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

Thoughts on Recent Readings

 First, about City and Its Uncertain Walls, the symbolism of the shadowless city can be interpreted in many ways. As we discussed in class, I believe the shadow represents the ego and repressed emotions of a human. In Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland, the shadow symbolizes a similar meaning. When the characters in both story are separated from their shadows, they loses their emotions and become almost robotic. There is the saying that a root cause of depression is being stuck in the past, unable to live in the moment, whether it was a mistake or just painful memories. Thus, emotions and memories are intertwined. This could be an explanation as to why people in inside the walls don't have their memories. For them to be relieved of their pain and negative emotions, it also means giving up their memories. This raises the philosophical question of "can we experiencing happinese without knowing sadness? and vice-versa. 

Regarding Solaris, this story struck me as disturbing. It is already terrifying to be in space with almost no other humans around. Then, the protagonist hears about a friend who just committed suicide and his late wife shows up. This is surreal. In many of Murakami's writing, his characters are stuck in the past and are lost because of some sort of trauma or lost. As a result of this, many commits suicide. The protagonist in Solaris falls into a similar temptation with his late wife showing up, and so there is a similar theme of one's past controlling the person. In particular, this is true for Murakami's character like Toro. 

Eternal Soul Beyond the Wall

In another course, we compared the views on brain death in the West and Japan. In Japan, people are often reluctant to accept that brain death is the end of a person's life because they think the soul might still be there. In the discussion, I regarded this as a cultural habit. But after reading Haruki Murakami's City and Its Uncertain Walls, it gave me another way of understanding it.

In Murakami's novel, there is a small town where many shadows live. You can walk into that small town, but once you do, you might leave a part of yourself behind. The main body in reality is still living, and the tranquility of the small town gives the protagonist a sense of detachment from reality. This seems like another place where the soul can go while the body continues to live. I think this can correspond to the concept of personhood I discussed when I was studying brain death. Japanese culture holds that personhood is located throughout the body rather than solely in the brain. The issue is not whether the brain is still working, but whether that person is still "there" in another way. Western medicine says that without brain activity, there are no human beings. But Haruki Murakami shows that you can live in one world and remain a soul in another. The soul doesn't need a heartbeat but it just needs a wall through which it can pass.

Vivian

Murakami writing

Hi, just some personal opinion.

What’s truly baffling about Haruki Murakami is the bizarre disconnect between the man and the work. He’s built this public persona of the ultimate self-controlled professional: a guy who runs marathons, wakes up at 4 AM, and lives a life of quiet, rhythmic routine. But as soon as you open his books, you’re hit with a psychic landscape that feels utterly unhinged, and not in a way that feels particularly meaningful.

The most exhausting part of reading Murakami is his reliance on gratuitous, often borderline voyeuristic sexual descriptions. Take Norwegian Wood, specifically the backstory involving the young girl and Reiko. There are a million ways to write about trauma, psychological collapse, or the loss of reputation. Yet, Murakami consistently defaults to the most depraved, uncomfortable scenarios possible. It almost feels like he’s indulging in a specific kind of dirty storytelling because he lacks the creative range to destroy a character’s world any other way.

I often wonder: who is the novels actually for? He creates these dreamlike, cool atmospheres, such as libraries, wells, shadows, and urban isolation which lure people in. But once you’re there, you realize the depth is an illusion. He mistakes weirdness for complexity and perversion for profundity. It’s as if he thinks that if he writes something unsettling or abstract enough, the reader will do the heavy lifting and imagine a meaning that isn't actually there.

At the end of the day, his disciplined lifestyle feels like a marketing shield. It allows people to praise his work as high art when, in reality, a lot of it reads like the repetitive fantasies of someone who is deeply disconnected from how real human emotions and consequences work. True literary mastery shouldn't require this much cheap shock value to stay interesting.

However, It must be admitted that Murakami is a genius of atmosphere. He has an uncanny ability to capture the weightless boredom of modern life, turning a summer afternoon, a cold can of beer, or an old jazz record into something rhythmic. This unique Murakami aesthetics has provided a beautifully crafted sanctuary for countless lonely souls looking to escape reality for a moment.

Wendy

How memories change a person

When reading City and Its Uncertain Walls, I kept thinking about Norwegian Wood. What stood out to me most was the writing style, as in both books, the narration feels less like something happening in the present and more like someone carefully reconstructing the past through memory. Because of that, both stories feel emotionally distant and melancholic. That mood seems very common in Murakami's writing, where even strong emotions are expressed in a somewhat restrained and detached way. 

