Cindy/Jiahan Lyu's Blog post 5

 Cindy/Jiahan Lyu's Blog post 5

Murakami's otherworldly reality

As in The City and Its Uncertain Walls and The Strange Library, we encounter quintessential elements of Murakami’s otherworld: the Sheep Man, a mysterious beautiful girl, beasts with golden fur that eat Scotch brooms, and surreal occupations like the Dream Reader. These absurd yet dreamlike figures not only blur the boundaries between reality and imagination—or the subconscious—but also challenge our belief in an objective truth by continually moving across those thresholds. Rather than drawing a firm line between what is real and what is imagined, Murakami invites us to adopt a faith in perceptual relativity—to accept that subjective truths shape our experience of the world as a fundamental part of the human condition.

As the starling-girl in The Strange Library says:
"The Sheep Man has his world. I have mine. And you have yours, too. Am I right? ... So just because I don’t exist in the Sheep Man’s world, it doesn’t mean that I don’t exist at all" (section 14).

I take this as a message from Murakami—a quiet affirmation that perception is truth in itself. A phantom or figment of the imagination can hold just as much reality as tangible fact. Existence, in this sense, is not confined to what can be seen; it unfolds in memory and kokoro, the heart-mind, which together construct an individual’s private universe—firm, real, and unquestionable.

Cindy Lyu