Life, Death, and Dreams

The Role of Intertextuality in “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo”

Haruki Murakami’s magical realism novels and short stories are captivating for their ambiguity and meaningful use of intertextuality. Interpretation can go in many directions for the short story, “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” in which a giant talking frog enjoys Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and claims to do mortal combat with an earthquake causing Worm. This Frog does a lot more than save Tokyo; it plays a central role in a life or death battle that occurs in the main character’s mind. 

After sixteen years as a collection officer for the bank, Mr. Katagiri turns forty and experiences a mental crisis regarding his meaningless and uncelebrated life. His position at the Shinjuku branch of the Tokyo Security Trust Bank is dangerous, as he could be killed by gangsters at any time. 

“So what if they killed him?” 

With this line, Murakami emphasizes the lack of value Katagiri places on his existence. Katagiri has “no wife, no kids” and both of his parents are long dead. He lives a solitary existence, affirming that “It wouldn’t change anything for anybody” if he suddenly disappeared (Murakami 97).

Katagiri later monologues about his ordinary and purposeless life. His appearance is nothing special, which he admits by saying “I’m going bald.” His confidence is in the gutter, as he describes the last time he slept with a woman by saying, “I had to pay for it.” His characterization is developed with every possible negative extreme, “I’m tone deaf, short, phimotic, near-sighted – and astigmatic.” Katagiri has physical problems from his penis to his vision. This culminates in the depressed and suicidal sentiment of, “I live a horrible life. I don’t even know why I’m living” (Murakami 104).

The mundane status quo is broken up when Katagiri comes home one day to “a giant frog waiting for him.” This frog is “over six feet tall” and has “imposing bulk” compared to Katagiri’s tiny, “skinny” body (Murakami 91). 

Frog serves as a foil to Katagiri’s minuscule appearance and perception of himself, as Frog will help Katagiri see the value of his life throughout the story.

At first, Katagiri believes he’s the victim of a prank, “Somebody’s rigged himself up in this huge frog costume just to have fun with me.” He looks around for a hidden camera in his apartment, “But there was no camera” (Murakami 92, 93). These early interactions offer the reader to share in Katagiri’s surprise at a giant frog being in his apartment. 

When the issue of Frog’s existence becomes a question of hallucination or reality, Murakami’s process of discrediting a prank gives Katagiri and the reader time to accept Frog as a reality. For the more literary, Frog himself claims that he is a “genuine frog” and “a product neither of metaphor nor allusion” (Murakami 94). Frog is quite convincing, but by the end of the story, it is clear that he is, consciously or unconsciously, a product of Mr. Katagiri’s imagination. Frog is the friend that Katagiri lacks and a metaphor to combat Katagiri’s fears and psyche. 

Outside of the pointlessness of his life, Katagiri is most afraid of earthquakes. The 1995 Kobe earthquake which unites Murakami’s after the quake stories happened recently during the story’s events. The destruction of Tokyo that needs to be averted, as referenced by the title, is from an “earthquake”, which Frog explains with “utmost gravity.” One can assume that for days or weeks, Katagiri has ruminated on the Kobe earthquake and imagines the “pure hell” that would be the rubble of Tokyo with “a hundred and fifty-thousand” dead (Murakami 95). 

Frog emerges as the solution to Katagiri’s psychological fears. Frog is magical enough to solve Katagiri’s paranoia over another earthquake, and Frog gives Katagiri the companionship he needs as Katagiri’s midlife depression deepens.

The earthquake that threatens Tokyo will be caused by Worm, another magical entity imagined by Katagiri. Conveniently, this massive Worm storing up hatred and the potential for destruction is directly underneath Katagiri’s office. On Worm, Frog explains, “Last month’s Kobe earthquake shook him out of a deep sleep he was enjoying” (Murakami 98). Worm’s position underneath Katagiri’s workplace highlights his underlying terror of earthquakes, while simultaneously offering Katagiri the potential to be a hero and give purpose to his otherwise purposeless life. 

While the reader may infer that Katagiri is dreaming or hallucinating Frog and Worm, Katagiri still questions the process. Murakami does this to continue Katagiri’s characterization of self-doubt as well as to allow believability to the fantastical aspects of the story for the reader. 

Katagiri asks Frog, “Why did you choose me to go with you?”

