The darkness beyond our world in Murakami Haruki

In Murakami Haruki’s short story “A Poor Aunt’s Story,” the narrator finds that, somehow, without his notice, his back has become occupied by a poor aunt. Now, I may be missing some cultural idea in Japan about poor aunts, but I don’t really know exactly what he’s talking about here. With Murakami’s stories, however, it’s often important to purposefully not wonder what you’re missing and to just go along with the story. Murakami isn’t supposed to be dissected but wandered through. Kinda like jazz. You just go with the flow.

We soon learn that this isn’t just any old poor aunt, nor is it the narrator’s poor aunt. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be a physical thing at all. It is, quite literally, the phrase ‘poor aunt’ stuck to his back; “those very words, without meaning, without form.” If the narrator had to give a label to it, he’d “‘call it a ‘conceptual sign’ or something like that.’” Other people see this “conceptual sign” as different things, not just a poor aunt. One person sees it as his dog that died a few months back; another sees an old elementary school teacher who had been burned in the air raids of World War II. Whatever is seen, though, this conceptual sign has taken on an existence all its own, independent of the narrator’s will. It’s like a memory, especially a memory of something you wish you could forget. It continues to exist and live and thrive on its own.

There’s a lot more to this short story, but at this point you might be wondering, “What in the world is this story about?” There isn’t much of a plot, and describing this “oor aunt” conceptual existence is basically the point of the story. If you’ve read much Murakami before, you’re probably nodding your head and saying, “Yeah, that sounds like Murakami to me.” Again, you don’t dissect Murakami. You go along for the ride and let him play with concepts and ideas and, most of all, his imagination.

Now, I’m not sure how influential Murakami is in Japanese literature (he’s certainly popular, both in Japan and outside Japan), but Murakami has said that he wasn’t much influenced by Japanese literature. He claims a number of Western authors as his teachers, though I really do think there’s something to say about his writing being attempts to turn jazz into narrative form. That said, I think there is something very Japanese about something like having a conceptual sign on your back. It is a way of seeing a post-modern idea in a non-modern way. It is at once post-modern, Platonic, linguistic, and “enchanted” at the same time. And this collection of descriptors is something that Japanese authors and creators are very good at imagining.

I used the word “enchanted” above and put it in quotes, because I wanted to draw attention to it as a technical term in scholarship of the imagination. An enchanted world is one where the world around us is not just natural but is supernatural and hypernatural as well. Medieval European cultures were enchanted in that they saw the world populated by creatures such as elves and faeries, but also that it spoke of and revealed the character of the Christian God to those who studied it. A disenchanted worldview is one which sees the world as merely sense data and as a source of information about the material workings of plants, animals, and soil. A materialistic, scientific worldview is disenchanted, because it doesn’t concern itself with what we think about, feel about, or imagine the world to be like; it only wants to see how things function and to study these functions as the only facts about nature.

An enchanted worldview does not see the functions of a thing as the sum total of its meaning. C.S. Lewis says it this way in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: upon meeting a star, the character Eustace says “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” The star replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” You don’t have to think of stars as much more than giant balls of burning gas, but an enchanted worldview says that giant balls of burning gas speak of a greater reality and deeper meaning than just a bunch of particles up in space. When we think of other people as more than just bags of flesh and bones, but as human souls with a thriving life force and consciousness, courage and doubt, hope and loss, joy and sorrow, and not just a bunch of neurons firing in the brain, we are seeing humans in an enchanted way.

Murakami’s worlds are enchanted, but not in a Western way. Western enchantment is highly influenced by the Christian story, myth, and imagination, whereas Murakami’s enchantment is rather Zen Buddhist. The greater meaning for someone in the West need not be Christian, of course, just as Murakami isn’t writing Buddhist dogma, but when people in the West imagine a greater world beyond the physical, we are generally imagining something “more” than the natural world. Something supernatural. We also imagine that this supernatural world is full of life. There is more stuff: more beings, more energy, more ability (in the form of magic), and greater landscapes to explore. For Murakami, the world beyond the physical is often thinner, not more robust. People fade away and disappear, meaning is lost, poor aunts become conceptual realities, whatever those are, and those conceptual realities have a life of their own, but they also leave on their own without communicating directly. The narrator in “A Poor Aunt’s Story” gains wisdom, but it is dark and mysterious wisdom that can only be expressed with feelings and images and experiences. This is what makes Murakami so fun to read, what makes him so elusive, but it’s also what makes him so very Japanese.