As I mentioned in class, after reading the story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, I can clearly see the influence his style of writing had on Murakami’s own voice. Many lines I could picture one of Murakami’s protagonists (like Boku or Watanabe) saying, with the kind of candidness and bluntness of the thoughts of those narrators. The open-endedness of the ending, the sense of traversing to another world/reality, mentions of music— all aspects I’ve come to know as Murakami-esque. The protagonist even uses food as a gateway to enter some sort of other reality, like in other Murakami stories. The blind man also fulfills the common Murakami role of someone possessing an “unusual” aspect (as we’ve talked about in class, a scar or missing fingers— no magical ears this time, however). The story ends ambiguously, with a lot of unexplained questions that leave the reader confused, just like the works of Murakami in his fiction (like found in the ending of Norwegian Wood and many of his short stories).
For another class I’m currently taking, I had to watch the movie “Burning” which is based on the Murakami story. Since I watched the movie before reading the story (although I had already read it last semester), I was surprised to find out that elements of the film that I would think to be classic "Murakami"-isms weren't from the original work-- for example, in the movie the girl talks about the being trapped in a well when she was younger, a very common trope within Murakami's writings. This, however, wasn't mentioned in the first work. While I think the adaptation is faithful in this regard, much of the changes also feel less accurate to the short story-- the characters' relationships are less ambiguous (as the married man and the girl in the story) and the ending clears up the vagueness of how the girl disappeared.
-Maya Thiart
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