Method to Murakami

When you start reading Murakami, you can’t help but feel oneself to be pulled into a dreamlike haze where you wander for days until one day suddenly you find yourself abandoned on a deserted shore. Only to find that you have exchanged some of your loneliness with a molten honey of a warm feeling which fills your heart now.

If someone asks you what was the story about, moral of it, you will never have the right words to explain it. His work is more like music which can only be experienced by everyone on their own, there is no way for you to explain it to someone so that they can gasp the same meaning.

Method to Murakami by Magicthreadworks

After you read a lot of Murakami, you realise there is some method to his madness after all. His stories are more of less talking about the same journey of the protagonist, with similar milestones though the path taken will be entirely different.

At first, he will invoke a conversation outside of space and time between two people. This person is outside of protagonists ordinary life and no one from their life would know much about their interaction. It’ll be almost like a secret which gives a magical dreamlike haze to itself. This is one integration when one party just have a honest conversation with the other. When they have these conversation, you as a reader realise how rarely we speak to people about things which are really important for us. You miss that honest connect with someone. That’s when Murakami reels you in.

Then he talks about all the music, books, food over which people connect. They help give more depth to the characters and allows deeper conversations. At the same time, it even a bait for the reader so see if they like the same things. I was going through a Jack Kerouac phase and i found mention of it in Sputnik Sweetheart, I can’t explain the happiness I felt on being validated by my favourite author.

Where Murakami differs from others is his magic realism. His stories stories are always weaved around this world and other. Both existing parallel but never really intersecting. As we grow up we fill up our shell of a person by cultivating a personality who has thoughts, emotions, like and dislikes. Then comes a time when we really attach a self of our personality to something or an other person.

This interaction with this other person which has happened beyond the realm of space and time becomes the core of who we are. They become the meaning and purpose of our life, so much so that, when we suddenly lose connection with this person our self also splits and a part of us cross over to the other world with this person. Now all that we are left with is this empty shell of a self, who is automatically doing every tasks as assigned to the best of our ability, instead of actually living. In the meanwhile, our living breathing self belong to the other dimension where it eventually finds its whole with the a half of the person we had attached our personality with.

We live with the knowledge that there is some world where we are happy and belong. May be thats why we are okay living as we do, without connections, because we at least know how does it feel to actually have a real one.