What I found interesting was how this memory-like style of writing affected the portrayal of the girl. Since the narrator tells the story in a dreamlike way, she starts to feel less like a physical person and more like an abstract idea or dream. That feeling becomes even stronger when she says she is a shadow. To me, the shadow idea does not just make the story more surreal, but also makes her seem like someone who exists only partially. I also thought that in some way, Murakami is showing that memory does not keep people exactly the same, but slowly changes them over time. The girl is still very clear in the narrator's mind, but she also feels far away and hard to truly understand. It seems like the narrator is attached not only to the girl herself but also to his memory of her. 

- Shannon Li

Why Japan Feels Real

Hi guys, today I don't want to talk about Murakami's texts or writing style. Instead, I want to talk about Murakami and daily life.

As someone born in China, who frequently visits Japan, and now studies in the US, I personally feel a huge difference between these three places, especially between Japan and the other two. This feeling hits hardest when I visit malls or restaurants in the US and China. I don't know why, but there's always this sense of imitation, or some kind of alienation. In Japan, I never feel that. I just feel... comfortable.

This feeling had been bothering me for a long time, and I couldn't figure out where it came from or why it existed.

Then one day, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to ask Claude about it (it's not an ad lol). Through that conversation, I finally landed on something that made sense.

The details. In Japan, details are treated with a kind of care that has nothing to do with making you spend more money. The onigiri is made well because it should be made well. Not for Instagram. Not for the brand. Just because that's the standard it deserves. In Chinese malls and American malls, every detail exists to serve an external goal: conversion rate, brand image, revenue. The details are instruments.

That's when Claude pointed something out to me: intrinsic value versus instrumental value. In those malls, everything exists to serve something else. Nothing is there because it deserves to be there. 

And that's when it clicked why I love Murakami.

His characters live in exactly this world. Surrounded by the same hollow, instrumentalized spaces, they spend their lives searching for the things that still hold intrinsic value. A specific record. A simple plate of spaghetti cooked carefully. A bartender who wipes the glass like it matters. 

I didn't fall in love with Murakami because I read him and discovered something new. It was the opposite, I already carried this feeling for years without knowing what it was. And then I found out that my favorite author had been writing about exactly this, for decades, across every single book. He'd been naming this feeling long before I could.

Maybe that's what good literature does. It doesn't teach you feelings. It finds the ones you already have, and finally articulates them. 

Anyway, that's the little rabbit hole I fell into, and I thought it worth to share.

Boran

Murakami on Sexuality and Gender

The largest blemish on Murakami's career as a writer (aside from his pretty weird sex scenes) is the criticism he faces for the way he writes female characters. It can also be argued that his portrayals of LGBTQ+ characters are similarly stereotypical and underdeveloped. As a huge fan of his writing, I often find myself defending these portrayals to friends when I recommend his books, even though I do recognize his weaknesses on these fronts.

I find it harder to defend his portrayals of women in particular. Reading through many of his works, the hypersexualized roles that his female characters often occupy come across as somewhat egregious, especially for a first-time reader. While not all of his novels contain women that fit this description, the fact that they exist at all is a fair criticism. Being the optimist I am - and a huge fan - I want to believe that Murakami has good intentions, that he genuinely holds no conscious prejudice or bias against women, and that any such reading of his female characters is coincidental. But even granting him pure intentions, it remains a valid point of criticism, even if it isn't something that directly affects my enjoyment of his storytelling.

I take a similar stance on his portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters, who are often somewhat stereotypical. His gay male characters tend to be defined by neatness, good looks, and a put-together demeanor - with little variation - and his queer female characters frequently treat same-sex attraction as something non-serious or "in the past." These are both fairly reductive characterizations. That said, I want to believe his intentions are good here, too; these stereotypes aren't inherently negative, and portraying queer characters at all was fairly progressive for his era.

Ultimately, I think the general (though not constant) weakness in his female and LGBTQ+ characterizations is a valid criticism, and one I recognize. But it isn't one that truly detracts from my enjoyment of him as an author. His own openness on the matter actually makes me feel a little better about it. The fact that he hasn't even noticed these patterns himself suggests he's writing from a place of genuine openness and falling into them unconsciously (assuming that he isn't feigning his innocence). Both weaknesses are also compounded by Murakami's unsightly sex scenes, which makes me wonder whether the root of the issue lies not in misogyny or homophobia, but in his just generally weird relationship with sex - though I can't say that with any certainty.