A decent number of Murakami books in, and this one realization has been nagging away at me.

Murakami has this very specific way of writing about people who go through trauma.

I’m reminded of a class I took in my first semester of Uni. That class had us doing lots of reading and viewing (we got to watch a movie every other week). In the weeks nearing finals, one resonant theme began to emerge from the disparate threads of history, culture, geography and economy that had been discussed at length across the course – “Everything is a trauma response”. In the same way a scab develops from a fresh wound, societies, regions, countries and their people have found a veritable bevy of methods to deal with trauma.

For the inhabitants of Murakami’s worlds, they deal with their trauma by abstracting the experience away in metaphors. This manifests in Murakami’s sometimes self-indulgent use of magic realism.

Typing this out now, I’m brought back to my first Murakami book, Kafka on the Shore, where midway through Kafka’s journey to return home, the mysterious Oshima remarks that “Everything in life is a metaphor.”

Specifically, it appears to me that Murakami’s protagonists live in worlds where everything they experience, perceive and are subject to is filtered first through their consciousness, then tinted by their feeble attempts to comprehend them, before being further abstracted into convolution and confusion when attempting to communicate these precise feelings of melancholy and contempt to others.

In other words, Murakami writes about worlds that are our own.

In so many of his stories (1Q84 is the most recent that comes to mind), those that have suffered from the mammoth cruelty of others and the vicissitudes of life cannot help but turn inward, viewing themselves as irrevocably tarnished and marked. These people write of seeing a face that is their own, yet unspeakably twisted and malformed. They write of waking up to a world where the atmosphere is 2 degrees of separation from the world they knew before, of alternative universes where two green moons sag in the sky. They write of suddenly finding it unbearable to live their life the same way they have been up till now, of needing a change so drastic and shocking it would seem driven by a complete psychotic break. They undergo massive physical change, spending a night in a ferris-wheel only to wake up bloodied and white-haired. Feel free to take these people at face-value, but make no mistake about it. None of them are lying. All of them are, without a doubt, perfectly sane.

Maybe in some way, Murakami’s chief success is in pulling apart the underlying assumptions we have about how people choose to deal with their trauma. Trauma can easily go undiagnosed, but therapy alone might not be enough. Sometimes, the marks that our oppressors leave on us stay with us long until we’re grown whether we like it or not. Sometimes the only areas in life we can exercise control over is in our response. Our trauma response.

Murakami’s writing really flows like a medley of poetry and prose. It can get really hard to distinguish the two.

Godspeed.