Thoughts on the magical realism in The Zoo Attack

 I like the Zoo Attack for its magical realism. Murakami creates a unique writing style that is addictive to readers who like it by warping realistic accounts with unrealistic or supernatural events. He also invites his readers to think about these events' connotations and significance without giving a standard answer. 

For example, at the beginning of the chapter, Nutmeg was migrating back to Japan from Manchuria with her mother by ship, and a USS submarine intercepted the ship. All of that, including the open-fire ultimatum, seems realistic enough, but then Nutmeg fell asleep amid all the hustle. What's more, in her coma, she saw the events going on in a zoo back in Manchuria's capital, and she slept for 20 hours. How does that work? Well, in east Asian tradition, one's dream can be the means to connect to someone else, by having that other person entering one's dream and conversing, or by entering the other's experience. Some people believe such a dream predicts an important matter that concerns both the dreamer and the dreamed person. Nutmeg then revealed to Boku that her father was a vet, although she did not confirm that she saw her father in her dream. If I were reading the book as a whole, at this point, I would anticipate her father to have died in Manchuria, and I would want to keep reading to figure that out. This is how Murakami's magical realism attracts and addicts his readers. 

The more profound usage of magical realism lies within Nutmeg's dream. At first, the soldiers received an order to kill the animals by poison. It turned out there was no poison for them to use, and the soldiers had to kill the animals with guns. The soldiers killed many predators but decided to not kill the elephants. Then some Chinese workers appeared to take care of the bodies. I think declaring the whole process as realistic is a stretch. For one, the twist of the poison seems purposefully done by Murakami to present animals' massacre. Then he described how difficult it was for the soldiers to kill animals. Ordinarily, soldiers are trained to kill people on the battlefields, and animals are caged, so this is another disjoint between the story and reality. My interpretation is that Murakami wanted to emphasize how inexperienced these soldiers were. One soldier grew up in a peasant's family and enlisted only for a year. Of course, such an amateur was not ready to kill a big animal, let alone a human. With that in mind, readers can then interpret this book through an anti-war perspective, which deepens Murakami's significance. 

Marshal