Frog answers, “I have always had the profoundest respect for you” and explains that he sympathizes with his “unappreciated and unpromoted” sixteen years of work. Beyond work, Katagiri has been selfless by paying for the college and marriages of his siblings. In return, Katagiri has received no respect from them or anyone in the world. Frog validates Katagiri’s distress and life by saying, “Their behavior is unconscionable.” Frog then asserts that he needs Katagiri’s pure spirit and help to fight Worm, “I need your courage and your passion for justice” (Murakami 99, 100). 

When Katagiri hits forty and contemplates his physical and social failures along with the dead from the Kobe earthquake, expressed by his “I don’t know why I’m even living” line, Frog is the answer. Frog bestows the imagined purpose of defeating Worm and becoming a hero.

Before the confrontation with Worm, Murakami provides Katagiri and readers with another line of reasoning to prove Frog’s existence. As a collection officer, Katagiri has an issue with Big Bear Trading. Frog pays Big Bear a visit, and the next day, Katagiri receives a call saying “do not send Frog to his home again.” This adds a layer of complexity, because Frog asserts that he can “produce results” as a “real, living being” (Murakami 102, 103). 

These results are taken as a fact and cannot be easily disputed as a hallucination when compared to Frog simply being in Katagiri’s apartment. It is possible that Katagiri unconsciously uses “Frog” as an alias when going out and dealing with Big Bear’s men himself, or like later events, this phone call is entirely dreamed up to justify Katagiri’s belief in Frog and the proposed heroic battle with Worm. 

The latter is most likely, as when Frog returns after the Big Bear incident, he makes contradictory claims to Katagiri with, “You are the only one who can see me” and “I am not a product of your imagination” (Murakami 104). It is in this passage where Murakami fully develops the theme of Imagination as central to “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.” Frog is not real, but he is simultaneously real to Katagiri. What we imagine can have real benefits and consequences to us as individuals. 

The role of intertextuality begins on this page. Frog cites Joseph Conrad, “True terror is the kind that men feel toward their imagination.” When combined with the ghastly images of Tokyo and rubble from before, one begins to understand the psychological terror Katagiri is experiencing. Worm is imagined underneath his workplace, and therefore, Frog needs to be imagined to stop Worm. 

In his imagination, Katagiri justifies his life and offers himself needed acknowledgment through Frog. Katagiri and Frog’s battle against Worm will be a “lonely battle” that gains “no one’s sympathy” and no one’s praise (Murakami 104). The word choice of ‘battle’ and ‘combat’ is used not just to describe Worm, but Katagiri’s entire life, “He had weathered sixteen years of daily combat” without sympathy or praise already (Murakami 96). Katagiri is utterly unacknowledged until he conceives Frog who gives him the most sincere compliment in, “Tokyo can only be saved by a person like you.” 

This heroic purpose and call to action fulfills an emptiness in Katagiri. Without Frog, his depression and low-self esteem could potentially result in catastrophe. Suicide is never directly mentioned by Murakami, but it is alluded to enough through intertextual references to Leo Tolstoy’s 1873 classic, Anna Karenina, whose main characters, Levin and Anna respectively, both have thoughts of suicide. 

When discussing the battle with Worm, Katagiri asks Frog what Frog will do without his help. Frog answers, “My chances of beating him by myself are just slightly better than Anna Karenina’s chances of beating that speeding locomotive.” In other words, he says fighting Worm alone is suicide. 

Murakami’s work seems to express the notion that Katagiri is dreaming most, if not all, of the events of this story. A detail that adds mystery to his dreams or justifies Frog’s existence is the fact that Katagiri has not read Tolstoy’s gargantuan novel, but “Frog was very fond of Anna Karenina” (Murakami 105). Katagiri needs some unconscious understanding of the classic, as Frog’s dialogue highlights the climax of Anna’s tragedy.

Anna Karenina commits suicide by jumping in front of a train. 

To best understand Frog’s allusion, I read all 754 pages of Anna Karenina. While Anna is the titular character, she is not so much the main character as a stone thrown into the lake of the plot, causing ripples between everyone else in Russia’s high-society families. Anna has an affair with Count Vronsky, starting a downward spiral of shame and misery. Levin, the main character, also considers suicide despite being a happy and hardworking man. The novel ultimately reflects on life and death itself, questioning the meaning of human existence. 

As Katagiri questions the meaning of his life, the thematic connections are strong. 

Levin expresses the contradictions of human emotions by saying “I am happy, but dissatisfied with myself… When I think about myself, and compare myself with others, especially with my brother, I feel I’m a poor creature” (Tolstoy 519). Katagiri undeniably compares himself with others. His self-conscious monologue about his physical and social defects highlight this, and his relationship with his siblings is one where he feels like the loser. This uncelebrated and fruitless position which he’s been in for sixteen years demands an elevation.

