being confused and uncertain around such concepts isn’t a sign of weakness or stupidity. It is, for Derrida, the central mark of maturity. Derrida’s tactic was to glamorize this condition and to give it a positive ring, which is why he brought back into use a beautiful Greek word: aporia, meaning impasse or puzzlement. He was proposing aporia as a state we should feel proud to know and to visit on a regular basis. Confusion and doubt are not embarrassing dead-ends in the Derridian worldview. They are simply evidence of the adulthood of the mind.”
From a Derridian perspective, Peter critically lacks aporia: where most adults would understand the serious and confusing nature of death, Peter understands it simply as an exciting, new experience of no serious consequence.
While our storytelling sensibilities as readers might predict that Peter joins the world of normal children (as the rest of the Lost Boys do), he instead decides to remain a forever-child, asking Wendy:
“Would you send me to school?” he inquired craftily.
“Yes.”
“And then to an office?”
“I suppose so.”
“Soon I would be a man?”
“Very soon.”
“I don’t want to go to school and learn solemn things,” he told her passionately. “I don’t want to be a man. O Wendy’s mother, if I was to wake up and feel there was a beard!” (149-150).
Peter refuses to join the world of normally aging people – but why? Canadian psychologist, public intellectual, transphobe, conspiracy theorist and vaccine-denialist Jordan Peterson (whose controversial opinions I write about here) is only right twice a day when, in a lecture about the Jungian concept of the great father, he says:
“Pirate, Captain of the High Seas, someone willing to break rules – there's a romance in that figure. Well, the idea of the ‘great father’ as the pirate is a good one. Captain Hook is a pathetic pirate and, of course, pirates are precisely that because they’re also crooked. So what makes him pathetic? … It’s [that] he’s being chased by a crocodile with a clock on its stomach. … Your life is going to end; it's already got a piece of you, and it's coming for the rest. Hook is terrified of that; he’s terrified into resentment and evil. That’s why he can prey on other people. And so that’s the father in the Peter Pan story out in Neverland, which is the archetypical domain. Captain Hook is the father. Well – why would Peter Pan want to grow up to be Captain Hook? He doesn’t. And so he stays Pan – Pan means ‘everything’, like pantheism – he stays everything, he’s this divine child, he never wants to grow up. Well, why would you sacrifice the potential of youth to become nothing but a death-obsessed tyrant?”
Peter’s choice not to become an adult man is a reaction to the singular adult man in his life, his representative-father, who has become violently obsessed with his own mortality. Peterson goes on to say that Peter’s choice to remain a boy isn’t exactly the best choice either – to remain a boy-king of a make-believe realm isn’t exactly a fulfilling life. Peterson’s final argument – and perhaps one of the greatest take-aways of the book – is, for those being pushed unwillingly into adulthood, to choose your own sacrifice because sacrifice is inevitable, but at least you get to choose it.
In the final chapter of Peter Pan, we fast-forward into the future and see Peter visit Wendy who is an adult with her own children. Although this jump thematically works, it doesn’t deliver to readers the answer to: what happens in our early adulthood that is so important for us to experience that we must relinquish our childhood to experience it?
Part Two: Norwegian Wood
I started reading Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami in Fall 2022 and finished in the Spring (thank you for everything, S.C. – I hope we can try again someday soon.) It was the first Murakami novel I’d ever read and the first novel I’d ever read from a Japanese author. It’s interesting to hold this story up against Peter Pan, as the two are products of different countries, different time periods, and different cultures. The novel takes its title from the Beatles song of the same name.
The story is a retrospective; a vision of the past by the 37-year-old Toru Watanabe who is struck with wistfulness on an airplane bound for Germany. He vividly remembers being a confused college-aged adult in the 1960s navigating the turbulence of his early twenties. Like Peter, Toru’s environment is similarly one of extremes, but like Wendy, he must understand and overcome the trials of maturity to break from childhood.
