Murakami and the Fantastical World of (Sur)Reality (Thomas Simmons)

One of my absolute favorite things about Murakami’s books is their strangeness and ability to impose that strangeness onto the most mundane and ordinary things and places. His books have a way of transforming a simple mountain village, library, or fast food mascot into a wondrous or horrific entity of surreality. 

I believe that Murakami’s works are some of the most interesting modern-day examples of fantastical realism; a strange genre where the border between real, unreal, and surreal is so blurred that it might not even exist within the story. There is an evanescence present within Murakami’s story settings that can be seen across many of his works like the mountains past dead man’s curve in A Wild Sheep Chase where the dead come to life in the form of balding men in bad sheep costumes or the forests in the outskirts of the library in Kafka on the Shore where past traumas root their way into the minds of those who stray too far off the path. 

This surreality is especially present in some of the readings we have been assigned: A Wild Sheep Chase, Where I’m Likely to Find It, and even The Year of Spaghetti wherein each of these has transported us to a strange and liminal reality in between where the rules of the world are warped. One does not cook spaghetti for a year day in and day out and imagine ghosts of their past without having crossed over into a realm where this ritual has significant meaning. One does not find oneself in a staircase reflecting in fun-house mirrors and speaking with strange little girls when investigating disappearing husbands. These appear mundane on the surface: cooking dinner, using a staircase, etc, but in each of these cases Murakami has taken us to a strange realm where these ordinary things are instead manifestations of often darker and more complex realities hiding under the surface.

As we continue to read Murakami’s works, I am interested to see in what other ways he manages to warp and distort reality to create remarkable moments out of the most unremarkable things. 

- Thomas Simmons