Alexey Alexandrovitch, Anna’s husband who has been cheated on, too needs elevation, “It was such a necessity for him in his humiliation to have some elevated standpoint, however imaginary” (Tolstoy 473). The focus on imagination and perspective connects to Katagiri, who is undeniably imagining Frog, Worm, and the events of the story. The only acknowledgement Katagiri receives is from a six-foot tall, talking frog, and if together they save Tokyo, Katagiri will be a hero to a hundred and fifty-thousand people. 

When Anna goes down the dark spiral toward suicidal ideation, she says, “To escape; so then one must escape: why not put out the light when there’s nothing more to look at, when it’s sickening to look at it all?” The use of escape is repeated again before she steps in front of the locomotive, “I will punish him and escape from every one and from myself” (Tolstoy 705, 706). Anna’s suicide is multifaceted. It is done out of the hopelessness and unchangeable nature of her position as a shamed woman in high-society, and it is done out of revenge and spite to her lover who she believes to love her less than before. Her tragic decision is a declaration to ‘look at me.’

If Katagiri does have suicidal intentions, it is easy to believe it would be out of a similar desire to be seen and acknowledged. His position in life is entirely unappreciated by his siblings and coworkers, and he has no other relations. Katagiri’s statement, “I don’t know why I’m even living,” relates to the conclusion of Vronsky’s character who says, “My use as a man is that life’s worth nothing to me” (Tolstoy 721). After Anna’s suicide, Vronsky goes off to war with the belief in heroism and doing something greater than oneself to fill the void of a meaningless life. This belief in doing something greater than oneself is similar to Katagiri’s imaginary battle with Worm to save Tokyo from destruction. 

Until a certain point, Murakami builds a belief and reality of Frog, disputing notions of imagination and hallucination. Things change when Katagiri is “shot on the evening of February 17” before he can help Frog fight Worm. He wakes up in a hospital, concerned about Frog and the earthquake. The nurse reveals the unreliability of Katagiri’s character and Murakami’s scenes, “I’m sorry, Mr. Katagiri, but you haven’t been shot” (Murakami 106, 107). 

If the gun and bullet are not real, then the Big Bear case may not be real either. If Katagiri envisions himself getting shot, then he can also envision himself talking to Frog. This transition alone erases the plausibility of Frog’s existence and increases the weight of Katagiri’s imagination.

When he is ‘shot’, Katagiri “cut the switch of his imagination and sank into a weightless silence” (Murakami 106). The key use of imagination draws attention to this line, and how Katagiri simply turns on and off his mind as it suits him. Perhaps a gangster relating to his collection duties did attack him, perhaps Katagiri had a panic attack over earthquakes post-Kobe, or he could’ve been stressed from work, but he ultimately passed out unconscious in the street. His imagination justifies this with being ‘shot,’ while his imagination simultaneously stresses about the consequences of not being there to help Frog against Worm.

Frog visits Katagiri in the hospital, reassuring him that the battle had occurred nonetheless, “The whole terrible fight occurred in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there that we experience our victories and our defeats” (Murakami 110). This expression is thematically the most important in the entire story. Murakami’s work, such as Kafka on the Shore, cherishes the value and power of imagination. While one may ridicule Katagiri’s imaginary battle of Frog and Worm deep underneath his workplace in Tokyo, this imaginary battle has significance and weight. It symbolizes a conflict about his fears and his depressive position in life. 

Anna Karenina reads as a work in which Tolstoy explores the mental battles of why one may live or why one may die. In the closing remarks, Levin wins the battle over himself and determines, “Every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it” (Tolstoy 745). This powerful sentiment about life being as meaningful as one determines it to be leaves an impression on any reader, and it would have been on Murakami’s radar because of the multiple allusions to Anna Karenina in his own story. The imaginary battle between Frog and Worm represents Katagiri assigning a heroic purpose to his life. It is also a battle between his will to live and his will to die.

Frog describes the battle to Katagiri, “Worm tried to frighten you away with phantoms of the darkness, but you stood your ground. Darkness vied with light in a horrific battle.” This description of darkness and light sounds like a traditional yin and yang conflict. It is weighing life vs death, and death is an option to Katagiri, Levin, Anna, and all people.