First, on Toru’s campus are student protests calling for university reform, the hypocritical outcomes of which disappoint him:
“During the summer holidays the university called in the riot police. They broke down the barricades and arrested the students inside … I went to the campus in September expecting to find rubble. The place was untouched. What the hell had they been doing behind the barricades? … The arseholes had screamed their heads off at the time of the strike, denouncing students who opposed it … To think that these idiots had been the ones screaming for the dismantling of the university! What a joke” (58-59).
These student protests serve as an important narrative device: they establish Toru as an observer of both his internal and external worlds. It also establishes him as a vocal observer of these worlds – here, he is capable of communicating both positive and negative opinions about the trendy counter-cultural attitudes of his student-peers. Despite being relatively dispassionate about the protest’s aims, he can recognize its practical and spiritual failures. (F. Scott Fitzgerald famously writes in his essay “The Crack Up”: ”The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” – Fitzgerald and Western writers and artists abound in Murakami’s works.) This perceptiveness and understanding of life’s complexity is an important thematic undercurrent and an important symbol of maturity.
Similarly to Peter Pan, many of the characters in Norwegian Wood function as metrics by which we can measure Toru. His roommate, aptly nicknamed “Storm Trooper”, is fixated on his personal health and the cleanliness of the room, waking up early to exercise and obsessively organize his belongings:
“My room-mate was a cleanliness freak … He did all the cleaning, he took care of sunning the mattresses, he threw out the rubbish. He’d give a sniff and suggest a bath for me if I'd been too busy to wash for a few days. He’d even point out when it was time for me to go to the barber’s or trim my nasal hair. The one thing that bothered me was the way he would spray clouds of insecticide if he noticed a single fly in the room …” (18-20).
Storm Trooper represents a departure from the chaos Toru will face throughout the novel – he is regimented and disciplined; a straightforward young person with a mind for routine and self-care. Eventually, for reasons that are never explained, Storm Trooper disappears, as does much of the emotional foundation from underneath his narrator-roommate. Although he never embraces the strict routine with which Storm Trooper lived his life, Storm Trooper is an important and valuable character-touchstone for understanding the other characters, particularly Nagasawa, whom Toru also meets in the dormitory.
Nagasawa is a brilliant student but guiltless womanizer and chain smoker who comes from a wealthy family. Toru is struck by his charm:
“Nagasawa had a certain inborn quality that drew people to him and made them follow him … Even I would be moved by his kindness at times, but he could just as well be malicious and cruel. He was both a spirit of amazing loftiness and an irredeemable man of the gutter … The first time I saw Nagasawa drunk and tormenting a girl, I promised myself never, under any circumstances, to open myself up to him” (38-39).
Nagasawa embodies a vein of Hemingway-style masculinity: he is dangerously intelligent, charismatic, good-looking, and daring (traits which contribute to his mythological status in the dormitory), but his egocentricity precludes him from having meaningful relationships to the degree of self-sabotage. As a symbol of distinction between Nagasawa and Toru, when Toru is taken under his wing as a womanizer-protege, Toru runs into spiritual and philosophical trouble:
“I was not too crazy about sleeping with girls I didn’t know. It was an easy way to take care of my sex drive of course, and I did enjoy all the holding and touching, but I hated the morning after … When I had slept with three or four girls this way, I asked Nagasawa,
‘After you’ve done this 70 times, doesn’t it begin to seem kind of pointless?’
‘This proves you’re a decent human being,’ he said. ‘Congratulations. There is absolutely nothing to be gained from sleeping with one strange woman after another. It just tires you out and makes you disgusted with yourself’” (41-42).
