For years, I’ve loved the books of  Haruki Murakami.

The best-selling Japanese author of books such as “Kafka On The Shore,” “The Wind Up Bird Chronicle” and “Norwegian Wood.”  has described himself as an outcast of the Japanese literary world.

“I have my own readers but critics, writers, many of them don’t like me.” Why is that? “I have no idea! I have been writing for 35 years and from the beginning up to now the situation’s almost the same. I’m kind of an ugly duckling. Always the duckling, never the swan.” ~ Haruki Murakami.

I loved him all the more when I heard his interview, saying this–as my favorite book as a child was about the ugly duckling. There is something magical about him not seeing himself as a swan and accepting himself as a duckling still, a duckling that can write like no-one else.

His greatest novels inhabit a magical place between realism and fable, whodunit and science fiction: “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,”  for example, begins prosaically as a man’s search for his missing wife then quietly mutates into a strange hybrid narrative.

Reading Murakami has changed how I see the world, because his world is so different from what I am used to reading in fiction. Haruki Murakami’s world is an allegorical one, constructed of familiar symbols—an empty well, an underground city—but the meaning of those symbols remains hermetic to the last.

He has often spoken of the theme of two dimensions, or realities, in his work: a normal, beautifully evoked everyday world, and a weirder supernatural realm, which may be accessed by sitting at the bottom of a well, as does the hero of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.”

I was inspired to write this poem, as a thank you to Haruki Murakami, for changing how I see the world and opening the magical world, that exists in symbols and allegory.

Murakami-ist

The silence that waits
hungrily at the edge
of everything we do.
He’s right,
silence is something
we can hear
and whatever we’re seeking,
won’t take the form we’re expecting.

On a wild, sheep chase through life,
we move through shifting sandstorms.
Sand in our hands like pulverised bones,
the storms changing us.
Blue skies getting darker with every stroke that is painted blue on blue.

Ambiguous dreams we try to sleep through.
Making love with familiar faces in hallways.
They disintegrate under our hands,
the lights go off and we can’t wake up.
It’s a strange library,
full of jazz and cats.

What should Murakami fans call themselves?
He suggests, “Murakami Shugisha”  (村上主義者, meaning Murakami-ist).

It sounds almost political,
hiding out in caves,
reading “Norwegian Wood.”
Burning memories as fuel,
in order to stay alive.

~

*Relephant read:

The Most Beautiful Morning. {Video}

~

Author: Jackie Gorman

Editor: Ashleigh Hitchcock

Image: courtesy of the author