Murakami: Books and Birds - Thomas

Something that I’ve noticed more since taking this class is how often Murakami inserts all manner of birds into his stories. The same could be said of libraries and books in general. In The Library Murakami portrays his library as a house of horrors rather than the sanctuary that it often appears as in his other works. The most notable book where libraries play a role is in Kafka on the Shore where it is a sanctuary for Kafka to escape his father and Tokyo. Rather than having books provide comfort or be ways to gaze into his character’s minds, in The Library the books are almost irrelevant in both subject and usefulness. A child reading dusty tomes about Ottoman tax collection is hardly a gaze into his psyche and doesn’t really serve a purpose other than to be a dense book. The idea of a knowledge vampire/cannibal is an interesting interpretation of the axiom: knowledge is power. 

Something that I also found to be interesting is that Murakami specifically chose a starling as the child’s pet bird. Starlings are not particularly common pets and are technically an invasive species depending on where you live. But what struck me about this choice is, and I don’t know if it was intentional, starlings in European folklore are birds with a talent for mimicry both of human speech and songs (think of the jabberjays from The Hunger Games). Shakespeare mentions their ability in his play Henry IV. Additionally in Ancient Greece and Rome, augurs would read the flight patterns of starling groups (murmurations) to divine prophecies. I find that this has an interesting interpretation when we later discover than the tea cart girl is in fact his pet starling in disguise. Was she mimicking a human girl to save her owner or was she a ghost mimicking a bird to have a companion?

The idea that the starling/tea cart girl is in reality a ghost is not particularly a stretch when this story also features our old friend The Sheep Man who in past encounters has actually been the Rat’s ghost.  Thus Murakami calls on old characters and themes and inverts them to create a very strange and whimsical horror story that is unlike many of his previous works. I found this to be a very interesting short story on his part and the unorthodox formatting was reminiscent of House of Leaves.