On Barn Burning

Ray Carver's "Cathedral" and Murakami's "Barn Burning", when read side by side, display the structural and storyline influence that Carver's work likely had on Murakami's dark short story. The introductions and character dynamics of either story are strongly paralleled, with Carver's narrator describing a relationship his wife had with another man, as does Murakami's. In both pieces, the wife experiences some hardship or dissatisfaction in her life with her husband, decides to leave, and is driven to engage with these other love interests, as if the engagement is without fault, but simply a result of circumstance. Both women also think it right to invite their love interests over to the home of the narrator, where husband and love interest meet.

Particular body parts and their abnormalities are always of interest in a Murakami, so when first comparing Carver's "Cathedral" to Murakami's "Barn Burning" I was struck by the attention drawn to the fingers of the wives' love interests. These fingers of 'the other man' are described in Carver's story when the blind man touches every part of the wife's face, his means of engaging intimately with her. And this intimacy affects her so that she must write a poem about it, and poem which later in life she feels the need to revisit. 

In "Barn Burning" Murakami seems to pull from this same attention to fingers, with the novelist narrator first describing the man dating his wife as having large hands with long fingers. When the narrator shares a smoke with this other man while listening to his jazz collection (another classic Murakami detail), the narrator remembers a song about a glove maker who won't sell his gloves to a fox cub. Then, when the Barn Burning man first tells Murakami of his 'hobby' the narrator notes the man's fingertips tracing the pattern of his lighter, and then later his fingertips are described stroking his own cheek. Throughout their conversation about their pastimes, the narrator as a novelist and the tradesman as a barn burner, Murakami repeatedly notes the actions of the tradesman's hands. Once the tradesman leaves the home with his girlfriend, the narrator asks himself if, in the play he recalled, the fox cub ever did get his gloves. 

This final comment about a fox cub and gloves convinced me that in the story, the boyfriend 'barn burning' is really him killing the women he is involved with. If fingers, hands, and the connection with someone else that can be achieved through them is significant for the connection between the wives and love interests in either story, it makes sense why the narrator questions whether or not the tradesman will get his gloves. Since the tradesman describes his barn burning as an inevitable obliging act to his 'barns', I wonder if Murakami is asking if there is a barrier needed to be placed between the hand and the man and the act of murder on his girlfriend in order for this man to commit this act?

Gia