The Genius of Haruki Murakami
Perhaps you love someone that does not love you and never will. This is a problem that cannot be solved. It’s like admitting you have herpes. It’s incurable. And that, precisely that, is what makes Haruki Murakami’s writing so powerful in a literary sense. A good writer can enable you to feel a little bit less alone in an experience that is horrifically isolating. They can give you permission to simply feel what you feel. It’s not beautiful. It’s not something you or anybody else can solve. It does not get better with time. It does not teach you a valuable lesson. It simply hurts. It hurts worse than anything you’ve ever experienced in your life. And so it is, therefore, unmentionable in polite conversation. But when you see that same longing, that same melancholic awareness of something essential that is missing in your life reflected in the characters of Murakami’s stories, you realize, as James Baldwin once wrote, that those things which torment you the most are precisely the things which connect you with all the people who are alive and have ever been alive.
I had learned one thing from Kizuki’s death, and I believed that I had made it a part of myself in the form of a philosophy: “Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life.”
By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning. (Norwegian Wood, pg. 273)“We’re crying for all the things you can’t cry for,” whispers Kiki. Slowly, as if to spell it out. “We shed tears for all the things you never let yourself shed tears, we weep for all the things you did not weep.” (Dance, Dance, Dance, pg. 371)
Murakami novels often involve a strange mixture of real and mystical, explained & unexplained, anticipation and resolution. In one interview Murakami said he likes to intentionally leave blanks in his stories “just like omitting the root from the chord in jazz.” And I think this is one reason his stories resonate so deeply, because life can often feel like something essential is missing.
I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself. (South of the Border, West of the Sun, pg. 208)
The following aside in one of Murakami’s early works gives us a glimpse into how his tendency to incorporate magical, often absurd plot devices in his stories isn’t a slip away from reality, but rather, for him, a step closer to describing reality as it actually appears.
I dreamed about a dairy cow. Rather nice and small this cow, the type that looked like she’d been through a lot. We passed each other on a big bridge. It was a pleasant spring afternoon. The cow was carrying an old electric fan in one hoof, and she asked whether I wouldn’t buy it from her cheap.
“I don’t have much money,” I said. Really, I didn’t.
“Well then,” said the cow, “I might trade it to you for a pair of pliers.”
Not a bad deal. So the cow and I went home together, and I turned the house upside down looking for the pliers. But they were nowhere to be found.
“Odd,” I said, “they were just here yesterday.” (A Wild Sheep Chase, pg. 77–78)
As he said in one interview, “people say it’s magic realism — but in the depths of my soul, it’s just realism.”
There are symbolic dreams — dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities — realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councilors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.
Yet the fact that the cow chose me to obtain her pliers changes everything. This plunges me into a whole universe of alternative considerations. And in this universe of alternative considerations, the major problem is that everything becomes protracted and complex. I ask the cow, “Why do you want pliers?” And the cow answers, “I’m really hungry.” So I ask, “Why do you need pliers if you’re hungry?” The cow answers, “to attach them to branches of the peach tree.” I ask, “Why a peach tree?” To which the cow replies, “Well, that’s why I traded away my fan, isn’t it?” And so on and so forth. The thing is never resolved, I begin to resent the cow, and the cow begins to resent me. (A Wild Sheep Chase, pg. 79)
Many psychotherapists including Freud point out that, at bottom, we crave most of all some kind of certainty. We want to know that we won’t die, that we won’t suffer, that the person we love will always love us back, and yet, Murakami’s stories embody the tragic, yet true fact that we can never truly be certain of any of this. Neither on a universal, scientific level:
“Why do you like jellyfish so much?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I guess I think they’re cute,” she said. “But one thing did occur to me when I was really focused on them. What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that’s not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that. Don’t you agree? Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what’s underneath the skin.” (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, pg. 225–226)
Nor, perhaps even more tragically, on an interpersonal level:
What had I ever known about Kumiko? Soundlessly, I crushed the empty beer can in my hand and threw it into the trash. Could it be true that the Kumiko I had thought I understood, the Kumiko I had held close to me and joined my body with over the years as my wife — that Kumiko was nothing but the most superficial layer of the person Kumiko herself, just as the greater part of this world belongs in fact to the realm of the jellyfish? If so, what about those six years we had spent together? What had they been? What had they meant? (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, pg. 278)
We are, therefore, always naked, always vulnerable. But in this radical vulnerability, Murakami finds and offers as a gift to the reader a subtle sense of humor:
“Ever read The Brothers Karamazov?” I asked.
