Murakami and Dreams

In a previous interview, Murakami once said: “For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. […] It's also a way of descending deep into my own consciousness. So while I see it as dreamlike, it's not fantasy. For me the dreamlike is very real.” 

From these statements, dreams can be theorized as representations of reality and “truth.”  Keeping this in mind, I started thinking about Murakami as a magical-realism writer. Based on my experience reading Murakami (all of which is limited to the readings assigned to this class), his stories often seem very “strange” and “weird” to me (but not in a bad way). The strangeness of his stories and the sometimes inexplicable nature of certain events and characters matches well with Murakami’s claim that his novels are like dreams. Our dreams are capable of portraying fantasy and reality, but while we are in that dream-state we wholeheartedly believe that everything is real. Sometimes in my dreams, events are out of sequence, sceneries suddenly change, strangers are considered trustworthy, time doesn’t exist, and people’s faces are blurred; despite this, I easily accept that where I am is reality, and the strangeness doesn’t phase me. Thus, dreaming is like stepping into another world or reality, similar to boku at the Rat’s house in A Wild Sheep Chase, or boku in the basement in The Strange Library.  In this way, the magical elements of Murakami’s stories can be described as “fantasy-like” and “dream-like” but are still depictions of reality. 

Because dreams are often nonsensical, perhaps Murakami isn’t putting too much symbolism into every little detail of his works. I don’t believe that every character of Murakami’s has to have a specific significance for its existence, and sometimes I think they’re added just to exist in that universe— this happens in dreams as well, where one may interact with many different people and be instantly comfortable with associating with them, but then the characters disappear forever, as if they never existed. Perhaps the inexplicability that sometimes occurs in Murakami’s works is not meant to puzzle the reader, but simply to add another layer of detail to make the world seem more “real.” Or, perhaps there are characters that are invented just purely for entertainment purposes. Of course, I do believe that there are characters that act significantly to serve a purpose, and that there are details in Murakami’s works that definitely do hold symbolism. In some cases, however, I think the strange elements in Murakami’s stories exist simply to be “strange.”

-Michelle