What I learned from reading Haruki Murakami

There was a time in my life where I had very few connections of my own, but each one was too strange to explain. I remember the anxiety creeping in…was I the only one surrounded by such weird and dark people? Why couldn’t I just sit down with normal humans, share a conversation, and feel like I understood them, or more importantly, that they understood me? On the surface, nothing about my situation was particularly surreal, but my constant mental chatter twisted it into something far more complex…too many emotions, too much mental static for me to handle. That’s what I learned from reading Haruki Murakami, that magical realism isn’t just confined to novels but to real life!¹

Then, one day, someone (who, ironically, I can’t even recall) suggested I read his novels…or more specifically, something drenched in that peculiar, surreal realism. That’s where my journey of what I learned from reading Haruki Murakami began. 

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Personal struggle I had before reading Murakami

Truthfully, novels always felt like a pointless journey for me. I mean, I have read Dan Browns in a single day when I was 13-14 (yeah, I’m proud of that, shamelessly), read some Sydney Sheldon, and a good amount of Neil Gaiman’s comics. Those books were great for teenage entertainment, but as I grew older, I craved something deeper. They didn’t scratch that itch for understanding human nature, or maybe it was just my age that I couldn’t understand their depth. I was (/am) still immature about reading novels.

But when adulthood hit, when people became more complicated than quantum mechanics, when no amount of psychology or neuroscience could explain their behavior… that’s when the walls really started closing in. Trust? It felt like building a house of cards in a windstorm. Interacting with others became this strange, shallow dance. I started to believe I was surrounded by hollow shells…people just going through their daily motions with no real substance, no inner world worth exploring. That only I had this strange depth, this perspective on life that no one else seemed to share. I’m so glad I was wrong about that!!

Murakami’s writing style is like meditation

Having read much of Murakami, there are a few things I think he does really well (from a literary standpoint):

1. He builds atmosphere beautifully. His descriptions may be (too) long, they are a pleasure to read.
2. His writing feels like meditation (and trust me, I say this as someone with Neurodivergence).
3. His novels are typically 600-800 pages long, which means nothing is boiled down to the lowest common denominator (though this might be a problem for some).

(You may stop reading at this point if you don’t want my bias.)

What I learned from reading Murakami

Here’s what I took away from his stories (from a human standpoint):

1. His characters are “magical” but still somehow grounded in reality. They’re people you can relate to in your own life…ordinary, yet tinged with something extraordinary.
2. Human emotions are like dark matter. You can piece together some theory about them, try to understand how they work, but you’ll never fully know what they’re made of.
3. Humans, beyond just their emotions, are complicated by default. I’ve learned not to try to understand them, but just to be with them. (Though he objectifies Women, slightly)
4. It’s not just me who’s surrounded by “weird” humans. Everyone has their own flavor of strange; they create their own kind of magic in their own corner of reality.
5. The dreamlike world Murakami creates? It doesn’t stop at dreams or novels. It’s embedded in real life too. The human brain is constantly firing neurons for reasons beyond our grasp.

To say, “I’ve changed as a person after reading this” would sound, a bit pretentious. I’m too stubborn to fully embrace new emotions, and let’s be honest, I’m not the best with new people. But what his work has done for me is give life an extra layer, not just the usual dimensions of space and time, but a whole new one, “emotions”. For someone like me, who struggles to understand human emotions, this was a door to possibilities far more interesting than machine learning or math (not even kidding). Truly, what I learned from reading Haruki Murakami is invaluable.

Murakami based Movies and other stuff

I would not call myself an avid reader, far from it, as I don’t read many novels. But reading Murakami has made me realize there’re many other possibilities for me to read (If you have yet to read any of his books you can refer this). So, I will keep reading, don’t be shy to drop a mail on [email protected] to suggest me some books that you have read!

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Also, I don’t want to sound like Murakami fanboy, but there are few movies I would like to point out:

I wish I could say I figured all this out on my own, but I didn’t. My brain doesn’t work that way (welcome to the low IQ club). Thanks to ChatGPT-4, a ton of Reddit threads, articles and some geeky friends, I managed to piece it together. The insights from what I learned from reading Haruki Murakami have profoundly influenced me. 

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Thanks for reading! 🙂

1. Just for the literary musings, not scientific nor that I believe in any magic. ↩︎