Transitivity and Narrative Voice: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Analysis of Haruki Murakami’s Short Stories

Abstract

This study examines how narrative voice and transitivity patterns intersect in four of Haruki Murakami’s short stories, i.e. “Cream,” “With the Beatles,” “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,” and “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” as translated into English. Using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the framework, eighty clauses from each story (320 clauses total) were analyzed to uncover how Murakami’s narrators construct experience through process types, participant roles, and circumstances. A mixed-method approach combined quantitative frequency analysis with qualitative stylistic interpretation. Findings reveal that material and mental processes are consistently prominent, encoding the narrators’ actions and introspections in tandem. Transitivity profile of each story aligns with its thematic focus: self-reflection in “Cream,” nostalgia and memory in “With the Beatles,” imaginative speculation in “Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova,” and confessional dialogue in “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey.” Despite being English translations, the clauses maintain Murakami’s distinctive narrative voice, characterized by a blend of the mundane and the surreal. The narrators frequently serve as both Actors and Sensers, linguistically foregrounding their subjective reality. The study concludes that Murakami’s transitivity patterns encode a first-person narrative ethos: mundane actions and psychological perceptions intertwine to produce the author’s signature tone of subdued alienation and “dreamlike” realism.