Darkness, Light, and the Moon in Murakami

 Murakami often employs light symbolism to suggest a shift in reality and to potentially mark a point of transcendence. In Norwegian Wood, Naoko’s fear of the deep well that people sometimes fall into with no return is representative of her struggle with mental stability as well as her entrapment within her own psyche. In The Strange Library, as the boy descends towards the reading room, he becomes engulfed in total darkness which now separates him from the conventional world. Whether the reading room is a construction in the boy’s psyche following a traumatic experience or a regular dream, there is an overlap between the two worlds which is not purely metaphorical but actually very physical: the boy leaves the library with no shoes on and when he returns home, his pet starling is gone. Interestingly enough, right before the boy flees from the library with the Sheep Man, he notices that the girl who often brought him food seems to be disintegrating in the moonlight. Specifically, it is the new moon that seems to play a crucial role in the development of events. One of the wives of the Ottoman tax collector - whose identity the boy had temporarily assumed while reading - mentions how “the new moon will shape our destinies”  (17). Moonlight, being the reflected light of the sun, can be representative of the relationship between dreams, the psyche, and reality. Because of the new moon, the setting of the library is primarily dark with minimal light. In Norwegian Wood, Naoko mentions how from the bottom of the well, you can see a faint streak of moonlight which is the only thing dissipating the complete darkness. So, if the bottom of the well and the lowest level of the library where the reading room is located, represent our consciousness, then what does the light represent? In Norwegian Wood, the light seems to be a glimmer of hope but in The Strange Library, the moonlight harms the girl who the protagonist wants to help. Or maybe the moonlight did not hurt her but rather helped her to transform. In that sense, light can be anything that causes a change in someone’s core identity which allows them to escape from the prison of their own mind. 

Ruska