Our paper, Western and Japanese Signifiers in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, is part of The University of Derby's Literature and History Public Conference 2026: Books that Changed the World. Our paper examines how Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood constructs meaning through a network of interconnected Western and Japanese signifiers, which operate across the narrative rather than functioning as isolated references. These signifiers, such as the character of Storm Trooper, who participates in Japanese practices like Rajio Taiso, or Western cultural references such as The Beatles, The Great Gatsby, do not remain culturally separate, but are continually brought into relation with one another. In doing so, they form a chain of signification in which meaning emerges through their interaction. Rather than residing within any single reference.

Through this network of signification, Murakami produces a form of cultural recognisability that contributes to the novel’s global circulation. Western signifiers provide points of famililarity for international readers, while their integration within a Japanese narrative context allows these references to be reconfigured. This interplay does not simply make the text more accessible, but enables it to articulate experiences, particularly those relating to loneliness, relationships, and mental health, in a way that resonates across cultural contexts without reducing them to fixed meanings.

To support this movement of meaning, the paper will draw on Lacanian theory of signification, specifically his distintinction between the signifier and the signified from his essay ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’. It through the instability of this relation that meaning in Norwegian Wood remains mobile rather than fixed, as signifiers recur, shift in function, and generate new associations across the narrative. This framework allows the paper to show how Murakami’s cultural references do not produce singular meanings, but instead operate through displacement and deferral.