Spoilers ahead for Kafka on the Shore, Umurangi Generation and Sayonara Wild Hearts

As the months of 2024 creep by like a swollen caterpillar full on the weight of the very leaf it perches upon, the first two semesters of University have drawn to a close. It is 11:52 pm on a Friday night. The weak coughs of my study room fan fail to protect me from the steep layers of April humidity that bears upon my skin. As I type this, sweat collects around my temple. The physical discomfort is overpowering and dense, but right now, not even KGC’s air-conditioning would take away the thick wrinkles in my brow.

On my left, I have the Quora mobile app open, a single sentence hanging within the query box. It has remained there, a prisoner, for the past 7 days.

Here is the question.

“Does Murakami take psychedelics?”

It might sound like I am overreacting. Before you pass judgement, consider the following chunk.

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverised bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

This is from the first work of his I read, Kafka on the Shore. I think about it to this day.

How does someone write like this, if they aren’t constantly surveilling life from a fourth or fifth-person perspective?

It has been 978 days since I last wrote about Murakami. Over the span of that time, I have read 4 of his novels and 2 of his short story anthologies. The disgusting thing I have noticed about all of his works is how they linger with the sickly, ethereal afterglow that only dreams have, long after you have finished the last sentence and mentally shelved the story away. I’m really not sure what it is, either. I can scarcely tell you what happens in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Killing Commendatore or Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, but I can tangibly quantify how each of those works made me feel.

More and more, I am beginning to realise that Murakami runs off the distilled essence of pure vibes. And that vibe can only be found in the realm of dreams. This feeling isn’t always unpleasant, occasionally its nostalgic, often it forces me into multiple rushes of déjà vu, but it is always uncomfortable.

To borrow some of his rhetoric, reading Murakami makes me feel as if I’m laying underneath a weighted, heated blanket. It is the deepest of Winter, and my body is locked into the curled foetus position I’ve assumed for what seems to be forever. I need to stay warm, so I curl harder. My feet are numb, my legs are numb, my body is numb, my arms are numb, my neck is numb, my head is cold, and numb. But my mind is clear.

Perhaps because Murakami’s works all draw from this specific place in my mind, because they all invoke the unique combination of neural synapses and sparks required to send me into the heart of the storm Kafka writes about, there is literally no modern-day analogue I can use to explain what exactly Murakami is doing with his writing, or how he is able to repeatedly invoke the same emotions within me.

In the absence of the literal, we speak in the abstract. As Oshima poignantly put it, “Everything is a metaphor”.

While I can’t exactly aggregate what about Murakami’s writing is special, I know how each of them made me feel. And I know of two games that made me feel the exact same way.

First, ウムランギ (Umurangi) Generation.

When describing the game to friends (which I find myself doing more often than I would expect), I’m always left stumped as to how to go about it.

I could go for the hyperbolic approach. Umurangi Generation is my favourite game of all time. Maybe the literal approach. Umurangi Generation is a game about taking photographs at the end of the world. What if I instead quantify it by its accolades? Umurangi Generation was awarded the Highest Honor at the IGF Awards 2021 and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, alongside clinching 1st place in Excellence in Narrative and an Honourable mention for Excellence in Visual Art.

All those things are true, and they are all equally meaningless when it comes to helping me convey what exactly I love so much about this game.

Just like Murakami’s writing, Umurangi Generation is an experience that runs off pure vibes.

While the techno-orientalist vibes of pseudo Neo-Tauranga, New Zealand stray from the tenuous dream-like quality of most of Murakami’s works, Umurangi Generation achieves a completely unique narrative tone, especially when considering the ludonarrative harmony generated by the one way the player is given to emote within the game, a camera.

By forcing this single mode of interaction, Umurangi Generation explores the ways neoliberal dystopias have failed its citizens, all the while enshrining its dire landscape in vivid mulberry hues that bleed into the bloodshot maroon present throughout the game’s skyline, peppering player’s exploration of many of Neo-Tauranga’s secrets with the chilling, sepia-tinted shades of music that only Minecraft’s C418 album can evoke in those born in the early 2000s.

Umurangi Generation is my favourite game, ever. Check it out when you can, it’ll become your favourite too.

Next, さようなら (Sayonara) Wild Hearts.

If it’s true that writing 2 whole paragraphs about Umurangi Generation takes away from its environment, then I really shouldn’t be saying anything more than I already have for Sayonora Wild Hearts. In a sentence, Sayonara Wild Hearts is a playable music video that you watch immediately after your first relationship has fallen to bits.

Trust me on this, check it out.

Ultimately, what I’m really trying to poke at is this. By predicating their entire structure, story and design around the vibes alone, these 3 experiences (2 games and 1 author to be precise) breeze past the burden of representation that so many successful titles are forced to premise themselves upon to gain commercial and critical acclaim. In doing so, these experiences achieve a level of fullness and transcendental consistency that I would otherwise only be able to attribute to unbridled synchronicity.

We all wander through this world, trying to find objects of value to latch onto. We look for people, possessions, achievements, livelihood, all in a desperate grasping-at-straws bid to fill the abyss of loneliness within ourselves that none of these things can truly remedy.

Yet, come the next millenia, these objects will decay, fade into dust. Organic life will crumble back into ash, the inert will fossilise as minerals.

Truly, what we are left with when we sit by ourselves at the end of an era, are our emotions and experiences. After that, we just vibe.

SDG.