The Desire to Forget

 A number of stories that were gone over so far seem to deal with a person's trauma or haunting of a past, but it isn't always fully clear as to the details of what happened, parts are forgotten or are tried to not be acknowledged by the recounter. In The Year of Spaghetti, the protagonist seemingly is in a state of cooking spaghetti as an excuse to get away from real world commitments or the business of people he knew in the past. The Second Bakery Attack has the protagonist recount his odd feelings towards his strange burglary, but those past quarrels are not immediately linked to the current oddities happening to him now, almost like he doesn't want to consider it to be relevant in the present and bury it in the past. The Zoo Attack has the woman recounting her experiences coming back to Japan from oversea territories but it is explained that during a crucial interaction with a U.S. submarine she fell unconscious for a time, until the traveling boat reached docked. These all have a connection of trying to not acknowledge the past, not necessarily move on from it but to not think that it even existed, which seems very much along the lines of trauma and the brain trying to erase the source as a precautionary measure. It's very interesting that this theme comes up so often from Murakami, the past coming to haunt the present day was also the case in A Wild Sheep Chase, with Boku's friend the Rat. What makes this theme so alluring to Murakami? It probably isn't a message of getting people to face their past traumas and overcome them, as the stories of A Year of Spaghetti and The Zoo Attack don't have those missing memories or past grievances cleared up, they're merely explained and left like that. Although it could be the case with those stories that they're meant to show that not facing past trauma leaves one to end up being a bit of a hollow person, that this is what can come of people if trauma isn't dealt with, being an indirect message to get people to face trauma. I'm unsure of how personal this theme of past grievances is to Murakami, but I can imagine one connection with his thoughts on Japan's World War II actions and subsequent actions of not fully apologizing or acknowledging the crimes Japan committed during the war, but whether this is an overarching idea for him or coincidental connections is something that I do not know.

-David Barnes