Grass - or “fields” in this translation - is usually thought of as ordinary, but you can recover the sense of importance in ordinary things and see splendid fields. * Note: this seems to reference William Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” which depicts a nostalgic sense of childhood clarity that you grow out of as you get older. Then I reached up and pulled the breaker switch to cut the electricity. The splendour of the fields, the glory of the flowers, I recited under my breath. My job, my whiskey, my peace and quiet, my solitude, my Somerset Maugham and John Ford collections-all trashed and worthless. In the time it takes to swill two cans of beer, all had sublimed like morning mist. Sure I’d gotten tired of this tiny space, but I’d had a good home here. Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up it takes moments to destroy. I stopped to take a last look at my scrap heap of an apartment. Your question is meaningless,” said the Gatekeeper. “Nobody has a shadow in this town, and anybody we let in never leaves. Hard-Boiled Wonderland vs End of the World
Mortal (messy but meaningful life) vs immortal (content, oblivious, eternal meaningless life) Left brain vs right brain (shuffling data a cracked egg of a brain-see page 32) The book operates on contrasts and oppositions: Thinking about it, it seems I was limiting myself with a tedious rule, but I didn't give it a second thought then.” So, in the first eight years before that, I was using nameless characters and writing in the first-person view.
The first time I was able to properly name characters was in Norwegian Wood (1987). I'm not sure how to put it, but it seemed somewhat artificial for someone like me to be freely designating names onto people, even if they were fictional characters I created. “I'm not sure myself, and can only say that I was embarrassed about naming people. Murakami’s response to this was (translated): There are several key characters in this book that are without names: the Gatekeeper, the Caretaker, the Librarian(s), and the Colonel. You could choose to live an unexamined life, content and oblivious, but the delight of this book is investigating each metaphor and pausing to reflect. Scattered with intentional ambiguities, the book operates in contrasts - ordinary/sublime, conscious/subconscious, perfect/imperfect - nothing is ever equal.
In this complex pairing of intertwined stories, Murakami takes us to another world as he examines what it means to live a meaningful life.
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