Here, we discover that Nagasawa’s intelligence doesn’t preclude him from hedonism (and shameless infidelity, as we later meet his girlfriend.) He is plainly aware of his flaws and vices but makes no serious effort to change his behavior; he instead employs his intelligence to justify it. What differentiates him from Toru, then, isn't the ignorance of his behavior but the degree to which his intelligence and morality cohabitate. Being around Nagasawa is a test of Toru’s moral compass and constitution as a young sexually active man. In Nagasawa, Toru witnesses moral apathy, sowing him between the futile passion of the student protestors and the destructive indifference of Nagasawa. Both solutions to the difficulties of life are seen as fruitless.
We can also observe the difference in their maturity when Toru interacts with Naoko, his primary love interest. Throughout the novel, Toru writes her letters and re-reads the ones he’s received from her both as an act of love and longing. She suffers from debilitating mental illness and emotional instability brought on by the suicide of her boyfriend, Kizuki, who was also Toru’s best friend in high school:
“‘So after [Kizuki] died, I didn’t know how to relate to other people. I didn’t know what it meant to love another person.’ … Naoko remained silent for a while, then suddenly burst into tears, trembling all over. Slumping forward, she buried her face in her hands and sobbed with the same suffocating violence as she had that night with me” (136-137).
Although confused by her condition (as her caretakers simultaneously are), Toru approaches their complex relationship with genuine sensitivity. Having both lost Kizuki, they share a unique but tragic bond built on death and loss. To take care of her is, in many ways, to take care of himself. Johnathon Dil explores this bond in his thesis “Murakami Haruki and the Search for Self-Therapy”. By reading Norwegian Wood with a Jungian lens, Dil adds depth to Naoko’s symbolism and the symbolism of the water well in Murakami’s fiction:
“While earlier women in Murakami’s novels offered the promise of potential meaning or even fullness, Naoko signifies the danger and even temptation of non-being or death … There are many examples of characters in the novel who succumb to this temptation. Naoko is the obvious one, her ultimate decision to commit suicide suggests that she is finally overcome by the darkness and depth of the well inside herself. Another important example is Kizuki, Naoko’s former boyfriend and [Toru’s] best friend, who had gassed himself in a car several years earlier … The question is why do they do it, and why does Watanabe not follow after them?” (137-138)
The answer to this question resides in the mythology of Peter Pan. Dil continues,
“The opposite of the hero archetype in Jungian thought is that of the puer aeternus or eternal child. It is a kind of Peter Pan syndrome where the temptation of staying in the womb replaces the need for individuation and adult responsibilities. Opting for this deceptively risk-free existence, however, entails its own risks” (138).
In Peter Pan, Peter rejects the opportunity to age, choosing instead to embrace the life of the forever-child, thwarting responsibility, purpose, sacrifice, and the meaningful difficulties of adult life. Oppositely, Toru “chooses his sacrifice” to advance into adulthood; he chooses life despite the increasingly convincing case for its futility. He recognizes the potential value in individuation just as Wendy does when she decides to “grow up” over staying in Neverland.
According to Dil, Naoko retreating to the Ami hostel and sanitorium is a sort of Neverland by which she can further avoid the pain of growing up. After Toru makes the extensive journey to see Naoko there – effectively taking the journey to a place suspended from reality – she explains her own interpretation of Kizuki’s death:
"Because we would have had to pay the world back what we owed it … The pain of growing up. We didn't pay when we should have, so now the bills are due. Which is why Kizuki did what he did, and why I'm here. We were like kids who grew up naked on a desert island. If we got hungry, we'd just pick a banana; if we got lonely, we'd go to sleep in each other's arms. But that kind of thing doesn't last forever. We grew up fast and had to enter society. Which is why you were so important to us. You were the link connecting us with the outside” (155-156).
Here, Naoko reveals her bond with Toru as not just constituted by romance and loss, but also of a symbiotic duty to age. By committing suicide, Naoko terminates her own Jungian hero’s journey and simultaneously provides Toru with another trial of maturity. To Dil, this
“... represents more than just the dangers of an early death; [Naoko] represents the powerful allure of it … While Naoko had earlier been associated with death and the passion of the Real, on this later occasion she is associated with something beautiful and sublime. She seems to represent both the anxiety and attraction of non-being” (140-142).
