Inside Out

Since my daughter pointed me to The Windup Bird Chronicles several years ago I’ve been a big Murakami fan. For me, his writing reverberates in unexpected ways.  I don’t know where he’s going until all of a sudden I’m there. I’ve tried to figure out how he does it, but alas I’m no literary critic.  I just know that for the most part it works for me.

Two thoughts come to mind about his fiction.

First, the point of origin in many of his storied is stillness, a Zen-like neutrality in which no much is moving and listening is intense.  From that meditative emptiness often emerge interesting and bizarre plots which couldn’t happen without the previous silence, without the intense listening. From the quietness the ideas seem to evolve on their own in natural if unusual ways.

Second, the story lines often externalize internal conditions and emotions.  The stillness opens a path from the deeply personal out into the external world.  Sometimes the outward representation is ostensibly realistic, sometimes fantastic.  But more often than not the externals represent a kind of creative prismatic refraction of an inner state.  And that complex shimmering tunnel of light between inner and outer can be striking. We see the outside, we look inside, our gaze is reflected back out, then in. And it’s all made possible by the stillness that allows that special vision to penetrate along the Murakami path that connects the two. 

I’ve read most of the novels, will catch up on the ones I’ve missed, and will certainly read everything he publishes (in translation) going forward. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of twenty four short stories. They are all worth reading though there is quite a bit of variety in the collection. In looking back through the book a few weeks after finishing it I’m struck that each story evokes in me that specific memory of the inner/outer connection, that special pathway that Murakami uncovers. He doesn’t so much forge the pathway in an aggressive way, but rather out of stillness just shines an enticing dim light in a place we didn’t know existed.  Except we really did know, we just chose not to connect the dots.