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标题：Last Days of Empire: DeLillo's America and Murakami's Japan
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作者：David Palmer
期刊名称：Transnational Literature
电子版ISSN：1836-4845
出版年度：2009
卷号：2
期号：1
出版社：Flinders Humanities Research Centre
摘要：During the decade following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, there was a revival of the concept of empire applied to contemporary politics.1 In the 1990s, two major novels, one Japanese – The Windup Bird Chronicle (Nejimaki-dori Kuroniku), by Haruki Murakami – the other American – Underworld, by Don DeLillo –anticipated this vision of empire in their respective countries.2 Even the cover of DeLillo’s novel has a prophetic quality with its silhouette photo of a nineteenth century church in Manhattan’s Wall Street district in the foreground and behind it reaching into a black sky the World Trade Center towers, which were standing when the novel was published but destroyed four years later. The United States has been an empire since the opening of the twentieth century, but by the twenty-first century it faced decline, its symbolic ‘last days’ marked by the terrible recession that began in 2008 and indicated an economic power shift to East Asia. Did the decline actually begin during the Vietnam War, a war the U.S. had lost by 1975, followed by a decade of de-industrialization and urban decay prior to the financial debacle in the next century? Japan, the nation with the world’s second largest economy, also became an empire in the twentieth century, but suffered total defeat in World War II by August 1945. Although its imperial empire,s