After Naoko’s passing, Toru romantically reunites with Midori, his secondary love interest whom he meets in a literary drama class. Her personality is completely opposite of Naoko; she’s characterized as an outgoing and spontaneous girl who has a curious and strong-willed attitude towards the chaos of life (a satisfying and hopeful character model for Toru to end up with.) An important scene Dil doesn’t mention is when the two visit the hospital to care for her father dying of a terminal brain tumor. Toru describes him:
“He lay on his side, limp, drooping left arm inert, jabbed with an intravenous needle. He was a small, skinny man who gave the impression that he would only get smaller and thinner … His half-open eyes stared at a fixed point in space, bloodshot spheres that twitched in our direction when we entered the room … You knew when you saw those eyes he was going to die soon. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest trace of what had once been a life” (217).
Using Dil’s psychoanalytic framework, we may understand this interaction as Toru meeting a version of himself that was infected by the neurosis suffered by his loved ones; the brain tumor becomes a symbol for the cancerous way in which depression grows in our minds and wilts our bodies. In him, Toru sees both the discomfort of death, but also the strange tranquility of losing the mind’s acute awareness. It poses the question of nihilism to Toru and to the readers: why should it matter to have a strong moral constitution when death is the inevitable outcome? One answer is Toru’s responsibility for Midori – to see that her spiritually redeeming qualities are not taken by the dark and invisible forces that have taken his friends. When her father whispers incoherently to Toru about Midori and a “ticket”, he consolingly says:
“I tried to summarize what he was getting at: ‘Ticket, Midori, please, Ueno Station,’ but I had no idea what it meant. I assumed his mind was muddled, but compared with before his eyes now had a terrible clarity. He raised the arm that was free of the intravenous contraption and stretched it towards me … I stood and grasped his frail, wrinkled hand. He returned my grasp with what little strength he could muster and said it again. ‘Don't worry,’ I said. ‘I'll take care of the ticket and Midori, too.’ He let his hand drop back to the bed and closed his eyes. Then, with a loud rush of breath, he fell asleep … As I was sipping the hot liquid, I realized that I had developed a kind of liking for this little man on the verge of death” (230).
With enough interpretive force, a single passage of literature can take you anywhere. Maybe the “ticket” Midori’s father deliriously refers to stands as a metaphor for the way in which Toru and Midori ought “leave” the place that may, eventually, give them a “brain tumor” also.
At the very end of the novel, Toru remembers calling Midori, who asks:
“‘Where are you now?’
Where was I now? Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the phone box. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere.” (350)
This final paragraph obscures the emotional condition of Toru’s present. Has he healed from the difficulties of his youth? Despite obviously surviving, has he completed his Jungian hero's journey into adulthood? Dil says:
“The fact that Watanabe is now the middle-aged narrator telling us this story assures us that he avoided the kind of early death many other characters in the novel suffer from … [H]owever, [h]e has not emerged from this inner journey with the resources needed to fully recommit to society. In fact, he seems to have emerged even more confused” (145).
To Dil, the ending signals that Toru’s hero journey is incomplete: instead of growing into an adult with better emotional faculty, he instead remains stunted by the death of his loved ones and confused by the reality of being alive. However, I argue Toru’s confusion is inseparable from a person matured: as we learn in Peter Pan, it is an immature mind who thinks clearly and resolutely about the difficulties of life by failing to grasp the dangers of adult decision-making. Toru doesn’t enjoy his aporia as Peter does – he suffers dearly from it, making his story a strong argument for the hero’s journey being much more complicated than its preceding mythos (And when I awoke, I was alone/ This bird had flown…)
Despite these two stories being written seventy-six years apart and by two different authors of two different countries, they provide a unique (if sometimes morose) commentary on the way we perceive the chasm between childhood and adulthood, ignorance and knowledge, and having vs. having not.