“Sleep” by Haruki Murakami is a short story of a woman with insomnia. It describes the protagonist’s experience and the changes sleeplessness brings to her life. In “Sleep,” Murakami exposes how the protagonist’s insomnia creates a split between mind and body, suggesting she exists in two simultaneous yet distinct states. Through her seventeen days without sleep, what begins as a physical-mental division evolves into a deeper fracture between her social roles and her autonomous self, particularly her pre-marriage identity as a passionate reader. While this division initially appears liberating, allowing her to pursue her intellectual interests beyond social constraints, the story ultimately reveals how such apparent freedom leads to psychological fragmentation, suggesting that attempting to completely separate one’s authentic desires from social obligations results in self-destruction.

The story establishes the initial mind-body split through the protagonist’s first encounter with sleeplessness in college. When she introduces her insomnia, which occurred before marriage suppressed her autonomous identity, she recalls, “My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake” (75). The description of her mind as “staring, breathing” gives it an almost physical presence, a separate entity capable of watching and existing independently from her body. This separation becomes evident when she describes her “physical self” in the third person (“it could feel”), marking the beginning of her detachment from her corporeal existence. Furthermore, the phrase “both a body … and a mind” explicitly reveals the separate existences of body and mind. Through her description of being “on the verge” of sleep and wakefulness, we see the tension between her body’s natural desire for rest and her mind’s stubborn resistance to it. This early split through sleeplessness still maintains clear boundaries between her mind and body, setting the stage for the more profound division between her two different identities.

The mind-body split evolves into a more complex separation between her social and autonomous selves as her insomnia returns after marriage. Before marriage, she was a dedicated scholar and a passionate reader who “majored in English literature and got good grades” and who “had read every book in the grade-school library” (87). However, after marriage, she finds herself unable to truly read, as her mind drifts to “my son, or shopping, or the freezer’s needing to be fixed,” until she had “become accustomed in this way to a life without books” (87). This shows how domestic obligations gradually suppressed her intellectual self. However, her insomnia creates space for this latent identity to reemerge by again separating her body and mind. She explains, “While my body went about its business, my mind floated in its own inner space. I ran the house without a thought in my head, feeding snacks to my son, chatting with my husband” (96). As in college, her two states, “body” and “mind” are differentiated. However, these states have now evolved to take charge of her two different identities: her identity as a mother and a wife and another identity as an intellectual reader. For instance, the phrase “body went about its business” reduces her house duties to mere mechanical routine performed by her body “without a thought in my head,” where ‘thought’ represents her mind separated from the body. While performing mundane household tasks, “All the time I had been washing the dishes, my only thoughts had been of Vronsky and of how an author like Tolstoy managed to control his characters so skillfully” (92). This quote particularly demonstrates how her body is separated, with her mind remains fully engaged with the novel. The expression “all the time” suggests that the separation is more sustained and complete than her college experience. After all, the quote shows her mind is dominated by her autonomous ego, a passionate reader. In this way, her mind enjoying her lost passion for literature while her body performs house choirs seems to suggest the positive aspect of this identity division.

However, this partition between social and egoistic identities ultimately collapses as her true self becomes increasingly dominant, resulting in a confusion of identities. Her detachment from her family role, which her social identity originally took charge of, becomes clear when she reflects on her emotional distance from her family: “I felt no particular love for my son and husband. The affection I had felt for them had vanished somewhere along the way” (89). The extremely simple expression “no particular love” combined with the word choice of “vanished” represents a complete emotional void rather than a gradual decline. It is as if her attachment to her family has disappeared without a trace. The expression “somewhere along the way” further underscores her disconnection, meaning she can’t even pinpoint when this lack of affection occurred. The fragmentation of her consciousness reaches its climatic point in the final scene. When she is alone in her car trying to reminisce about the past, she says, “I come to myself again” (108). This statement is ambiguous because we cannot determine whether the “myself” she returns to is her role as wife and mother or her autonomous identity as a reader, suggesting these once-distinct selves have begun to blur destructively. Her psychological fragmentation manifests in increasingly disconnected observations: “How long have I been sitting here? Hands on the wheel. Eyes closed. Staring into the sleepless darkness” (108). The progression from temporal disorientation to dissociated body parts further fractures her coherent identity. Her question about time (“How long”) reveals she has lost track of reality, while the disconnected references to “Hands” and “Eyes” suggest she no longer experiences her body as a unified whole. Most disturbing is the paradoxical image of “Staring” with “Eyes closed,” which implies her breakdown of normal perception. In addition, the fragmented sentence structure here itself reflects her chaotic state of mind. Most revealing is her realization that “the me who used to go to sleep every night is not the real me, and the memories from back then are not really mine” (108). The repetitive negative expressions “not the real me” and “not really mine” emphasize her rejection of her past identity, while the possessive “mine” ironically emphasizes her uncertainty about which “me” can claim ownership of these memories. Her body, once able to perform house chores while her mind was elsewhere, now fails her at a crucial moment. And she becomes paralyzed when faced with danger.

Through the protagonist’s experience from initial mind-body separation to complete psychological fragmentation, Murakami’s “Sleep” offers a warning about the dangers of viewing personal desires and social roles as mutually exclusive states. While modern society often encourages us to “find ourselves” by breaking free from social constraints, the protagonist’s descent into chaos suggests that authentic self-realization cannot come from rejecting our connections to others. This short story thus challenges discourse about individual freedom, suggesting that true authenticity must find ways to integrate, rather than escape, our obligations to others.


Works Cited

  • Murakami, Haruki. “Sleep.” The Elephant Vanishes, Vintage Books, 1993, pp. 74-110.