Murakami and Descartes - Where I'm Likely to Find It (Bruce Wei)

    In "Where I'm Likely to Find It," the narrator encounters a wide variety of individuals in the staircase and common room, one of which being an old man who for no particular reason begins to ramble about broad philosophical topics. Specifically, he alludes to Descartes' famous declaration, cogito ergo sum, or "I think, therefore I am" and subverts it with his own declaration that "we sometimes think in order to not be." Taken in context, the old man is describing how the missing person that the narrator was hired to find, Mr. Kurumizawa, would periodically lose himself in his own thoughts. In general, it can be taken to mean that, ironically, the same mind which is viewed as the threshold for existence is often used to fabricate ways to escape it. At the end of the story, the narrator, in a tone that could sound sarcastic or maybe even remorseful, says to himself in regards to Mr. Kurumizawa:

"Welcome back to the real world. Back to the three sides of your beautiful triangular world-- your panic-attack prone mother, your wife, with her ice-pick heels, and good old Merrill-Lynch."

This quote implies that Mr. Kurumizawa's disappearance is parallel to his being lost in thought, either literally or as a metaphor. His thinking whisked him away from the real world into somewhere that neither he nor the rest of the world could ever know about. His return to the real world marks the end of his thinking-- back to the monotone of the quotidian; to his familial obligations and office job, a perfect citizen of Japanese society. This interpretation also calls into the question of whether the old man's statement contradicts with Descartes declaration at all. Perhaps Mr. Kurumizawa had never existed until his being lost, and perhaps his being found marked the end of his brief existence. Perhaps that "door" that the narrator professes to have spent his whole life searching for is the door to this existence.

Another allusion to Descartes occurs at the end of the story, where the narrator leans back to observe his grid ceiling and its irregularities. This is a direct reference to Descartes' invention of the Cartesian plane. The story goes that Descartes was observing a fly on his ceiling, which was a grid, and he constructed an elaborate coordinate system to track the position of the fly in relation to the corners of his ceiling. In this context, the narrator imagines that the little spots on his ceiling as constellations. Like Descartes, he is constructing a whole world within his own mind, further cementing the relationship between imagination and existence.