The Lost Love of Boku (or Murakami)

After reading so much Murakami back-to-back, I can’t help but start to play detective. I am truly desperate to understand the ultimate story behind the “missing girl” or “lost girl” that plagues so many Murakami stories: Sputnik Sweetheart, Norwegian Wood, The City and its Uncertain Walls, South of the Border, West of the Sun to name a few. In a strangely transparent afterword in The City and its Uncertain Walls, Murakami states, citing Borges, 

 

“there are basically a limited number of stories one writer can seriously relate in his lifetime. All we do– I think it's fair to say– is take that limited palette of motifs, change the approach and methods as we go, and rewrite them in all sorts of ways.” 

 

With that, I find it overwhelmingly interesting that one of these motifs is a lost love or searching for a lost love (in some ways we can see that in 1Q84 as well, though the main female character is not actually lost). I can’t help but wonder what it is about this specific idea/ concept that Murakami feels so drawn to, that it appears in so much of his work. Lots of short stories from, Men Without Women also document, not lost loves in the literal sense, but rather, the emotions and confusion that accompany losing the person that you love. 

 

I want to understand this motif, this role, this girl. What happened to her? In different novels, in different forms, she had either died or disappeared without a trace. Is the basis for Naoko the same for Sumire or Shimamoto? I can’t help but assume the “real” or complete story is buried within these stories (I am positive I am missing some as well since I have not read all of Murakami’s novels). Even in The Strange Library, there is still a mystical, beautiful girl left behind as well. It seems there is really something Murakami is trying to work out, or communicate in bits and pieces, and I would love to put it all together. I am not sure if it’s ethical to speculate about the artist based on the art, but I do find myself wondering how all of these works fit together. 

 

Thinking about how this motif has evolved over time, generally, it feels so interesting that in Murakami’s latest works, The City and its Uncertain Walls, the lost girl is barely mentioned. The entire first part is dedicated to describing their relationship, and how the city itself is integral to the connection between them. In part two and three the relationship is put on the back burner (by design it feels like) and instead we focus on the characters of another town (a real town), and then the journey back to the fictional town with the company of a boy from the real world. But upon finishing the novel, there is little to no resolution on what I thought would be a more central conflict. There is less resolution than the normal resolutions in Murakami novels, where although the ending is not explained, there is some sort of finality/message to take away from the story.  For me, it felt like the reader needed to understand the general mechanics of the “lost love” motif for The City and its Uncertain Walls to make sense. There was a certain intertextuality needed here– once again, like this was a piece in a larger story Murakami wants to convey. Not sure if that’s how anyone else felt. 

 

-Isabella