HARUKI MURAKAMI

by: Georgia Rose

I once said to an exboyfriend of mine that to me, everything was a metaphor. I didn’t really know what I meant at the time, but I knew it felt right to say it. Said exboyfriend didn’t like that at all. He screwed up his face and sneered, ‘that’s ridiculous, not everything is a metaphor Georgia, some things just Are’. He had a disdain for anything he viewed as excess. Upon reading, then, on page 95 of Murakami Haruki’s Kafka on the Shore, the exact phrase I had said, ‘Everything is a metaphor’ (Oshima says to Kafka), I knew Murakami and I were going to get along.

Murakami’s fiction is a metaphor. His plots are metaphors, his characters are metaphors, even the metaphors are metaphors. Metaphorically speaking, it’s metaphors all the way down. You get the feeling when reading his novels that Murakami fails to bury himself very deep within his writing. Characters go on sprawling monologues; not quite out of character enough for it to feel jarring or disjointed, but enough to understand that these characters are merely mouthpieces for Murakami to, essentially, ‘go off on one’.

In a similar vein, his characters don’t really exist, either. Nothing really exists in Murakami’s books. After you’re finished with one of his novels, it feels that maybe, even beyond the idea of fiction, nothing in the book was really real. The whole plot, premise, location, the characters, were all illusionary, layers of pure aestheticism to portray messages, meanings, and philosophies. It’s no wonder then, that a common criticism Murakami faces is weak characterisation. In NW and KOTS, Kafka and Toru are essentially the same person, and when that happens it’s not hard to imagine that those two people are probably just the author. I’ve always been drawn to writing that fails in any way to hide the creator within it, however. What skill is it to write about other people? Writing about yourself is where the struggle really lies.

What I gather, from these two books then, is that Murakami is one weird dude. He likes to drink milk, like a lot. He yearns for a love that spiritually completes him, one that is found in childhood; but maybe contents himself with the idea that it is impossible to hold on to (in fact, it permanently damages you). He likes cats and pale women. He is panicked, philosophically. He doesn’t know who he is, what lies within him, or what his purpose is.

He’s not sure about fate and destiny but he’ll write about it as if he is, possibly to gain some sense of fleeting control over the concepts.

The resounding thing that shines through both books is the idea of discovering the self through others. Murakami quotes Hegel in KOTS, having a prostitute tell a character that the only way to really know the self is to know other people. That only by projecting your ‘self’ onto the Other, do you gain an understanding of your own consciousness. What really illustrates this, however, is how the main characters of Murakami’s books do not tend to stand out, that it is always the supporting cast that does the metaphorical heavy work. ‘Hell is other people’, Jean-Paul Sartre said. Murakami, I think, would not agree. The reliance on others is a central theme in both KOTS and NW. It almost becomes a bit of a deus ex machina. In KOTS, it is made very clear that both characters could not have done any of the things they were able to do, had it not been for the incredible kindness of the people around them. Total strangers offer them places to stay, food to eat, and essentially follow them around like disciples, opening their horizons to all that fate was offering up to them. You feel that these types of stories could not have been written by anyone who wasn’t Japanese. The fact that an elderly disabled old man managed to hitchhike across the country relying purely on the kindness of strangers would be genuinely unbelievable in any country that wasn’t Japan.