Rifts of Life

Unberable Loneliness in his Stories

 

The “fil rouge” which ties together this collection of six stories consists in the terrible earthquake taken place in Kobe (Japan). This catastrophe has a different relevance in each situation portrayed by Murakami.

The reader is offered a wide range of colorful characters, starting with the experience of Komura, a married, peaceful salesman, who finds himself suddenly abandoned by his taciturn wife. To process the loss, he decides to leave his city for a while to deliver a package one of his friends gave him. This unexpected journey becomes a “rite of passage” for Komura, in which he tries to overcome the past looking straight into what life has been preserving for him.

In a strong divergence from the previous story the reader finds Junko, a 20-year-old girl living in Kashimanada. She befriends an older painter, whose most frightening fear is to die in a refrigerator due to a decreasing lack of oxygen. This constant nightmare determines the way he is living: without a refrigerator, always wondering when he would die. This encounter disbalances Junko, who is incessantly looking for some meaning in her own life, and the two of them decide to die together when the bonfire the man had set up, burns itself out.

Murakami, conversely, well depicts an optimistic young guy, Yoshiya, who has spent his entire life being told he is the Son of God. Rejecting what he has been told, he decides to follow a man who he thinks could be his actual father. Once Yoshiya loses his tracks, his own emptiness spills over in a release dance, careless of the world surrounding him, since “All God’s Children Can Dance”.

This sense of unbridgeable emptiness is a constant feeling all the characters in this book have. Each protagonist tries to make up for what they lack in different ways: Satsuki, a woman whose husband has divorced her, attempts to overcome it by travelling to Thailand, where she finds herself lost in her own past, frightened by the impossibility of forgetting her former lover.

Mankind’s instability is properly described by the author in Katagiri’s short story. The man thinks he is fighting evil and saving Tokyo from a terrible earthquake, convinced to do so with the help of Mr. Frog, an imaginary being, the only one giving him company. The unbearable loneliness he suffers, is confirmed by his strong belief in the existence of this animal, which in the end dies and is consumed in front of Katagiri’s eyes.

The last story deals with a group of best friends (Takatsuki, Sayoko and Junpei), whose relationship is tested by the marriage of the first two, a union that apparently excludes the protagonist Junpei. But he then becomes the couple’s daughter’s “best-friend”, the one telling her fairy tales before she goes to bed, the one reassuring her mother when the child cannot sleep, scared by the TV images of Kobe’s earthquake. After Takatsuki and Sayoko’s divorce, Junpei discovers how his union with Sayoko, the woman with whom he has been in love all these years, would fulfill his emptiness and sense of desolation.

 

       Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

 

The Man behind the Stories

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer, born in Kyoto, Japan in 1949. His works are heavily influenced by western literature, which makes him easy to be recognized among other Japanese writers. Compared to the traditional Japanese writers, whose style is more sophisticated and heavy, focusing more on the description of the environment; the style of Murakami's writing is quite tidy, fresh, cool and restrained, mainly focusing on character's psychology. He tends to use simple words to express the complicated feelings of humans and precisely capture the atmosphere of modern society.

Most of Murakami's fiction is considered surrealistic and melancholic or fatalistic. There are lots of surreal creatures appearing in his stories, sometimes in a very humorous way. The fancy-like settings throw an ultimate question to the readers: what do you do to prove your existence and find your own meaning of existence in such an absurd world?

 

Citizen of the World

Haruki Murakami is often viewed as a cosmopolitan author. In order to understand why, we need to delve into the idea of Cosmopolitanism. The term kosmopolites was used to refer to an individual that considered her/himself a citizen (polites) of the world (cosmos). Thus, cosmopolitanism is the combined notion of citizens of the world that form what is referred to as the universal community. In its core cosmopolitanism is a philosophical idea. This idea requires openness to cultures and to people that are beyond the ones that raised them. Moreover, this idea could only happen through globalization. In the sense that global media-knowledge of one another made it possible to not only know but affect each other around the world. A cosmopolitan usually engages with different people from different cultures. This however, requires a great responsibility towards other people outside of our own cultures. Which, on its end is a universal concept that requires a wider moral concern towards others.   

Cosmopolitanism is an adventure and an ideal.  

The way Murakami is seen as a cosmopolite is through the stories that he tells in  After the Quake. His stories produce a product known as World Literature. What this term implies is open for discussion. However, some have tried to define World Literature as any work that has ever reached beyond its home base, namely the piece of work is present in a literary system that is beyond the one of its original culture. In the case of After the Quake, it was first published in Japan in 2000 and two years later it was released in English. Furthermore, his works have been translated into more than fifty languages. His characters portray somewhat Western behavioural characteristics, which is another sign of the mixture of cultures in his writing.  

 

Finally the twain met… in Murakami’s narratives

Western readers’ unfamiliarity with Japanese literary novels diminished as Norwegian wood, Murakami’s fifth novel, was translated and published in English. This cult classic brought Japanese literature to the notice of the Western world and turned its writer into a globally acclaimed celebrity.

Murakami succeeded in breaking through the Western readers’ orientalist expectation. Instead of writing about mysterious women and cherry blossoms falling, he abandoned Japanese literary conventions and concentrated on the unpredictable psychological reactions that shape each individuals life. Therefore his fiction cannot be seen as typically Japanese: his novels are not tied in with the culture of the nation, they convey universally felt human emotions. They occupy a cultural space of their own, where individuals constantly have to keep loneliness, isolation and loss at bay while re-affirming their existence as an autonomous being

In his texts he frequently alludes to Western music and literature. Raised in an environment of strong cultural traditions he distrusted, in his youth he was drawn to American culture. Through the works of great Western writers as Fitzgerald, Dostoyevsky and Kafka he escaped to a world outside the society of the Japanese war generation. He particularly loved jazz music. The love for the rhythm and improvisation which define jazz resulted in his method of writing: he is always “searching for melody” in the rhythms of his prose.

In his narratives Western images and symbols are intertwined with Japanese folktales and legends. Although occidental readers are often not familiar with these myths and the description of events is often surreal, Murakami manages to create a world that feels quite natural to readers of all ages all over the world.

However, the literary establishment in Japan scorns him for being too westernized. In fact he uses the modern technical commodities to show the world a Japanese society in which the mixing of genres of high and low culture is more accepted than in the West. The reactions of young people on his website emphasize the openness of the new society without boundaries between classes and cultures.

It’s not his only merit that he makes Western readers aware of the remarkably cosmopolitan culture of Japan, he also translates the novels of his favourite Western writers in Japanese. In this attempt to make great works of the Western literary canon available to the Japanese public he helps constructing a global network in which cultural exchanges can be made. We might conclude that Murakami’s work forms a central node in this network of cross-cultural connections.

 

Discussion Questions:

1. Can Murakami’s stories be seen as an example for an interconnected globalised network?
2. Can the quake be used as a metaphor applicable on a global scale (for example the attacks on the World Trade Centre)
3. Is it possible to experience loneliness in such a globalised and interconnected world?
4. Is the Quake a metaphor for the intense but brief insight the reader gets into the lives of the protagonists of each of the short stories?

Written by: Gaia Bugamelli, Hannes Nikl, Marlies van Breda, Shao Ren- Chen, Yvette Atanassov

Art and Globalization