Hardboiled Dream

While we speak frequently about the connection between Murakami's stories and dreams, we speak less about how the hardboiled genre serves as the perfect medium to present these situations. When we dream, we find ourselves placed in fantastic situations that we accept without question. We drift through these scenarios without processing them emotionally. And when we wake up, we often forget it all. 

In the same way, we are dropped into Murakami's stories, faced with a an empty room where a man pulls stockings out of a bag or a picture of sheep sends us on a quest up a mountain. The characters face these situations and their mundane lives with the same ambivalence. But despite their apparent detachment, they find ways to process their grief and regrets. In Wild Sheep Chase, Boku loses a romantic partner and can't remember her name, loses his wife and can only picture a clothing item she doesn't own, and sees his past home reduced to rows of concrete building and can do nothing but litter a beer can. It's only once he climbs a mountain and communicates with a dead friend that he can return to society and feel the emotions he's been suppressing. It's as if his whole life was one big mundane dream but he had to go one layer deeper to wake from it. 

As I see it, these stories are only one layer removed from traditional hardboiled fiction as well. Underneath the gritty veneer of the city and slick talking criminals is romanticism. These are not realistic depictions of PIs, but instead what a PI dreams he would be. The hardboiled genre creates a fantasy so real that it takes someone like Murakami converting it to the overtly surreal to see the dream it represents. Ultimately, the characters in hardboiled novels are all like Boku, repeating the motions of their lives until they lose their Terry Lennox and remember what they had. 

- Joe