Matteo Giacchè

• PhD student in Japanese studies, Newcastle University
• New Meanings Through Music in the Novels of Murakami Haruki

Matteo Giacchè is a PhD student in Japanese studies at the School of Modern Languages. Before coming to Newcastle, he undertook a BA and MA in Japanese studies at Sapienza University of Rome. From 2015 to 2016 he was a research student at The University of Tokyo. As a teaching assistant he has contributed to courses on Japanese history and society, Japanese literature and Reflective Research. His research interests include music in Contemporary Japanese literature and manga, particularly its relation to gender and political issues, character construction and the unconscious. He has published a book chapter on Mizuno Hideko (Manga Academica, vol.11 2018), pioneer of music manga, and a paper discussing the literary significance of Italian politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison in Japan (Proceedings of AATI Conference 2019).

New Meanings Through Music in the Novels of Murakami Haruki
This dissertation shows how music – operatic arias, pop tunes, and jazz riffs – participates in characters’ construction and the unconscious in novels by Murakami Haruki. The study explores how musical instruments and melodies, viewed through the prism of affect theory, serve as conduits for characters’ emotions and interpersonal connections within realistic settings, to then move into an exploration of the unconscious through music and psychoanalysis. The study is continuously funded by the Great British Sasakawa Foundation.

Main supervisor:
Dr Gitte Marianne Hansen

Additional supervisor:
Dr Fernando Beleza