510: From my draft, here is a reworked discussion of the mirror and the spiral

The mirror can be the starting point of a visual spiral of reality as is seen when, in Higuchinsky’s film Uzumaki[1], Shuichi’s father films himself reflecting in a mirror on his way to a watery, spiraling death in a washing machine. This then also becomes a spiraling point of reflection for the other characters who are then able to piece together the possessing power spirals hold over their town. As they attempt to decipher the meaning in the particulars of this death, they discover that the word transliterated as kagami is the same set of syllables (although written with different characters) meaning both mirror and snake, the snake’s coils being a natural version of the uzumaki or spiral[2]. The snake is also here connected with eternal life, which in this instance this can only be seen as infinite through reincarnation, or a spiraling transmutation of soul. This town seems susceptible to this spiral possession – as well a lack of the recognition of this fact until it is too late – in part because most of its members are living so fully on the surface that they do not have the depth needed of and for reflection. Without the true spiraling of meaning brought about by reflection, their lives are merely repetitive actions. Yet when one descends deeply into such powerful reflection, one can lose the self and the dayworld in the spiraling interconnectedness recognizable through such an act. Hillman would not see this as a negative loss, for he argues that we must leave the dayworld meanings behind us and seek the metaphoric in underworld imaginings.

The reflecting power of mirrors is also used by Murakami to bring about Boku’s moment of epiphany when he realizes that the Rat is dead, a ghost who has visited him initially in the form of the Sheep Man, and more solidly setting Boku on a path of self-reflection and the realization that his true quest was personal rather than solely for the mysterious star-marked sheep. After cleaning the mirror during his purification of the house (and symbolically of himself), Murakami’s narrator relates:

The mirror reflected my image from head to toe, without warping, almost pristinely. I stood there and looked at myself. Nothing new. I was me, with my usual nothing-special expression. My image was unnecessarily sharp, however. I wasn’t seeing my mirror-flat mirror-image. It wasn’t myself I was seeing; on the contrary, it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the real me. (318-319)

This is a clear example of Frye’s comment in The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance that, “When the action passes from one level to another through the recognition scene, we have a feeling of going through some sort of gyre or vortex, to use another Yeats image, a feeling we express in the phrase we so inevitably use when summarizing a romantic plot: ‘it turns out that . . .” (91). Hillman places great value on the implications of the mirror when he writes that,

So again, entering the underworld is like entering the mode of reflection, mirroring, which suggests that we may enter the underworld by means of reflection, by reflective means: pausing, pondering, change of pace, voice, or glance, dropping levels. Such reflection is less willed and directed; it is less determinedly introspective like a heroic descent into the underworld to see what is going on here. (52)

So, not only is Murakami using this scene to bring about transformation through reflection, but he is also indicating that Boku is now entering another underworld labyrinth, the labyrinth of the self.

That Boku’s revelatory experience happens when he sees himself in the mirror but not the form of the Sheep Man who he can see in the room (and who leaves physical evidence of his presence in the form of a whisky glass and cigarette butts), hints at the close relationship between this spiral and madness. Boku comments, “I checked the Sheep Man in the mirror. But there wasn’t any Sheep Man in the mirror! There was nobody in the living room at all, only an empty sofa. In the mirror world, I was alone. Terror shot through my spine” (322). In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault suggests that, “The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive” (27). While Boku may very well be mad, this incident marks an important point in his transition from passive to active, and if it is madness, it results in a healthy self-preservation and the culmination of his quest, and thus is a madness which works in his favor, allowing himself to perceive some truth about himself and his wild sheep chase.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye also recognizes this as an association of the spiral and the labyrinth with the hero’s point of epiphany, “the symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment” (203). Perhaps in this schema, it is actually the very contradictions and convergences between the spiral and the labyrinth which compose the epiphany. The labyrinth can be seen as the “undisplaced apocalyptic world,” and the spiral suggests the “cyclical world of nature,” and in the conversation between these elements, one is assaulted with their multiple, convergent, closely related, and yet contradictory aspects. In the act of interpretation, it is important to accept the possibility of an endless spiral of meaning circumscribed by the tall walls of the labyrinth. The point of epiphany would thus be a rare moment of alignment which allows one to see the beauty and complexity of these relationships as a manic, dynamic whole.

[1] This title is translated as Spiral or Vortex, and the word is used throughout the film for these ideas.

[2] In an interesting counterpoint to this Japanese perspective, Frye argues that the snake is generally seen as a demonic animal, and yet even in the West, he acknowledges, the snake is also used to symbolize infinity when fashioned into an ouroboros. In spite of the snake’s positive connotations for this character in Uzumaki, it does lead to his physical death, and the audience is not given to believe that reincarnation is taken seriously by any of the other characters, rendering this highly symbolic death futile.