“Once, a long time ago.”
“Well, toward the end, Alyosha is speaking to a young student named Kolya Krasotkin. And he says, Kolya, you’re going to have a miserable future. But overall, you’ll have a happy life.”
Two beers down, I hesitated before opening my third.
“When I first read that, I didn’t know what Alyosha meant,” I said. “How was it possible for a life of misery to be happy overall? But then I understood, that misery could be limited to the future.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “Not yet.” (Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, pg. 389)
a profound attitude of acceptance:
It feels like ages since I last saw you, she said. I pretended to add up the time on my fingers. Three years, I replied. Gone in a heartbeat.
We silently nodded at each other. We might have been sipping coffee in a café, toying with the lace curtains.
I think of you a lot, I said. It gets me feeling pretty low.
When you can’t sleep?
Yes, when I can’t sleep, I parroted.
…
She looked off into space, the sweet smile playing on her lips. It feels strange somehow, she said. Like none of it really happened.
Oh, it happened all right. But now it’s gone.
Does it make you sad?
No, I said, shaking my head. There was something that came out of nothing, and now it’s gone back to where it came from, that’s all.
We fell silent again. What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness. (Pinball, 1973, pg. 120)
and a contagious curiosity for whatever life has to offer each of us:
Humans achieve their peak in different ways. But whoever you are, once you’re over the summit, it’s downhill all the way. Nothing anyone can do about it. And the worst of it is, you never know where that peak is. You think you’re still going strong, when suddenly you’ve crossed the great divide. No one can tell. Some people peak at twelve, then lead rather uneventful lives from then on. Some carry on until they die; some die at their peak. Poets and composers have lived like furies, pushing themselves to such a pitch they’re gone by thirty. Then there are those like Picasso, who kept breaking ground until well past eighty.
And what about me?
My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. Some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pac-Man, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.
‘No promises you’re gonna be happy,’ the Sheep Man had said. ‘So you gotta dance. Dance so it all keeps spinning.’
I gave up and closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, Yuki was sitting across the table from me.
‘You okay?’ she said, concerned. ‘You looked like you blew a fuse. Did I say something wrong?’
I smiled. ‘No, it wasn’t anything you said.’
‘You just thought of something unpleasant?’
‘No, I just thought that you’re too beautiful.”
By pointing towards its absence, Murakami is also raising awareness of that which we are missing. And in that sense, what Murakami manages to capture most of all in his novels, for me, is a glimpse of the overwhelming yet beautiful mystery of reality, of which ourselves and all of our existential uncertainty is undeniably a part.
Once before, when camping on a mountaintop with some friends in the fifth or sixth grade, I had seen stars in such numbers that they filled the sky. It almost seemed as if the sky would break under the weight of all those things and come tumbling down. Never had I seen such an amazing skyful of stars. Unable to sleep after the others had drowsed off, I crawled out of the tent and lay on the ground, looking at the sky. Now and then, a shooting star would trace a bright arc across the heavens. The longer I watched, though, the more nervous it made me. There were simply too many stars, and the sky was too vast and deep. A huge, overpowering foreign object, it surrounded me, enveloped me, and made me feel almost dizzy. Until that moment, I had always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that would last forever. Or rather, I had never thought about such a thing at all. I had simply taken it for granted. But in fact, the earth was nothing but a chunk of rock floating in one little corner of the universe: a temporary foothold in the vast emptiness of space. It — and all of us with it — could be blown away tomorrow by a momentary flash of something or a tiny shift in the universe’s energy. Beneath this breathtaking skyful of stars, the uncertainty of my own existence struck me full force (though not in so many words, of course). It was a stunning discovery for a young boy. (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, pg. 248–249)