I may have a slight obsession with the stories of Haruki Murakami, and if you read any one of his books I defy you to evade developing one yourself. In many of his novels, we are confronted with an intricate and finely-tuned view of the complexities and relationships of daily life, combined and contrasted with aspects of magical realism and absurdity.
In his novels, most of what Murakami describes is grounded in reality and abiding by the laws of our world. However, quite suddenly, we will then encounter vanishing hotel floors, an elusive Sheep Man, a gathering of Skeletons, talking crows and a sleeping character who is abruptly absorbed into a television set, and so on. As a reader of Murakami, we cannot help but wonder if these oddities are supposed to be happening in the same world we inhabit, or if the worlds described in Murakami are fundamentally different realms; perhaps with a predisposition for these occurrences.
A philosophical explanation of the latter interpretation would be the ‘Possible Worlds’ concept: things may not have ended up as they are experienced by us, but may have led to an entirely different experience and situation [1]. Maybe, the world was constructed where sheep men hide in vanishing rooms, scurry around the mountains of Hokkaido, and converses by candlelight upon a towering stack of books.
In Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, we join our narrator on a search for a mysterious sheep. Yet, the odd connections and coincidences of the ‘chase’ leave us incredulous and disbelieving [2]. A girlfriend’s beautiful ears seemed a not-too-unusual character feature, but suddenly those ears are a means for psychic predictions – a matter which is accepted by our narrator without any seeming hesitation. This doesn’t seem like a reaction someone from our world would exhibit, given this realisation. Furthermore, upon the discovery of the Sheep Man, of hearing the tale of the non-existent sheep with the mark on its back, and of a man who claims to have been possessed by such a sheep, our narrator is similarly nonchalant and accepting.
Perhaps we are to conclude that this is not our world. Perhaps, what we should conclude, is that Murakami is presenting for us a possible world. Philosophically speaking, the notion of ‘possible worlds’ are mostly induced with regards to modal logic, that is, for discussions of logic and argumentation. But there is an instance of philosophy where these ‘possible worlds’ are invoked in a notion where they exist in the same space and time as our own world, and this is in the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics [3]. Let us simply note that according to this view, there are worlds in the Universe which overlap with our own – of which we are totally unaware – and of which there are various instances of ourselves.
Yet, I believe that in Murakami’s works, we are being told stories about some of these other worlds, rather than our own. Near the end of A Wild Sheep Chase, it seems that our narrator, in fact, becomes aware of these overlapping worlds during a strange encounter with a mirror. The narrator experiences the sensation that the person in the mirror is separate from himself:
“I wasn’t seeing my mirror-flat mirror-image.
It wasn’t myself I was seeing; on the contrary,
it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror
and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the
real me.” (p. 269)
This ‘real me’, could be referring to the version of himself that belong in our own world. Furthermore, when he is talking to the Sheep Man, later on, our narrator notices that the Sheep Man is not reflected in the mirror: “In the mirror world, I was alone” (p. 272). On this interpretation, we can see that the strange occurrences, exemplified by the mysterious figure of the Sheep Man, do not exist in the world seen through the mirror. This mirror-world reveals a different world, which happens to be our world: the one inhabited by your and me, where the Sheep Man does not exist.
Additionally, a similar encounter with a mirror is described in Murakami’s short story ‘The Mirror’, reinforcing the intention of this symbol and the idea that Murakami’s stories are from a world very much different to our own [4]. That they are from another world is confirmed in this story, where our narrator recalls a time when he was on night duty as a janitor at a high school. He describes his experience upon suddenly discovering a mirror, which he has never seen before: ‘It looked exactly like me on the outside, but it definitely was not me. No that’s not it. It was me, of course, but another me’ (p. 72). Here, our narrator has also come across another version of himself from another world, revealed briefly and inexplicably through a mirror.
In telling his stories through the guise of another world, Murakami allows the reader to confront the absurdity of our own condition; things needn’t be as they are and they could have, very easily, ended up differently. Earlier in A Wild Sheep Chase, our narrator goes off on one of his many tangents and talks about the ‘worm universe’: “In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me” (p. 67). Here, our narrator references and directly mentions the notion of multiple worlds, of ‘alternate considerations’. Murakami forces us to realise that maybe the stories being told seem absurd and crazy to us, but if their world and our world are just two in a multitude of different worlds, then we have no grounds to reason that they are not all absurd.
[1] Menzel, Christopher, “Possible Worlds”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/possible-worlds/>.
[2] Murakami, Haruki, A Wild Sheep Chase (London; Vintage, 2003)
[3] Vaidman, Lev, “Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/qm-manyworlds/>.
[4] Murakami, Haruki, ‘The Mirror’ in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (London; Vintage, 2007)
Bookish Ponderings 