Dare I start my review with a meme? I know it is not literary, but I think it’ll provide a good opening argument for this review. Question: what is the biggest reason for divorce? Answer: marriage! While it might sound immediately funny, after some thought it also sounds logical, yet inevitable nonetheless. Marriage might be losing its prominence in our increasingly individualistic and threateningly liberated world, whereby it is considered a nonsense, an unwanted contract, simply needless.
Love, however, is a different story. You cannot choose not to love like you can choose to not involve marriage in your love. Love happens to you, and from you towards someone, without you ever having a say in it. I should also say that I am a believer of labored love as well: love that is made, is worked for, is planted and nourished – love in a lovelessly started marriage. Not only do I believe is this love that might seem artificial, made or formed, but I also admire it for its maturity, kindness, compromise, and sacrifice. Although different, it shouldn’t be considered no less than the love that happens by itself.
So, in order to avoid divorce, choose not to marry. But in order to avoid love? Choose not to live? For to live is to be missing, to quote John Greene here, to be wanting: a love from someone else, someone to complete us. Murakami’s book is filled with such stories of love and the consequences that follow, both bitter ones and ones that through some reckoning and a kindly reflection of one’s painful past, become rather sweet or even cherished.
A philandering man who loves and respects all the women he dates, yet is afraid to fall in love with anyone of them. But love happens, as I said, rather inevitably. Samsa, a metamorphosized being, who wakes up in an unfamiliar world and feels an attraction towards the locksmith girl who comes to fix the door. He knows love in a world where he knows nothing. Schehrazade, a maid who loves to tell stories of her childhood adventures about breaking into his boyfriend’s house, right after having sex with the man she’s assigned to work for. The two high school friends, one of whom wants to share his girlfriend with the other who is currently single. And the story of the loneliest and second loneliest men in the world, both linked to a woman who has now committed suicide; men without women.
In these stories are glimpses of how consequential love can be, how love can shape our whole lives, our existence in its entirety. Yet also how uncomfortable love is, how uncertain, and how deeply coupled with pain it always has to be. Each of these stories shares a past, or present, of tremendous love, born off of hapless men. Affairs can be messy, pain is almost guaranteed, death is inevitable – but love we shall.
Being my first book of short stories, I loved how each story was quick yet complete, giving the reader a comprehensible side of love that it wanted to convey. Murakami’s book is also very regional – I often found my imagination to be in the instilled world of Japanese anime, Tokyo in its bustling busyness and life.
However, among many good stories, there were a couple of them in this book that didn’t quite connect to me. Nor is Murakami’s book seriously literary. He has only a few significant things to say about love, and the rest is just good storytelling. The fact that I loved this book means I’ll be reading more books of short-stories; yet another genre for me to get lost into.
Ratings:
4/5 **** June 16, 2021_