There is almost always a sense of ambiguity in Murakami’s works, and it often leaves a feeling of confusion or questioning in his readers. This feeling has often led me to ask myself: Just how much should I be analyzing? How far should I continue to try and peel back the different layers of the piece I just read? Am I looking for meaning where there is none?
While doing research for my Murakami presentation, I read several interviews of him discussing his approach to writing. One of the biggest things he said that stood out to me was in an interview with the Paris Review: “When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.” Murakami has always struck me as a sort of stream-of-consciousness writer, but I never realized just how much he just went with his own flow. This, combined with another interview with The New Yorker in which Murakami talks about how he acknowledges the existence of the “unreal world” in his work, even claiming that he enters that world himself when he sits down to write, made me reconsider the way I approach reading and understanding his writing. I decided that, rather than try and decipher the meaning in every strange or unrealistic aspect of his stories, I should take a page out of his protagonists’ book and simply accept what comes.
This is not to say that Murakami doesn’t address deeper themes within his work. Murakami has said that he aims to write about difficult and complicated ideas using language that is easy to understand. It’s clear that there is more than meets the eye in many, if not all of his works. For example, the excerpt we read from Sputnik Sweetheart hints at some kind of trauma and/or battle with the self. Another example concerns our discussion about A Wild Sheep Chase and whether the characters were “functions of [Boku]’s psyche”. There was a lot of talk about whether or not the whole journey-people and all- were in Boku’s mind. Though this is definitely a possibility, for me personally it would somewhat undermine the whole story. I chose to believe that, in whatever universe in which this story takes place, all of it actually happened- the strange sheep hopping between people, the magical ears, the conversation with the already-deceased Rat, and so on. All of these mystical elements don’t necessarily represent some deeper idea individually, but come together to collaborate on some deeper purpose- maybe to drive Boku’s personal development.
For me personally, I am working on the balance of accepting that there is a deeper meaning within Murakami’s works, but that the unrealistic, magical aspects of the “other world” are not necessarily a symbol or metaphor for something. Instead, they are more like a vehicle for him to express those deeper ideas. And sometimes, maybe he just includes things because he likes them.
(“I like wells very much. I like refrigerators. I like elephants. There are many things that I like. When I write about the things I like, I’m happy.”- Murakami in The New Yorker)
-Angela Pyo
A link to 2 of the interviews, if anyone is interested:
https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/hardboiled-detective-fiction-and-haruki-murakami/
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/the-underground-worlds-of-haruki-murakami
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