The battle is a draw; Frog laments that, “I was finally unable to defeat Worm” (Murakami 111). Darkness and death are inevitable and natural parts of life, so they cannot be destroyed, and they are not necessarily evil. 

Another intertextual reference is supplied by Frog at this point. He explains that during his combat with Worm he thought about Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story, “White Nights.” This allusion further deepens Katagiri’s character and Murakami’s literary influences. Dostoevsky’s 1848 story occurs across four nights, where each night conversations are shared between two characters in dreams. Their position as “dreamers” are central to their identities. 

The narrator of “White Nights”, like Katagiri, is depressed. In the exposition, there is the statement, “I had been oppressed by a strange despondency,” and an outcast nature is depicted by the phrase, “No one – absolutely no one – invited me; it seemed they had forgotten me” (Dostoevsky 6, 8). The thematic similarities highlight the necessity of Katagiri’s dreaming in Murakami’s work. There is no significance or companionship to his life without Frog, a character he’s evidently dreamed up.

Imagination, the central theme of Super-Frog, is “fostered by solitude and idleness” in Dostoevsky’s work (Dostoevsky 21). Katagiri has not read Anna Karenina nor “White Nights” based on his desire to read them and have literary conversations with Frog, but dreams are mysterious, and in Katagiri’s solitude, a literate, talking Frog can be produced even if Katagiri himself can not fully understand its references. 

Referencing Anna Karenina’s suicide again, Frog says, “My enemy, is among other things, the me inside me. Inside me is the un-me. The locomotive is coming” (Murakami 111). If it is all a dream, Frog is the “me inside of me” for Katagiri. Frog is the heroic and confident foil for the ordinary and insecure man. Frog did not win the battle against darkness, merely delayed it, and the “locomotive,” death, is unavoidable. 

After this, Frog does die. He bursts into maggots and grotesque fluid. In the most disturbing passage of the story, bugs from Frog’s corpse crawl into Katagiri’s anus and “Crowds of slimy worms raced each other up the walls to the ceiling, where they covered the fluorescent lights” (Murakami 113). This disturbing sequence ends abruptly when the lights are flipped on and the hospital nurse inquires if Katagiri has had another bad dream.

If the reader has still believed in Frog’s existence, this final sequence confirms Katagiri’s unreliability and his shift into dreams. As for Katagiri himself, he is still alive. I believe he will remain alive, though something has been lost in the process of the story. Frog may not have been real, but Frog embodied real values and purpose to Katagiri, supplying him with a reason to live. The imaginary, mental battle of wanting to live vs wanting to die has resulted in a draw, but a hundred and fifty-thousand people have been saved, and Katagiri was one of those people for now.

Katagiri’s final word is “locomotive.” Through Anna, we know the train symbolizes death, and it could potentially allude to future suicide. The train of death came for Frog, and as a consequence, Katagiri’s imagination is no more. He can no longer conceive magical adventures or heroic possibilities to his dull existence. Before going to the hospital he “cut the switch of his imagination” and the closing lines confirm that Katagiri’s dreams are over, “Then he closed his eyes and sank into a restful, dreamless sleep” (Murakami 114). 

Dreamless is a key word of emphasis in the resolution because the reader will understand that “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” is a catalog of dreamlike conversations and experiences, similar to “White Nights,” where the lonely protagonist dreams with a friend. Katagiri is fond of Frog, however imagined, because Frog sees the value of life within him. Frog’s battle with Worm represents the light and darkness of Katagiri’s mind in turmoil. Katagiri’s collapse in the street could even be a suicide attempt, plausible through the Anna Karenina references. Whatever happened, he is still alive in the hospital, and the ‘battle’ is a draw, but Frog and what he represents have been sacrificed in the process.

Without Frog, Katagiri will return to a dreamless life and be alone again like in his status quo throughout the last sixteen years. The daily “combat” he’s endured will play out again and again. The fight for his life will repeat without Frog’s help.

The locomotive, or death, waits at the end for him as it waits for everyone. To avoid an early demise like Anna, Katagiri will have to assign meaning and goodness to his experiences like Levin. In the now dreamless world, this meaning will have to come from himself and not Frog.

As Frog said, “Ours will be a lonely battle.” 

Your fantastic world will grow pale, your dreams will fade and die and will fall like the yellow leaves from the trees… – Dostoevsky, “White Nights”

Citations

Murakami, Haruki. after the quake. Vintage, 2002. 

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. White Nights & Other Stories. Project Gutenberg, 2011.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash