Dr. Murakami

I’m sold.  Have been for a while. A new Murakami book is announced, I pre-order. On arrival, I read it ASAP. That’s how it’s been for me for some time, and the latest book,  Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki was no exception. Is it because of years of therapy? Reading Murakami for me reopens an internal voice, a voice that I learned only with professional help. It’s a voice that has become essential to my ability to guide myself, to know myself, to live as myself.

Very handsomely and expensively printed.

I won’t say much about this particular novel. No need. I don’t think it’s his best work, but it is quintessential Murakami.  For me, just about anything he writes in that special voice will awaken the therapeutic experience.  As usual it’s about a male character who is stuck in life, caught in a period of unhealthy stasis.  The cause is sometimes vague, sometimes clear.  The character’s means of (at least partial) escape is partly psychological, party magical, partly circumstantial.  I liken the approach to that in Freud’s case studies, i.e. Dora.  There’s a problem, there are symptoms and periods of turbulence, there’s exploration, there are dreams, and then there’s a sorting out that leads to tentative healing.

All of that may be beside the point. It may be just the flat unemotional narrative style that appeals to me. That desert is a familiar if unhealthy place for me; I’ve been there many times, and it’s a challenge for me to find my way out.  I have managed it (sooner or later, for better or for worse), and I think reading Murakami’s fiction reassures me that there is always an exit path, no matter how consistently solid the prison walls might seem.  There is an opening if only I could see it. I have constructed the prison myself, and I can also imagine it out of existence.

I’m sorry, we have to stop now. See you next week.