The Murakami Experience

I remember how I struggled with Murakami the first time I picked up "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman". I complained about the unresolved conflicts, the denouements that never came and the non-concluding conclusions. He has a way of building up his plot until he reaches a certain height and then he stops. All of a sudden, I was reading the conclusion. Before I realized I was there, I had missed the ending.

There has always been something I felt I was missing when I read him—something that kept me from making sense of the stories he told. It was easy to feel like an outsider from Murakami’s world. I felt unwelcome and as a result, I was always lost.

Strangely, though, the stories manage to make me feel comfortable with my confusion. At some point after I put the book down, the frustration and the confusion will have left, and what lingers, surprisingly, is the impression of an experience. What remains are memories of the loneliness of spaghetti, of chocolates melting in the sun, of a moving kidney-shaped stone, of a sole firefly against the vastness of a black sky. I remember them, and the emotions they carry, as if they were my own memories.

As for Murakami, I could only attempt to make sense of him in the single way that I know how. I became aware that I was—and still am—constrained by a Way of Seeing that requires me to label, to consult, to anticipate. Because of this, I necessarily live in a world that refuses to perceive what it does not recognize.

And still, in a peculiar Murakami-esque way, it is only when I give up trying to comprehend the Strange Things, that I begin to appreciate what I could not understand. Just as in magic, there are things we see only when we don't.



This un-seeing, I have come to realize, is a Way of Seeing.