Murakami’s Stories and WWII - Claire

The use of war in Samsa in Love suggests that Samsa is waking up to WWII. It seems like Murakami has timed Samsa’s awakening after Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia, but that Nazi troops are carrying out some kind of military action in the city. The locksmith girl tells him that “the streets are crawling with soldiers and tanks” and that “people are being rounded up” as an explanation for why she is there to replace the lock and not her brothers. When I read this, I immediately thought back to how Samsa wakes up completely alone in the house in the locked room, but goes downstairs to find five plates of fresh, untouched food. This, combined with the girl’s observation about the locked room: 

“ “I don’t mean to pry, but what was going on in that room on the second floor? Why did your parents need such a big lock for a room that held nothing but a bed, and why did it bother them so much when the lock got broken? And what about those boards nailed across the window? Was something locked up in there—is that it?” “

suggests to me that the original inhabitants of the home were hiding Jews in the locked room. Upon learning that Nazi police were carrying out some kind of action in Prague, the family flees along with the people they hid.

But, if my theory is right, why is Gregor Samsa waking up after all these years to the fall of Prague? This may be Murakami’s homage to Kafka and how he may have interpreted WWII into writing, as Kafka died in the early 1920s. He incorporates the Kafkaesque process of Samsa learning how to be a person in society and juxtaposes it against a seemingly meaningless war, while demonstrating the war’s impacts with the family’s absence. This makes for a bizarre story and leaves me with little hope for Samsa.